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Conference track: Growing Drupal

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Track mission and session plans

Growing Drupal is about building communities. Not just the Drupal community but all open-source communities. With the support of both new and ongoing contributors, the Growing Drupal track will share ideas for expanding our horizons and influencing others who respect us and our project.

In order to develop Drupal's internal resources and share in open-source successes, this track aims to inspire and connect people with the things they care about most. The track will feature brand new information about the ongoing programs for growing Drupal, including:

  • Drupal Really Open Participation (DROP)
  • Google Summer of Code
  • Google Highly Open Participation Contest
  • The Knight Drupal Initiative
  • The Drupal Dojo

We are actively looking for people to present sessions that cover:

  • Organizing local Drupal User Groups
  • Managing community with groups.drupal.org
  • Building a Drupal business
  • Planning and holding regional Drupal conferences
  • Attracting and retaining new Drupal developers and designers
  • Selling Drupal services to skeptical clients
  • Applying for grants for open-source projects
  • Drupal leadership in specific industries

Track chairs

Ken Rickard

Ken Rickard is a senior Drupal programmer at design and development firm Palantir.net. Ken started working for online newspapers in 1998 and launched the first newspaper website on Drupal, Bluffton Today, in 2005. A longtime advocate of Drupal in the newspaper industry, he joined Palantir in 2008 in order to work full-time on Drupal. Ken is the author and maintainer of the MySite, Domain Access and Skeleton modules. He is also co-chair of the Newspapers on Drupal group and the Knight Drupal Initiative. He is a two-time Drupal mentor for Google's Summer of Code and was a track co-chair for DrupalCON Boston..

He and his wife life in Augusta, Georgia (US) with their two dogs.

Charlie Gordon

Charlie Gordon is a 10th grade student and an enthusiastic Drupaller. Charlie began using Drupal one year ago, and quickly realized the power and awesomeness of Drupal. He became much more involved in Drupal through the Google Highly Open Participation (GHOP) program. He has since continued to work on Drupal, contributing and maintaining a number of contributed modules, and helping improve the SimpleTest automated testing framework in Drupal core. Charlie also is running the DROP program, which helps people get acquainted with Drupal through small, bite-sized tasks that help the Drupal community. He is also a mentor for Google Summer of Code (GSOC) this year.

Charlie lives in New York, New York (US) with his parents and sister.

Joel Farris

Joel 'Senpai' Farris works on improving User Interface design, bulletproofing module development, and patch testing for the Drupal community. Part of the ranks of the Drupal Dojo training sessions since their inception, Joel is an advocate of the "free software for all, but not free for your abuse" philosophy.

Eric Gundersen

Eric Gundersen, a strategist at Development Seed, designs communication plans and crafts creative and effective approaches to solving real world communications problems for clients. This work, combined with his knowledge management work, leads to designing innovative online applications and ground-breaking uses of the Drupal platform for projects like Managing News, custom intranets, and public/private group spaces for membership organizations.

Eric joined the Drupal community 4 years ago. He has also helped grow the large and very active Drupal community in Washington, DC. He leads its monthly meet-ups and arranges other community gatherings to help potential users understand the platform and help Drupal developers get to know each other better.