Southwestern Ontario Drupal Camp 2026 Tackles AI Trust and Drupal 12 Readiness

Ahead of Southwestern Ontario Drupal Camp 2026, nine speakers have told The DropTimes what attendees can expect to learn about artificial intelligence, accessibility, Drupal 12 compatibility and the challenges of modern web development. The two-day gathering opens on Friday, 23 October 2026, in Kitchener-Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, with a keynote by Aidan Foster, UX manager for the Drupal AI Initiative, on keeping human judgement central to AI adoption.

Hosted by the Waterloo Region Drupal Users group with support from the Drupal Canada Association, the camp will hold its technical presentations and networking activities at Kitchener Public Library on Friday. Drupal in a Day training and community contribution activities will follow on Saturday, 24 October, at Conestoga College's Waterloo Campus. The programme brings together discussions on AI-assisted coding, accessible development, Canadian cloud infrastructure, Drupal CMS, application orchestration and project governance.

Aidan Foster: Keeping Human Judgement at the Centre of AI

Aidan Foster, UX manager for the Drupal AI Initiative and owner of Foster Interactive, will open the conference at 09:00 EDT with The AI Survivors' Handbook: Should We Adapt to AI or Should It Adapt to Us? The keynote will address a question facing professionals across industries: how can organisations benefit from AI without letting the technology dictate their priorities and decisions?

Aidan told The DropTimes that his own perspective has changed considerably. Having spent 2023 dreading AI, he now approaches the technology with excitement. However, he warned that the ability to generate convincing recommendations does not make those recommendations sound.

According to the official session description, Aidan will draw on historical technological changes and his personal journey from anxiety to optimism to offer practical guidelines for adopting AI. The keynote is intended for individuals and organisations assessing AI's role in their work while preserving human oversight. Aidan told The DropTimes that he particularly looks forward to discussing these shared concerns with others navigating the same transition.

Fran Wyllie: Making Accessibility Survive Beyond Launch Day

Accessibility initiatives frequently lose momentum when their success depends on a single employee or last-minute compliance checks. Fran Wyllie, a Certified Professional in Web Accessibility and development manager at Northern Commerce, will examine how organisations can avoid that problem during Building a Sustainable Accessibility System, scheduled for Friday from 10:20 to 11:10 EDT.

Fran told The DropTimes that sustainable accessibility requires more than introducing rules. Teams must distribute responsibility across development, quality assurance, content and leadership while making accessible practices part of existing workflows.

The official session description details how accessibility checks can be integrated into development environments, component libraries and continuous integration pipelines. Fran will also explain why her team developed an internal accessibility tool when existing products did not adequately support its workflow.

She will also address where AI can help scale accessibility efforts and where human evaluation remains essential, offering practical actions that teams can apply to existing projects.

Andrew Berry: Containing the Risks of AI Coding Agents

AI coding agents promise faster development, but their growing autonomy introduces new security concerns. Andrew Berry, vice president of technology at Lullabot, will examine the trade-off in Trust Nothing, Ship Anyway: Coding Agents in Disposable VMs, scheduled for Friday from 11:20 to 12:10 EDT.

Andrew told The DropTimes that developers need safeguards that allow agents to work efficiently without exposing their computers and projects to unnecessary risks.

The session description identifies web searches, documentation retrieval and Model Context Protocol integrations as potential prompt-injection entry points. Andrew will demonstrate Sandbar, an open-source application from Lullabot that runs coding agents inside disposable virtual machines, isolating their activity from the developer's host environment. Sandbar supports tools including Docker, DDEV and nested virtualisation.

Andrew's responses also highlighted the importance of preparing Drupal projects for agent-assisted development and using automated tests to evaluate generated code. Beyond security, he is interested in discussing a changing development bottleneck: AI can now generate code faster than teams can review it.

Dan Friedman: Investigating Infrastructure Problems Before Solving Them

Canadian hosting requirements will receive attention in Escape from Big Cloud: Canadian-Friendly Infrastructure for Drupal & CiviCRM, a Friday panel examining how smaller agencies manage infrastructure for nonprofit, public-sector and mission-driven organisations.

Dan Friedman, director at Consensus Enterprises, will facilitate the discussion with Liam McDermott, partner at Woolwich Web Works; Alan Dixon, principal at Blackfly Solutions; and Derek Laventure, senior web architect at Consensus Enterprises. According to the official programme, the panel will explore hosting performance, operating costs, data residency, vendor independence and the availability of Canadian-owned infrastructure.

Speaking more broadly about his technical approach to The DropTimes, Dan emphasised that complex operational problems require careful investigation, measurable outcomes and a willingness to examine underlying causes. He described this as Test Driven Operations.

Dan also encouraged practitioners to contribute reusable solutions back to the open-source community rather than limiting improvements to individual projects. He told The DropTimes that he looks forward to demonstrating the tools used at Consensus and discussing the problem-solving process behind complex operational work. His broader comments complement the conference's focus on practical engineering challenges without being presented as specific conclusions from the cloud-hosting panel.

Jordan Thompson: Building Reusable Drupal Import Frameworks

Maintaining multiple custom data importers can become difficult when each implementation duplicates the same processing logic. Jordan Thompson, Drupal solutions lead, will address the problem in Custom Importers 201, an intermediate development session scheduled for Friday from 10:20 to 11:10 EDT.

Jordan told The DropTimes that the presentation is intended for developers who have already built an importer and now need a maintainable way to support several implementations.

The published session outline describes a shared base module providing queue processing, parsing and validation services, with separate importer submodules responsible for individual data sources. It also covers custom hooks for source retrieval and mapping, reusable queue workers and administration forms that display configuration options only for enabled importers.

Jordan's responses further identified per-importer permissions, batch sizing, chunked processing and scaffolding conventions as important takeaways. He hopes to compare approaches with other developers dealing with complex import workflows and long-term maintenance.

David Pascoe-Deslauriers: Examining Drupal CMS Through a Developer's Eyes

Drupal CMS aims to make Drupal more approachable for site builders who may have little or no previous experience with the platform. David Pascoe-Deslauriers, chief technology officer at Coldfront Labs, will explore what the product offers during An Exploration of Drupal CMS, scheduled for Friday from 11:20 to 12:10 EDT.

His presentation follows the January 2026 release of Drupal CMS 2.0. The official session description approaches the product from the perspective of an experienced Drupal developer who had not previously examined it in depth, looking at its features, pre-packaged recipes, relationship with Drupal core and potential use cases.

David told The DropTimes that the session offers an introduction for developers and site builders who have not yet tried Drupal CMS.

He expects attendees to gain familiarity with components and capabilities they can use in their projects, alongside a practical assessment of the product's user experience. David added that smaller Drupal gatherings provide valuable opportunities to meet people building new things with Drupal and other open-source technologies.

Randy Kolenko: Connecting Drupal Workflows With External Systems and AI

Drupal's ability to coordinate processes across applications, people and AI agents will be examined by Randy Kolenko, senior solutions architect and partner at Nextide Inc., during From Workflows to Agents: Drupal Orchestration and the Rosetta Sprint.

Randy told The DropTimes that his presentation focuses on overcoming communication barriers between otherwise separate systems. He sees orchestration as a way to coordinate data ingestion, processing and handoffs between external services and Drupal applications with limited custom coding.

According to the session description, the presentation will examine the complementary approaches of Maestro, ECA and FlowDrop within the Rosetta Initiative. It will distinguish basic automation from durable orchestration, where processes must coordinate execution context, deterministic workflows, human decisions and interactions with AI agents.

The initiative seeks common foundations that allow Drupal's existing tools to work together rather than proposing a single orchestration replacement. Randy explained that the concentration of experienced Drupal contributors in Southwestern Ontario makes the camp an opportunity to learn directly from people involved in the platform's major initiatives.

Mauricio Silveira: Avoiding Compatibility Problems During Hook Migration

Preparing contributed modules for Drupal 12 requires more than replacing procedural hooks with object-oriented classes. Mauricio Silveira, senior architect at Kalamuna, will examine the less obvious problems in Hooked on Attributes: Migrating Your Module's Hooks to OOP Classes Before They're Gone.

Mauricio told The DropTimes that module maintainers need guidance extending beyond simple conversion examples, particularly when maintaining compatibility across Drupal 10, 11 and 12. The potential problems include duplicate hook execution and legacy implementations that no longer run as expected.

The official session description outlines the conversion of procedural hooks from .module files into classes with dependency injection. It also covers the #[LegacyHook] compatibility mechanism, hook class registration, changes affecting automatic loading of .inc files, and tools including Drupal Rector and a DDEV-based converter.

Procedural hooks remain supported in current Drupal versions, but the session identifies their planned removal in Drupal 13 as a reason for maintainers to begin preparing now. Mauricio aims to give attendees a repeatable five-step migration process and hopes Friday's presentation will encourage participants to convert actual contributed modules during Saturday's contribution activities.

He also mentioned that conversations with other teams about their Drupal 12 preparations are particularly valuable, since practical implementation challenges are not always documented publicly.

Christopher Gervais: Bringing Shared Decision-Making Into Drupal Projects

Effective Drupal projects depend on how teams organise and make decisions, not only on their technical architecture. Christopher Gervais, founding partner at Consensus Enterprises, will examine that organisational dimension during Everyone's Voice Matters: Empower Stakeholders With Sociocracy.

Christopher told The DropTimes that Sociocracy offers a framework for cooperation, shared authority and consent-based decision-making. He believes its principles can be applied not only to organisational governance but also to individual projects operating under agile development practices.

The official session outline describes consent-based decision-making, clear responsibilities, transparency and participation as core elements of Sociocracy. It will introduce practical methods for involving stakeholders while maintaining the ability to make decisions and move projects forward.

Christopher further explained that transparency and participation can help teams establish mutual trust and sustain engagement. His presentation provides a governance perspective alongside the camp's technical discussions of automation, accessibility and software development.

Saturday Focuses on Drupal Training and Community Contributions

Following Friday's presentations, Southwestern Ontario Drupal Camp will continue on Saturday, 24 October, at Conestoga College's Waterloo Campus. The second day includes Drupal in a Day, a practical introduction for students, newcomers and other participants interested in learning how to create a Drupal website.

According to the organisers, the training will introduce Drupal's core features and site-building fundamentals. Participants will have opportunities to build a working Drupal website, receive a participation certificate and connect with members of the community.

Contribution activities will also provide opportunities to work on Drupal projects. The organisers welcome not only developers but also participants interested in documentation, quality assurance, testing, design, accessibility, content strategy and project management. The contribution programme offers a way for attendees to apply new knowledge, collaborate with maintainers and support the wider Drupal ecosystem.

The camp is free to attend, with voluntary donations welcomed to help support the event. For the complete schedule, speaker information, registration and venue details, readers can visit the official Southwestern Ontario Drupal Camp website.