It was a busy year for Drupal Events in 2022, so fast that we completely lost track of time. This year we saw a broad return to in-person Drupal Camps, hundreds of meetups, and dozens of events around the globe for the release of Drupal 10. The Event Organizer Working Group continues to work to support event organizers, to provide resources, and to provide avenues for collaboration among organizers.
We’ve had three primary initiatives this year: Drupal.org Community Events, the Events Platform, and some self-care marketing the EOWG. In addition we piloted a new Camp Debriefs concept and a whole lot more.
Drupal.org/community/events
Launched in 2020, the Drupal Community Events page is intended to serve as a consolidated listing of Drupal events across the world to facilitate promotion, encourage collaboration, and give the community more data about what’s happening in the space.
In 2022 over 200 events were posted to the Community Events listing:
- 126 Local meetups
- 58 Trainings
- 27 Drupal Camps
- 14 (standalone) Contribution Events (see a discussion of this tag)
- 2 DrupalFests
- 2 DrupalCons
Additionally, lots of work was done on Drupal.org to use this data - community events now show on user profiles and organization pages. A more in-depth events view helps organizers with planning future events. Check out the full issue details along with what’s to come.
We’d like to send a huge #DrupalThanks to the Drupal Association and especially Caleb Crawley (crawleyhost) for all of his hard work in making these changes possible.
Event Platform
The Event Platform took the rich set of capabilities built for the Florida DrupalCamp website in 2022, and abstracted it to make it more easily used by any event organizer, including those who may be new to Drupal. This includes using tokens in default messaging (including emails to users who proposed sessions) so that, as much as possible, an event organizer can install the Event Platform and start using it with a minimum of effort.
Read more details about their releases in 2022 and check out the project.
Marketing the EOWG
The EOWG worked to improve how we raise awareness about the group and communicate with event organizers in 2022. We updated the monthly newsletter design and content structure to not only promote upcoming EOWG meetings, but also camps and contribution events posted to Drupal.org. If you have an upcoming event be sure to post it on drupal.org/community/events so it can be pulled in by the EOWG and others.
In April the EOWG and other initiatives were given booth space for a day at DrupalCon Portland. This allowed us to meet with organizers face-to-face, as well as promote some of the relevant sessions and BoFs. The sessions and BoFs were well attended and great conversations were had. We’re looking forward to DrupalCon Pittsburgh in 2023 and more about our plans will be posted as we get closer to the event.
Lastly, over the course of the year we discussed how we could make the EOWG open meetings more inclusive and accessible to potential participants. After a pilot of quarterly Slack discussions, we decided late in the year that this should be the primary method for checking in and chatting with event organizers. Along with this we also moved off the stand-alone Slack instance to the main Drupal Slack in the #event-organizers channel. We are hopeful that this change will increase the visibility of the EOWG and help us to better engage with the larger community by making it one less Slack instance for organizers to log into.
Elections
Our board usually elects positions in October but we are a little delayed this year. Nominations for board seats are now open. We encourage all event organizers to apply.
The board is composed of elected and appointed members and this year's slate will be appointed. The issue will be open for nominations until 31 January, 2023 at which time the Board will discuss the nominations. If possible we will invite newly appointed members to the meeting on February 7, if more discussion is required then appointed members will be notified after the February 7 meeting.