Where business and community come together

Published 2016-04-19 by Jochen Lillich

For the first time, a DrupalCamp directly addressed both businesses and the developer community in Germany (and its German-speaking neighbours). And it was a great success. Taking place in Heidelberg from April 8 to 10, the Drupal Business and Community Days ran a business-centered track with expert presentations in parallel to a community track in which Drupal developers worked on Drupal code and documentation.

The Business Days […] will be an opportunity for the German-speaking Drupal Business Community to get together, and work on strategies for growing Drupal within Germany, Austria and Switzerland. The Community Days […] will be international, with participants from all over Europe. The Community Days will be English, German, and hopefully a few more languages. The community event will have a focus on core, translation, and D8 User Guide sprints.

Why did the event team around Drupal Company Erdfisch choose this kind of topic split? They wrote about their reasoning on the event website:

In Germany, Drupal has an amazing developer community, but it is not as well known as a business product as it is in other countries. We need to work on that!

They did a great job. And having business relationships around Drupal proved helpful quickly: When the venue’s internet connection didn’t hold up, Erdfisch was able to get the University of Heidelberg to offer space at their data center so the development efforts could continue.

You could tell from the high attendance of the business track that providing products and services around Drupal is an important topic for businesses in D-A-CH. In Germany, all the leading Drupal businesses have realised that the market is big enough and treat each other as colleagues even though there’s competition. This opens up the way to share experience and learn from each other. A rising tide floats all the boats, and as businesses we can only benefit from conferences like this one. That’s why we were happy to support the event both as a sponsor and as active participants.

The freistilbox team had planned to attend in full force but unfortunately, I had to stay at home fighting a nasty virus that afflicted the whole family. In consequence, I wasn’t able to give my talk “How not to be afraid of your own success”. Instead, our friends at the Palasthotel stepped in with a great session about their new Drupal development workflow.

In total, 118 people ranging from “interested in Drupal” to “enthusiastic for Drupal” attended the conference. After it concluded, praise for a great DrupalCamp came not only from German attendees…

…there were also people from Canada (!)…

…from the Netherlands…

…from Belgium…

…and probably a few more countries — it was a great weekend for the international Drupal community.

The freistilbox team had lots of fun meeting old and new friends, and we also learned new stuff. So, thanks a million to Erdfisch for organising a great DrupalCamp! We’re looking forward to the next Drupal Business and Community Days!

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