Western Mass Drupal Camp Successful

We pulled off another successful Western Mass Drupal Camp. We watched the weather with some angst and agonized over whether to exercise our snow date -- They had been predicting up to 6 inches of snow. But in the end, it looked like the snow would mostly happen while the camp was going on and be finished in time to have the roads clear by the time people left, so we decided to push ahead with the camp on schedule. We ended up only getting around 3 inches and, although it probably depressed attendance a bit, we still had a substantial turnout and the camp felt very successful.

Last year, as we got close to the camp, there was angst over the organization (or lack of organization). I think many of the organizers had worried that they would get sucked into becoming responsible for everything, so we had all circumscribed our participation to particular things: I just did the venue and tried to put on blinkers with respect to everything else. But, amazingly, it all came together and just worked. This year, we had the same experience without the angst. We learned a lot from last year and the organization of this year's camp showed it: it was almost seamless and quite low stress. Still, we had all been very busy over the past few days getting all the details nailed down.

I attended three sessions. Two were very practical ("CSS and Drupal" and "Drupal Multisites") while the last was more intangible ("Shaping Drupal"). The practical ones were well attended -- packed, even. They were great and I learned something in both of them. The last didn't draw a large crowd (although I thought it was among the most important of the sessions at the camp: benjamin melançon led a discussion asking how do we maintain the Drupal community to keep the project moving forward? Drupal has been wildly successful, but principally due to people leveraging what the community has already built. And although Drupal use has skyrocketed, the growth of the Drupal development community hasn't kept pace. He didn't offer answers -- he just asked the question, although he did point to a handful of projects where people are actively trying to build the development community and help people move from just using Drupal to supporting it. I'm glad to see the question being asked.

I spent a good bit of my time trying to foster and organize the informal side of the Camp. Last year, we had reserved the Computer Resource Center (CRC) as a "Birds of a Feather" space, but it went almost unused. This year, I tried to organize a "showcase bazaar" and "genius bar" and get people to sign up. The "showcase bazaar" didn't attract anyone, but the genius bar went much better. There were almost constantly two or three people coming in with questions and experienced developers helping them actually work on stuff. I helped someone fix and update their instance of Drush and got a nice comment on twitter. (Note: I'm really not a drush wizard -- It was just old-time unix hacking: she had an alias in her .bash_profile that was invoking a different version of drush than the one on her $PATH, but it puzzled me for a few minutes until I figured that out.) It was really fun to watch over the shoulders of people fixing other problems as well. I learned as much or more doing that than I did in the formal sessions. We still need to find more ways to make the informal sessions work more effectively.

One challenge is where the CRC is located. I was involved in the design of the ISB and I advocated for having the CRC located adjacent to the cafe space on the atrium: it was the single thing I wanted most in the design of the building. My goal was for there to be a seamless flow from a completely informal space (the cafe), to the more formal CRC, to the most formal attached computer classrooms. This would enable people to hang out in the cafe and, when they thought of something they wanted to work on, to move into the CRC. Instead (probably due to my low status), they stuck the CRC off in a corner of the building on the third floor: you practically can't get any farther from the cafe space than that. This means that people hanging out in the cafe, decide to just work there, since it's too far to get to the CRC. Every time I visit the ISB, I have a little pang, because I'm reminded of all of the things we wanted, advocated for, and worked on (like the problem-solving auditorium, the team-based classrooms, ubiquitous wired networking etc) that didn't make it into the final design of the building or were otherwise thwarted. It doesn't help that everyone always talks about how wonderful the building is. It is a wonderful building -- one of the nicest on campus, but it still reminds me most of my failure in leadership.

At the end of the day, I walked around and locked up all the rooms, I pulled down our signs and erased the blackboards. We got the tables put away and cleaned up the trash (mostly). And then I went home. I decided to skip the after-party -- I was exhausted. I sat with Tom in the car for a long time talking about what a strange place the University is and how, in spite of its flaws, it's a wonderful place to be doing Drupal.