My First Drupal BarCamp

My first Splash-Award

As I mentioned in my report on the Splash Award, these are my first real experiences with the open-source community. I didn’t have any expectations for a BarCamp because I wasn’t familiar with the format yet. Back in my business days, when technology partners would organize partner meetings, they took place in large venues like the ExCel in London or the Flugmotoren Halle in Munich.

I was very curious to see what a BarCamp-style gathering at the Kreativquartier in Munich would be like. After enjoying my very first Splash Award yesterday, we got to spend a nice evening with the other award participants.

When I arrived at the Kreativquartier in Munich, I was pleasantly surprised. Back in Hamburg, you could compare the venue to Kampnagel. Fortunately, this wasn’t a high-gloss venue. After we unpacked our exhibition/information booth and set it up in a prominent spot in the entrance area of the small BarCamp hall, it felt like things were already getting started.

We at Factorial were one of the main sponsors, which allowed us to take the stage at the beginning of the BarCamp to welcome the participants and introduce our company. I actually wanted to draw attention to our “goodie” in the “goodie bag,” but unfortunately I completely forgot and had to go back on stage to grab the mic again and add the words I’d left out.

BarCamp is probably best known for its agenda—which is generated on the spot during the event—for the individual sessions and rooms, each of which covered a specific topic. These topics were ranked by priority in advance by the participants, so it certainly happened that interesting topics competed with one another, resulting in some tracks being very full while others were empty. Nevertheless, it’s a very active and interesting format for an event designed to cater to a broad range of interests.

I must admit that, as a business-oriented person, there wasn’t much content tailored to my interests, and the community consisted mostly of developers, so I was able to listen in on the community discussions and get a sense of the various use cases for Drupal installations.