Zacker.org

At the Yearly Kos convention on June 8th the CivicSpace community will be teaching a workshop on building netroots campaign websites. Experts will be avaliable all day to teach participants at every skill level. The day will culminate in a barn raising of a real world netroots campaign website thought up by the DailyKos community and built by workshop participants and facilitators.

This thread:

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2006/6/6/13713/38510

is being used used as a campaign idea incubator with the best concept being built three days from now at the YearlyKos convention. If any of you are DailyKos members we could use your help recommending the thread so that it gets exposure within the DailyKos community, also please submit your ideas if you have them. If any of you want to help out please send me an email and let me know:

1. If you will be attending YearlyKos
2. If you want to help facilitate the workshop
3. What specifically (if anything) you would like to pitch in on.

Hope to I'll see some of you in Las Vegas shortly.

Heads up! Noel Hidalgo has started to organize the first "Drupal Camp", a multi-day intensive Drupal developer training program. (The CivicActions folks are very keen on making this happen as well.)

Why?
Every Drupal shop I know of is in a crunch of Drupal development talent. The limit on their ability to take on more and bigger projects is not from lack of sales leads or lack of management capability, it is simply there are not enough seasoned developers on hand to pay to work on Drupal development projects. An experienced and talented web-application developer will take a bit of time to learn Drupal inside and out and get up to speed developing complex websites, so it is not simply a matter of bringing in fresh talent, we need fresh Drupal talent. The Drupal economy is rocketing skyward and this problem will only become more intense in the forseable future. This is an immediate and growing problem that we need to start solving now.

Who?

1. Drupal newbies sponsored by their parent companies (CivicActions, Trellon, etc)
2. Drupal engineering experts to lead the class. Anyone up for this? :) (Matt Westgate and/or Crunchywelch provided he doesn't drown? Anyone else interested?).
3. Other Drupal folks in the neighborhood also might want to get together for a code sprint or to discuss Drupal projects.

When?
At Vancouver Josh and I floated out the idea of doing it in conjunction with the Personal Democracy Forum on May 15th. This dates works with me, does it sound reasonable to you?

Where?
If we do it in NYC in conjunction with PDF, I can think of two possiblities off the top of my head:

• The Tank
• EyeBeam

I will follow up with my contacts at both of these venues tomorrow. Does anyone know of another possible venue?

Curriculum

We should make sure that whatever is taugh and learned at "Drupal Camp" is recorded and synthesized for posterity. We want to have many more of these in the future so we should aim for publish-able curriculum that can be later posted on Drupal.org.

Next Steps?

1. Gregory Heller is organizing a consultant conference call to talk about this and other issues shortly on the consultant mailinglist.
2. David Geilhufe proposed we look into the former Ars Digita training camps. I'll sign up to follow up and do some research and try to talk to folks involved in organizing them.
3. We need to figure out a data / location. Unless someone can come up with a better data / location than PDF on May 15th I say let's go with that. I will start looking seriously into venues tomorrow.
4. We need to line up the teaching staff and get firm commitments from vendors to sponsor newbies. I can take this on starting Friday.

Thoughts?

Update: Some folks on the consultant mailinglist are motioning to do a training sooner (next 2-3 weeks) and somewhere less expensive than NYC.