DrupalSouth Brisbane Started

DrupalSouth, the Drupal Conference for Australia and New Zealand for 2022, has started. The first day of events is over and today is the second day. It is the first in-person conference held by DrupalSouth after nearly three years due to Covid19 restrictions. 

Yesterday, Zaidul Alam, board director and national data lead of GovHack Australia Limited, gave the keynote address, “Hackathons and Open-Source: The Ideal Combination for Driving Innovation.” Past keynote, three separate tracks run parallel in different conference rooms.

Today’s keynote will be at 9.00 AM Australian time. Sarah-Jane Peterschlingmann, Managing Director and owner of ATech, will talk about “How to Lead Talented Technical Teams.”

The sessions will be over by evening 4.30 with a teak break and closing remarks. The third day of the conference will be a code contribution sprint sponsored by PreviousNext in Elevate Room, which will run from 9.00 AM until 3.00 PM.

Multiple sessions in DrupalSouth Brisbane are around Technology for Government—Both Aussie and NZ. No live conference stream will be available online, but session recordings will be released weeks after the event. You can view past year’s sessions from the virtual meeting on the YouTube channel of Drupal South.

The event is held at The Westin in sunny Brisbane, Queensland, for conference sessions on Wednesday, 19 & Thursday, 20 of October, and the code sprint on Friday, 21 October.

amazee.io is the Diamond sponsor for the event. Morpht, the Australian Government, GovCMS, and platform.sh are the Platinum sponsors, while Pantheon, Technocrat, Icon Agency, Salsa Digital, and Oxide interactive are gold sponsors.

Acquia sponsors networking function, Breakfast by Srijan, T-Shirts by Sparks interactive, Coffee cart by Ironstar, and Developer sprint by PreviousNext. Just After Midnight, Catalyst expert open source solutions, district, Skpr, and Tomato Elephant Studio are the silver sponsors for DrupalSouth Brisbane. 

DrupalSouth is one of the longest-running Drupal events in the Asia-Pacific region and the key event for Drupal users in Australia and New Zealand. Initially started in New Zealand in 2008, Australia adopted the DrupalSouth name in 2014 after running as Drupal Downunder and Drupalcon Sydney in earlier years. DrupalSouth organizers have also run a separate DrupalGov conference on an intermittent basis.

The conference typically attracts 200-400 attendees and features local and international speakers selected by a panel of their peers for each event.

DrupalSouth is backed financially by Linux Australia, organized by a local volunteer event team, and overseen by the DrupalSouth Steering Committee. Elections to three seats in the steering committee were held last Friday, 14 October 2022. One seat will be vacant in November, while the other will be by May 2023.