Getting Off the Island: Reviving Open-Source Collaboration at DrupalCamp Chattanooga

This year's Open-Source/DrupalCamp Chattanooga was the first one after the pandemic. As other camps have experienced, it takes a village to restart a conference after it's taken a break. We added organizers and spread responsibilities more equitably among ourselves to bring it back, avoiding burnout and additional stress towards the lead organizer. Additionally, we reached out to other open-source communities in town, such as WordPress, Python, PHP, and more. It certainly was an all-hands-on-deck strategy.

We had two well-known featured speakers: Mike Herchel (Florida Drupal Camp organizer and core CSS maintainer) and Eric Sembrat (long-time Drupal contributor and HigherEd Open Source advocate). Both delivered insightful presentations while ensuring the community had time to meet them, provide feedback, and develop a connection.

Our theme was centered on open source, as we had speakers and attendees who didn’t use Drupal but came to learn from each other and see some of the advantages and disadvantages each technology stack provides. We also had bootcamps graduates and other job seekers attend to learn more about open source and provide feedback from their communities.

The day was full of sessions with two tracks,  a technical hard skill track and a soft skill track in addition to WordPress and Drupal in a day training. To our surprise, WordPress in a day training had low attendance while Drupal in a day had a higher-than-expected audience. This may be due to the many videos and resources freely available on the web for WordPress. 

Schedule management between the two tracks can be challenging as one tries to distribute attendance evenly among sessions. It’s hard on the attendees to have two technical sessions next to each other, as sometimes one needs a mental break and tries to rotate them. However, that creates unique challenges as some might skip the hard track or the soft track, leaving those with low attendance. We certainly learned some things about how that can be improved in the future.

James Candan, who was teaching Drupal in a day, had a full class that was mixed between end users, new developers, and those who were just looking for Drupal insights.

Our overall attendance was down this year from 70 attendees in 2019 to about 40 attendees. However, that created unique opportunities, as one of our speakers noted. He was glad the conference provided an easy environment to get to know each other and found ours the easiest conference to network he had been on lately. Over lunch, everyone had a chance to learn more about each other.

We had some Drupal community members, but most of our attendance came from retired Drupal community members, institutions that rely on open source, such as Vanderbilt Medical Center and the University of Tennesee Chattanooga, and others that are exploring Open source and Drupal, such as Hamilton County (.net) and Tennesee State Park (expression engine).

As the day approached its end, we got together and invited everyone over for the after-party, which we had about 12 attendees. That's not bad, considering a good portion of attendees drove from Nashville, which is about two hours away.

Overall, it was great getting to know more about the local community. Some attendees worked on FreePBX (Linux phone systems) and the Javascript ecosystem, and some were new boot camp graduates trying to break into tech. It reminds me of some of the older Drupal camp recordings I have watched, where  Drupal camps were embedded into another event. Attendees took advantage of this to learn from new technologies and tell others what made theirs special.

It may be time for Drupal camps, including ours, to explore getting off the island and take advantage of our resources to promote Drupal at other non-Drupal conferences, maybe having a Drupal track at them or sharing our space and having another smaller Open Souce community present alongside a camp. All Things Open and other large open-source gatherings could benefit from the insights and potentially increased attendance if mixed with a camp. As we explore new tactics and ways of increasing awareness and avoid competing for attendance between Drupal camps.