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DrupalCamp Colorado took place on the Auraria campus June 26th and 27th and had over 300 people in attendance. The event brought together developers, designers, project managers, sales people, SEO experts and business people who might be end users of Drupal to learn, share and build community around the platform.

Drupal is an open source content management platform used by governments (e.g. http://www.whitehouse.gov), by corporations large and small (e.g. http://lindenlab.com), and by many nonprofits - including T4T, Colorado Cross Disability Coalition and The United Nations Millennium Campaign. By taking advantage of pre-written contributions designed to accomplish a multitude of tasks, people can also use Drupal to build applications rapidly. For example, tools were created in just days to support the recovery effort in Haiti.

At the Colorado Camp, I had an opportunity to learn and to teach. I learned about Drupal technologies old and new. I learned about PCI Compliance, something everyone who takes credit card payments needs to be aware of. All of the presentations are given by others in the Drupal community and no one is paid to present. Presenters are passionate about their topic and care about the Drupal community.

Andy Walters (of Sailboat Media) and I gave a session called Small Shops and Freelancers: How to Cultivate and Nourish Fruitful Relationships where we spoke both to potential clients of small shops and freelancers and to other small shops and freelancers, sharing from our perspective what works and what does not work in the world of Drupal consulting. I hope to offer this session again, unfortunately without Andy, at DrupalCon Copenhagen.

Drupal Camps are smaller regional conferences, where members of the local community can share their interests and skills. Every year there is also a North American and a European DrupalCon. This year the overseas convention will be in Copenhagen and the U.S. convention was in San Francisco. I am looking forward to continuing to expand my knowledge of Drupal.

If you are interested in learning about Drupal and don’t want to wait until next year’s Drupal Camp, there are lots of great online resources. For example, check out this short list.