Attracting & Retaining Drupal Talent

Overview

Drupal's growth is exploding and business and organizations are struggling to meet the growing demand. This panel will discuss best practices on attracting & retaining Drupal talent during this time of rapid growth.

Agenda

*Tiffany Farriss from Palantir*
Tiffany will share stories about how Palantir's core values of transparency, collaboration and "fit" have enabled the firm to grow and embrace change over the course of its 12-year history. She will talk about how Palantir made the transition from a CMS-agnostic firm to a devoted Drupal shop. Topics will include: project selection, company culture, recruiting, professional development and community engagement.

*Robert Scales from Raincity*
Most drupal shops come to life out of the collaborative desire of a few people working together with hopes to build a stable work place! Raincity Studios is no different.

Scales will be speaking about growing Raincity from small collective to a multi-national firm with operations in 3 countries and a growing team of nearly 40 staffers.

A reflection on Raincity's past 5 years; from startup to building our Chinese operation, working with the community and acquiring Bryght in 2007... What can you learn from our mistakes and experience to help you become a more successful drupal service/product provider.

*Eric Gundersen on: make mistakes faster*
From two guys in a basement to a team and clients spread across two content, Development Seed has taken a MBA crash course over the past years. co-founder Eric Gundersen will share a 20 minutes brain dump covering how Development Seed has grown and grown and retained it's awesome team by being able to quickly learn form it's mistakes after each project. Eric will cover communications, management, and business process that help to make an awesome working environment, specifically:

* Finding work: How to position for the projects that people like to work on and the art of turning down work

* Doing work: Constantly refining the process from agile development and GTD systems to benefits of sitting around the same table

* Getting paid for work: contracts, client communications, and cash flow

This talk specifically targets anyone starting their own Drupal shop.

Goals

This presentation is intended to help build capacity among shops looking to grow or people starting their shops.

Resources
http://www.omnigroup.com/applications/omnifocus
http://www.amazon.com/Getting-Things-Done-Stress-Free-Productivity/dp/01...