March 22nd, 2014, we have concluded DrupalCampChina 2014 (announcement). This is the second year that Drupal Shanghai Community has teamed up with Techyizu.org (a Shanghai-based volunteer-driven organization and supporters of the China startup and tech community.) to succefully organize DrupalCamp within Barcamp. For those who don't know, Barcamp is the same style as DrupalCamp, but wider topics and larger audience. We organize Barcamp to attract a variety of people in the related industries; In Spring, 2014, this Barcamp received over 700 people. On Drupal side, we also had large attendance, fun discussion & collaboration and a rooftop afterparty. I was very happy to see large increase in presentations and people at the DrupalCamp (comparing to DrupalCampChina 2013), and therefore, I am eager to share my observation publicly.

Keynote attendance doubled
Thanks to The Drupal Community Cultivation Grant (and the Committee), this year we received the grant help again to bring in an international well-known Drupal contributor to speak at our camp keynote. John Albin Wilkins offered the favor and presented "Drupal for a Better Web". During his keynote, I realized there were around 200 people packed in this conference room. I also recognized many local Drupal community leaders from other Chinese cities, such as Beijing, Hangzhou, etc. Comparing to last year keynote, we almost had 100% increase in keynote attendance.

Sessions doubledLast year, we had one track at the DrupalCamp, and besides a keynote, there were 4 hour-long sessions. This year, we had two tracks and total 8 sessions and a keynote. Thanks to all the presenters at DrupalCamp, you all made this camp succesfull!

Marketing presence
In the past 3 years of my volunteering and community activities in Shanghai, China. I almost exclusively interacted with developers, designers and entrepreneurs who work with Drupal on daily basis. However, at this DrupalCamp, I saw a person with professional cameras and camcorders busy recording all the sessions. I had a pleasure talking to him, and learned that he doesn't use Drupal, but he believes in his partners who develop a business on Drupal, and he decides to dedicate his efforts of Marketing and Sales for Drupal. As many people would agree, in the Drupal world, we are in high demand of talent, but we are even in higher demand of people who market Drupal well and explain what Drupal is to others. I am glad to see the presence of marketing professionals at this camp, which shows the business side of Drupal is promising in China. I believe they are good at helping companies discover and invest in Drupal as their business solution.

Future collaboration
6 Barcamps have been organized in the past 3 years in Shanghai. However, Barcamp didn't get very technical until 2013 we organized DrupalCampChina 2013. This year, we promoted DrupalCamp through the regular channels via Barcamp and media friends. Then at the camp, I saw Javascript, Node.js and a few other stacks of technologies sessions talking about Internet of things. Not only those presenters offered different choices and opinions and helped Drupal to educate the same audience on Internet or Web; but also, most of those presenters support open source and likely the Shanghai Drupal community will extend the communication to those local open source communities for future collaboration.

I am very glad how this camp turned out. I see great collaboration between local Drupal community and Drupal Association on bringing an oversea speaker, the collaboration among different communities to organize a large Barcamp and DrupalCamp, the collaboration within the camp during presentations. This collaboration builds us a good foundation to further advocate Drupal in China, and we will see a larger DrupalCamp next year!

More photos about DrupalCampChina 2014, please see the album on Google+

Here is a video recap for Barcamp, Barcamp Spring 2014 Shanghai with Techyizu.org.

Files: PANO_20140322_120703.jpgIMG_2591.JPGIMG_2624.JPGIMG_2575.JPGIMG_2592.JPGTag: Drupal PlanetDrupalCampChina