Drupal Camps in North America

After political discussions about the elections in the United States are slowly cooling down and the jokes on Donald Trump getting elected circle around the web in a lesser extent, we decided that it is time to look at something else. It's time to present you Drupal Camps organized in North America. We already presented Drupal Camps, which took place in Africa and Asia and concluded that Drupal Camps and activities are far more spread in Asia than in Africa. However, we expected that North America can offer a little bit more. We were right again.

After we discovered that so many websites run on Drupal in the United States, it was not hard to predict that Drupal Camps are massively spread across the North America. But do they spread the knowledge about Drupal more frequently than ones organized in Asia? They do. There's just one downside, but we'll run into it at the end of our blog post.

Duration of Drupal Camps

After seeing how many Drupal Camps are there in the North America the first major problem occurred. It was how to present Drupal Camps in a clearest way possible. Due to having more than 20 of them, there is no doubt that some were left out. In the end we decided that they will be classified depending on duration time.

Single day events

Although that was a frequent practice in Africa, you can find Drupal Camps that take place only for a day in the United States as well. The recent one was Drupal Camp Chattanooga, a conference, which was held less than two weeks ago in Tennessee. But the keynote speaker did not have as high reputation as Dani Nordin, a keynote speaker of Drupalcamp Baltimore, which took place more than a month ago. Of course we must not forget about Philadelphia, the city where The Declaration of Independence was signed. Therefore, Drupaldephia is also worth mentioning.

Two day events

The most common practice is to organize a two day Drupal Camp in the United States. The most prominent one is definitely DrupalCamp LA, which was organized from 27th to 28th August for the 10th consecutive time! Quite an impressive history. Drupal Camp PA, which was organized for the third consecutive time, and DrupalCamp St. Louis with the second anniversary, don't have such prominent histories. However, the first one invited everyone, who wanted to learn about Drupal, even Joomla and Wordpress users (!) and the second one had a session about Organic Groups, a topic which we analysed in one of our previous blog posts.

One of the largest Drupal Camps in in South-east, attracting hundreds of web developers, designers, executives and educators is DrupalCamp Atlanta, which also has a long history, dating back to 2009. DrupalCamp Colorado on the other hand doesn't have such a long history, but it took a local Drupal Community 8 months to prepare it. Not so much time was spent preparing Drupal Camp Asheville, which started a day earlier, on 12th of August. In addition to everything else, it focused on transition between Drupal 7 and Drupal 8, a very "hot" and important topic.

Events, lasting longer than two days

It is not hard to believe that a Drupal Camp can last for more than two days. It's true that you need more resources to pull that kind of project through, but such Camps are far from rare. One example is a BADCamp, a four day Drupal Camp in Berkeley California, which took place from 20th to 23th October. It hard to believe, but it was scheduled on 8 different venues. The keynote speaker was Kelly Bell.

Another hard to believe fact was associated with MidCamp. This four day Drupal Camp in Chicago had live streaming of 10 sessions, including the main one. That was not the case in Twin cities Drupal Camp (23-26 June 2016, University of Minnesota Law School). But on the other hand this Camp realized the unique idea of bringing together Drupal users from college and universities nationwide to share knowledge, collaborate on projects and learn from each other's experiences. Moreover, unlike many other camps trainings were free. That's perhaps down to a fact that students already pay for their education and can be spared some costs. Nevertheless, a keynote speaker was Helena Zubkow, a front-end developer at Lullabot.

What about Canada and Mexico?

Don't worry. We did not forget about the closest neighbours of the United States. They also host Drupal Camps. In Canada you can find Drupal North Regional Summit, which takes place from June 16th to June 19th, focusing mostly on how to build web sites on the latest version of Drupal (Drupal 8) in Montreal and in Mexico you can find a Drupal Camp Guadalajara.

Better luck next year

As you can see we presented only Drupal Camps that already took place this year. Not like in the case of Asia, when we were able to guide you to the upcoming events. That's because we must sadly acknowledge that upcoming Drupal Camps in North America will take place only in February 2017. Yes, they are over for this year. Complete downside, we know. Nevertheless, on February 2017 we will be able to see DrupalCamp NJ, DrupalCamp NYC, SANDcamp and Florida Drupal Camp. But until then, the visitors of this Camps will be left only with memories.