A few weeks ago we announced our diversity scholarship for DrupalSouth. Before announcing the winner I want to talk a bit about our experience doing this for the first time.

DrupalSouth is the largest Drupal event held in Oceania every year. It provides a great marketing opportunity for businesses wanting to promote their products and services to the Drupal community. Dave Hall Consulting planned to sponsor DrupalSouth to promote our new training business - Getting It Live training. By the time we got organised all of the (affordable) sponsorship opportunities had gone. After considering various opportunities around the event we felt the best way of investing a similar amount of money and giving something back to the community was through a diversity scholarship

The community provided positive feedback about the initiative. However despite the enthusiasm and working our networks to get a range of applicants, we only ended up with 7 applicants. They were all guys. One applicant was from Australia, the rest were from overseas. About half the applicants dropped out when contacted to confirm that they could cover their own travel and visa expenses.

We are likely to offer other scholarships in the future. We will start earlier and explore other channels for promoting the program.

The scholarship has been awarded to Yogesh Ingale, from Mumbai, India. Over the last 3 years Yogesh has been employed by Tata Consultancy Services’ digital operations team as a DevOps Engineer. During this time he has worked with Drupal, Cloud Computing, Python and Web Technologies. Yogesh is interested in automating processes. When he’s not working, Yogesh likes to travel, automate things and write blog posts. Disclaimer: I know Yogesh through my work with one of my clients. Some times the Drupal community feels pretty small.

Congratulations Yogesh! I am looking forward to seeing you in Hobart.

If you want to meet Yogesh before DrupalSouth, we still have some seats available for our 73780151419">2 day git training course that’s running on 25-26 November. If you won’t be in Hobart, contact us to discuss your training needs.