Community Content at DrupalCon Barcelona

Come for the code, stay for the community. That’s more than a tagline for Drupal, it’s a manifesto. Whether you are an experienced camp organizer or someone who is looking for their opportunity to give back to the community, we’ve designed a week-long celebration of Drupal community that will help you meet your peers, develop your leadership skills, and work collaboratively to address current issues in the community.

If you’ve been to a community summit or attended the community track in the past (and you can read this blog post from Addison Berry to learn more), you already know that the Drupal community is something special. In Barcelona, we’re looking to take the best of both approaches and double down on the community content. In short, we’re proposing that community is integrated into every part of the Con. You can read our full announcement, but here is a summary of the components, with notes about how to sign up:

• Community Kickoff: On Monday, we will hold a community kickoff event for the week. We’ll begin with an introduction to all the community content at the Con, followed by exercises designed to help you meet the people that can help support you in your community work, whether you need help maintaining a long-standing camp or User Group, or if you’re new to the community and want to know where you can get involved. Then we’ll conduct breakouts to share knowledge around specific issues, and identify good topics for further discussion in the community Birds of a Feather sessions later in the week. We’ll end the day by joining the First Time Attendee social so that we can show the new folks what our community is all about. LEARN MORE AND SIGN UP FOR MONDAY'S COMMUNITY KICKOFF.

• Community BoFs:Tuesday through Thursday we will hold Birds of a Feather sessions to focus on community issues. Some (maybe all?) will be determined at the Monday kickoff. These sessions should bring people together around a common theme, like User Group leaders discussing best practices for organizing a DUG. All BoFs will be asked to identify a note taker who records key takeaways from the conversation that can be shared back out with the community. BOF TOPICS DETERMINED AT THE KICK OFF. ATTENDANCE WILL BE FIRST COME, FIRST SERVED.

• Community Training: You asked for help building specific skills, so these sessions will be designed to help you learn specific takeaways and give you real tools you can use back in your community. Please RSVP for the topics you are interested in (more details and times will be posted soon!): 
  • Camp Budgets and Financial Management
  • Conflict Resolution
  • Sponsor Recruitment and Management
  • Public Speaking. 

• Community Keynotes: We did it in Amsterdam and it was such a success, we’re bringing it back in Barcelona. Presented by the community, for the community, Mike Bell (mikebell_) will talk about mental health in the open source world and David Rozas (drozas) will talk about the phenomenon of contributing to a community. LEARN MORE ABOUT THE COMMUNITY KEYNOTES.

• Community Sprints: After four days sharing what you know and learning new things, you’ll be itching to put your ideas to use. On Friday, sprint tables will be set aside to work on specific community issues that are raised throughout the week. Topics could include things like building a universal camp budget template or helping to find ways to integrate community contribution on Drupal.org profiles. LEARN MORE ABOUT THE SPRINTS.

Flickr photo: Boris Baldinger