When people ask me, “What’s Drupal?” I find it a complex answer. Of course, in a technical sense, Drupal is a CMS— but to me, and to many others, it’s far more than that. It’s a community full of amazing people with inspiring leaders and huge hearts.

At DrupalCon Austin, I was able to share several stories about community members who really pushed the project further, all with the help of community cultivation grants selected and financed by the men and women who love Drupal. I want to thank Gabor, Sheng, and Tatiana for letting me share their stories and I'd like to share these stories with all of you.

Drupal Dev Days: A Week of Sprints in Szeged

Earlier this year, Gábor Hojtsy organized a dev days event that was a huge success. From March 24 to March 30 this year, three hundred people gathered in Szeged to sprint together on Drupal 8 core, Drupal 8 Search and Entity Field API, Documentation, Migration, MongoDB, REST and authentication, Rules for Drupal 8 and, of course, Drupal.org.

There was so much happening, they almost brought D.O to a halt— but fortunately, everything came out OK, and we had huge improvements to Drupal.org as a result.

There were big benefits to Drupal 8 at Szeged, too. Some of the things that our great sprinters accomplished were:

•  115 core commits with 706 files changed, 10967 insertions(+), 6849 deletions(-)
•  19 beta blocker and beta target issues fixed

It was the community that made Dev Days Szeged so great. By turning out and sprinting, they made big improvements to the project, while a community development grant funded part of the Internet fees. It's an important element of any sprint, but the real significance is that Drupal Association members who could not attend the sprints or are not in a role to contribute code were still able to help achieve this success by funding it through their membership.

DrupalCamp Shanghai

Sheng is the community leader of the Shanghai community, and as an ex-New Yorker, he knew firsthand how important Drupal meetups and camps are for networking and learning. After he moved to Shanghai, he decided that he wanted to share the valuable experience of face-to-face time with his new local community, which had skilled developers who were mostly disconnected from each other and the wider global community.

After building momentum through holding a number of meet ups, Sheng applied for grants in 2013 and 2014 to put on a Shanghai Drupal camp. With the funds, he flew in a Drupal Rock Star to come keynote each of the camps — Forest Mars and John Albin — and the camp doubled in size and there are now hundreds of people who come out to these camps.

While the investment of flying John Albin out to Shanghai from Taiwan was relatively small, the impact and ROI was huge both for the camps and for the greater Drupal community: camp attendees learned to contribute back to the larger global community, almost like a small R&D investment. It wouldn’t have been possible without a community grant.

DrupalCamp Donetsk

Tatiana of the Drupal Association worked with her colleagues in Donetsk to put together a DrupalCamp in Donetsk, in spite of the revolution. A lot of people came together and connected both to each other and to the global community, and used a grant to pay for the food and coffee— and for us at the Association, that grant stands as a sign of positive support from the greater Drupal community in spite of the strife that was going on in Donetsk.

In the end, lots of thanks needs to go around. First, I’d like to thank Gabor, Sheng and Tatiana and all community leaders for turning your vision into reality and for the time and passion you pour into Drupal. We are appreciate all that you do to unite and grow Drupal.

Secondly, none of this would be possible without the three community leaders who manage the volunteer program: Mike Anello, Amy Scarvada, and Thomas Turnbull. Your passion for growing the community is doing great things.

Finally, I want to issue a big thank you to our Drupal Association Members for making these stories a reality. If you want to be come a member and help more of these programs around the world come to life, please sign up today at https://assoc.drupal.org/membership.