Identify a Camp Theme

I'll take the first crack at this. What about making the theme of the camp LSD http://www.largescaledrupal.com/ ... I think that this gives a theme that is open and diverse enough to appeal to both business and development. I'd like to reach out to Michael Meyers as a possible keynote to help support that effort.

Then again .. since we are going to be gathering donations for ADA does it make sense to make the focal point of the conference Diversity in Drupal (or similar)?

If we were to follow that theme it might be worth considering making it a target to approach specific people in the community to encourage a higher percentage of women speakers and attendees.

Wow!! Okay, this may not come as a surprise to anyone, but I absolutely LOVE the diversity idea.

"Diversity in Drupal" and "Large Scale Drupal" are both solid themes. In talking with cyberswat offline, "Diversity in Drupal", with a specific target to attract minority members of the community, could be very powerful if done correctly. I imagine we'd gain more attention as well as more attendance from outside of Colorado. Plus, we obviously have passionate advocates for this type of outreach right here (I'm looking at you, teckgirlgeek!).

That said, I'd be equally happy with LSD. This could also be positioned to achieve a broader reach and showcase a different set of individuals in our local community (examiner, etc). It is also becoming something of a necessity for individuals and shops to address as performance, uptime, and scalability demands are increasing across all projects (at least from my perspective).

I think LSD matches the proposed tracks that we've somewhat agreed on (perhaps prematurely?). It seems clear to me what we would do if we wanted to have LSD as a "theme." Meyers as keynote, as I mentioned our tracks already align with it, we would try to get some "business" presentations from large companies/orgs using Drupal, we would have morescalability sessions, etc. OK, fine.

It's less clear to me what we'd do if we had diversity as a theme. Anyone want to make some suggestions of what that would look like? I can see how that would carry into a keynote, but we'd probably want to expand the track list (or the scope of one or two of the tracks) to cover the topic, right? Hopefully the session selection committee will already be doing outreach to get a diverse set of speakers whether or not diversity is the theme of the event so...what else would make the event diversity "themed"?

I see diversity in Drupal touching on a lot of interesting subjects. The obvious is efforts to get more women and minorities involved, but there's also language diversity (internationalization sessions), technical diversity (Node, Mongo sessions), cultural diversity (how does open source differ in, say, China?), opinion diversity (debate-style sessions?), etc. I could see any of those making up their own track.

Ironically, I think diversity in Drupal is a theme better suited for a larger event, whereas large scale Drupal could more easily work in a smaller event. So I guess my vote is to do LSD this year and consider diversity in Drupal for next year after (hopefully) increasing the camp size a bit more. But like others, I don't have a very strong leaning either way, both seem great.

Re #9, I agree that there are some sessions we could hope to have, but (ironically enough) I doubt there are speakers knowledgeable on the topics - for example: open source in china - who will be available to speak at our camp.

Sorry, posted before finishing thought...

Basically: I agree with your comment that LSD is within what we can tackle.

A strategic difference in putting on a diversity based camp is that it would require a targeted approach to session selection. I could see a campaign that would begin by reaching out to a handful of prominent community members to gauge their willingness to help participate in recruitment to help meet demographic targets that we would need to define. Based on that feedback,we may be able to get a better measurement on the potential for success.

Does it change the scenario if we were to reach out to 6 prominent community members and gather additional energy willing to help us promote and possible organize?

I'm passionate about LSD. Large Scale Drupal and it's implications are of significant interest to me. I'm in agreement that this seems like a lower hanging fruit and less risky. However, I think that we have more motivation and more participation than we did last year to make this a good event; with the right theme, it could make for a great event.

I'd like to try and identify an initial group of 6 people to reach out to gauge interest and would be comfortable leading this effort. If the initial outreach is successful I'd like to help outline a strategy that supports diversity while not alienating the traditional aspects of the content.

I've identified an initial group that I'm going to begin reaching out to. Per irc we will leave the poll open until next Friday to allow me to gauge interest and better define success/failure indicators.

Perhaps it's assumed in the consideration of "diversity" but, running the risk of stating the obvious, what about accessibility considerations along the lines of http://www.w3.org/WAI/ (ATAG, WCAG, UAAG) and http://www.section508.gov/.

I think it could be helpful to have sessions (and pardon me that I haven't looked at the session track issue) teaching how to build sites to meet those guidelines.

Diversity is a broad topic and an imperative approach to the success of this concept is to support diversity and not increase barriers. We need to deliver the message of diversity but not dilute the content of the event.

Initial feedback so far seems to favor the concept of an event that focuses on something like LSD as a theme, but helps highlight and celebrate diversity. To that end, we could ask open ended questions similar to "What makes you diverse?" ... the focus would then become finding creative ways to surface that information.

Another point that was mentioned was addressing the diversity of speakers. I have a lot of notes that I need to parse and should be able to summarize early next week.

also .. here's another good set of opinions on the topic of diversity at Drupal events if you haven't seen it http://www.reddit.com/r/drupal/comments/1s97am/i_am_larry_crell_garfied_...

I performed outreach to get feedback regarding the topic of diversity as a theme for drupalcamp. 100% of the people that responded thought that at it was generally a good idea, and indicated that they would be interested in participating, but that the approach was flawed.

Essentially, the suggestions were that we focus on diversity, but do it in a way that doesn't focus on a specific demographic. Allow people to express what makes them diverse, possibly during registration, and then find some way of celebrating that throughout the camp.

We received suggestions on everything from making sure that we make extra effort to provide childcare based activities to providing content for audible or visual impairments.

Based on the feedback, I'd like to suggest that we focus on LSD as the primary theme and implement what we can of the suggestions to help grow diversity naturally. I'd also like to suggest that we consider more than ADA as a charity and allow people to choose from a limited list.

Thanks for giving me the time to research this!

That all sounds good to me.

If anyone has other ideas for donation recipients, please add them to #2151131: Charitible Donations. I'm not particularly tied to Ada Foundation. Also, the current pricing structure at #2151075: 2014 Pricing Structure has us making a single collective donation after we reach the camp budget. It's not clear to me how we'd do multiple donation recipients with a collective budget target. If anyone has any ideas on that, please post in that thread.

If we're thinking about offering child care, we should probably add that to the volunteer list so we have someone responsible for organizing it. I don't know much about it, but I know it's been difficult to do consistently at DrupalCons for some reason.

This is a whacky thing for me to say ... but I'll signup to help manage child care. I'll add it to the volunteer sheet.

To summarize, LSD as a primary focus with a secondary goal of celebrating diversity.

I'm going to set this as rtbc (since I can't get into irc to check). Feel free to add to the discussion or change status if so inclined.

@MatthewS What is the next step on this?

Issues go to fixed first. Thanks.