Save me, I'm going to GLADCamp!
GLADCamp, the Greater Los Angeles Drupal Camp, is coming up in a couple weeks and I'm helping organize a couple events that make up the conference program. I'm incredibly excited, and at the same time I'm feeling like I might be going out of my mind.
Depending on where you are or how far you're willing to go, this kind of event just doesn't happen very often (if at all). We have a non-profit summit, a job fair, an employers summit, a barn raising for a non-profit and our first-ever website performance speed competition.
That's in addition to a general DrupalCamp with keynotes, sessions, BoFs, trainings and code sprints.
You have to be crazy to run one of these events, and I have the tremendous fortune of being a member of a great team of crazy organizers. From the outside we all must look nuts but we've all drunk from the well like the one in Khalil Gibran's The Madman and together we're keeping each other sane.
We've organized camps, job fairs, tech summits, and website barn raisings before, so what's the big deal?
This is a new event. It's a mega event, but it's still new. GLADCamp has only recently popped up on the radar for many people and it doesn't yet have much name recognition. Will anyone come?
It's always a gamble that we'll be able to meet our venue costs and book the hotel room nights we've reserved. Our group has a commitment to transparency and accountability and we have open books for this conference, and this will probably lead to more criticism than less if we make mistakes.
On a personal note, my dance card has been pretty full over the past couple of years (see Recharging batteries). One of my goals for 2014 is to consolidate as many of my Drupal community efforts as possible into one big event and GLADCamp is it. This is a different approach for me and I'll just have to see if it works.
No matter what happens, this is going to be big. Fingers crossed!