We're stacking up karma points during this recession: over the weekend more than sixty people gathered at the DERI Institute in Galway, Ireland to talk, learn, and exchange ideas about Drupal. Various experts in web design attended coming from all over Ireland and as far as Scotland, England and the US. The best turn out was in absolute newbies - over half of the group who had traveled from all over Ireland.

As an incentive to push the learning curves we worked together to provide 3 Irish charities: Zikomo, Rural Science Association and Shadowbox Theatre with brand spanking new websites!

The plan was conceived 5 months ago when Alan Burke (alanburke) and Stéphane Corlosquet (scor) were brainstorming what to do for the next Irish Drupal event to bring it home to Galway. They wanted to do something different and make it over 2 days to take advantage of the presentation style of a BarCamp and to include a site-building challenge. Realizing they would need a great deal of help they recruited Stella Power (stella), Heather James (heather) for their expertise from organizing the previous DrupalCamp in Dublin.

We, the organizers, were impressed by the number of people who turned up as we expected 40-50. The rooms filled up fast and we had barely enough food for everybody. Alan had the insight to have a giant kettle available to provide plenty of tea and coffee with "loads of biccies" to all the attendees.

Day 1: DrupalCamp

Two tracks were set up for newbies and for advanced users.

Newbie Track:

Leon Butler, a 4-month old Drupal user, got the newbie track started by demonstrating what he had created at galwayflux.com with no coding and very little HTML background. This put all of the newbies at ease before we could roll out the 'harder stuff'.

Stella Power demonstrated building a site from scratch by throwing together the site for the Shadowbox Theatre, a small Irish charity. The site was built over the course of two presentations. The first showed users how to build a simple site with a blog, contact form and some static pages, and used a contributed theme. The second presentation focused on training people on how to wield the power of CCK and Views, and resulted in the addition of a custom photo gallery to the site.

Our special guest, Addison Berry (add1sun) on tour from the US, presented "Documentation is hot!" followed by an enlightening perspective through the archives of documentation in Drupal. Finally, Heather James & Alan Burke jointly gave a very informative presentation on theming in Drupal.

Advanced Track:

Topics for the advanced track were selected on the fly based on what people wanted to hear. In no particular order: Addison 'add1sun' Berry talked about usability and documentation. John Morahan gave an interesting presentation on writing secure code and simpletest. Martin Somers presented on theming. Scor went over RDF CCK and what's new in Drupal 7. Stella discussed Drupal 7 and gave an update from DrupalCon DC.

Day 2: The Drupal website building challenge & Documentation Sprint

Two months ago we made a call out to Irish charities for applications for a free Drupal-based website. We weren't disappointed - almost 50 applied. With great effort we evaluated the applicants based on the charity knowing what it wanted; the feasibility of creating the site in 1 day; the urgency of need; and the neutrality of the organization. We chose the following two:

Rural Science Association: The Rural Science Association is a nascent professional organization which comprises of individuals from all parts of Ireland (generally residing in rural areas) who hold or are currently studying to obtain a formal qualification in the discipline of rural development. The organization was formally launched at their inaugural conference which was held in May last year. Membership numbers currently stand at c. 70. In addition to its inaugural conference, the Rural Science Association has, to date, organized two weekend workshops which sought to act as 'think tanks' on how to progress rural development in the emerging 'new economy'.

Zikomo Ireland: Zikomo Ireland is a Galway-based registered charity group that is committed to fostering long-term self-sufficiency in southern Malawi. They work in partnership with rural communities to ensure that their projects have a lasting, positive impact on people's lives in one of the poorest regions in the world.

A third charity, Shadowbox Theatre Company, which was one of the original choices lost their funding and pulled out from the competition. We decided to build a site for them regardless c/o Stella and her presentation "Building a simple site". Shadowbox Theatre work with both the elderly and groups of people living with mental health problems and intellectual disabilities through theatre.

The challenge lasted from 4:30pm Saturday night until 4:30pm Sunday, we did send everyone for dinner and sleep at a reasonable hour. We scheduled six hours of active development on Sunday.

Assigned to team leaders Alan Burke and Stella Power, the teams formed a beehive of activity interacting directly with the representatives from the respective charities.

Documentation Sprint

Meanwhile, Addison 'add1sun' Berry led a Documentation Sprint. Surrounded by coffee cups and cookie crumbs, the sprint took off with a core team quickly forming up and tackling documentation issues under Addi's lead and a few curious onlookers popping in to see what was going on and to ask questions. The documentation sprint was a manageable size which allowed Addison to get to know the new contributors. They went through both the Getting Started handbook and the Drupal Cookbook, identifying confusing and problematic areas and tidying up the text. A number of useful discussions sprung up about the documentation as seen by a user new to Drupal.

"It was a ton of great feedback and I hope to see them all around the Drupal project even more because they are already awesome contributors" says Addison Berry.

Results and prizes

The weekend finished with the two teams presenting their sites and key features implemented before a panel of 5 judges: Addison 'add1sun' Berry, Diliny 'dcor' Corlosquet, John 'cloud' Breslin, Ronan Joyce and Stéphane 'scor' Corlosquet. Both charities were ecstatic and stunned by the amount of work carried out in such a short period of time. The judges tallied their marks finding a 2 point difference (out of 100) in favor of Zikomo. But we surprised both teams by rewarding everyone with a raffle draw for all of the winnings. Thanks to our generous sponsors who donated books, Flickr accounts, magazine subscriptions, tee-shirts and paid entries to the Connemara 2010 marathon (which some would argue, is not a prize).

From an organizer's point of view it was heartening and rewarding to see so much joy and appreciation from the charity representatives.

"It was truly fascinating to see the web site being constructed before our eyes" says Margaret Geraghty from Zikomo.

We'd like to thank all our sponsors:

• DERI kindly allowed us to use their venue
• IO1 supplied lunch on both days of the event
• Annertech provided free hosting for all three websites
• Lullabot gave away one "Using Drupal" book
• Packt Publishing sponsored 3 books
• DFSA offered 6 Linux+ magazine subscriptions
• Connemarathon gave 2 paid entries to the Connemara 2010 marathon

Kudos to all the volunteers who helped during the weekend and made this event a success! More pictures of the event are available online.

What we learnt

Need advice on how to set up your own DrupalCamp? We're planning to write a detailed report on the work we did to prepare the event, the materials we used in the various steps of the process. In brief:

1. Establish a good team of organizers (it's a large investment of time). We had 4 people who had already worked together on other initiatives. One challenge was how to keep the ball rolling even when others were busy. Keeping things relaxed means being able to ask for help, and get good follow-ups and feedback. Meeting in person once or twice is a must.

2. Establish a list of what you want to accomplish. We decided early on that the first day would be standard presentations followed by a second day Drupal Challenge and Docs Sprint. To accomplish this, we had to have an idea of the numbers and the "who" we wanted to cater the event to. This led to the deciding of having two tracks: newbies and advanced. In hind sight, we should have added an intermediate track - but since we were unsure of final numbers - we have made a note for the next time! Get each challenge team leader to meet with the charity before the event to ensure they are ready and know what they want. Team leaders should understand Drupal to manage the build. They shouldn't do any work on the project at all but just manage it. They deal with the client, they should be strict to avoid scope creep.

3. Information on getting a venue, sponsors, catering, and charities for the challenge will be detailed in a later report. Finally, at the end of the day - have fun and be relaxed as there were many last minute decisions and a few accidental mistakes which were forgiven on the fly.

For more information see our coming report. Watch the DrupalCamp group to stay tuned. There is already an interest for other user groups to organize similar events. Watch the interview of Alan Burke who gave some tips to Stephen Gray, from the Drupal Belfast user group.