Voor de komende DrupalJam, hier alvast een voorproefje dat als backchannel kan dienen gedurende de dag zelf. Embed op je eigen site en spreidt het woord voort.

Friday March 19 (9:00-18:00 CET) the Dutch Drupal community will organise the 6th "DrupalJam".

A DrupalJam is a place where anyone interested in Drupal can get together to discuss about one of the best Open Source CMS-es out there. A friendly palce where users, coders, business people as well as people interested in web technologies. This time the Jam will be helded at the StayOkay hotel in Amsterdam, Timorplein 21. More information about the StayOkay location can be found on Maps as well. We expect over 200 people (up to 300!) visiting the DrupalJam and we will have attendees form over four countries.

It only seemed like yesterday.. The first DrupalJam I co-organised was in a basement with 50 or so people (top left). Not unlike the second DrupalCon, held in Amsterdam (right).

And now, 6 editions later we have reached the scale of the third DrupalCon in Brussels as can be seen on Dries' site. And this is a global trends. While DrupalCons get bigger and bigger, there is also a trend to localise DrupalCon's that are reaching the same scale as DrupalCon's were only a a few editions ago. And with that the global DrupalCon problems get local as wel, continuity, professionalism en sponsors.

I am proud to say -not meant to toot my own horn- that the organisers of the DrupalJam so far did an excellent job. The very healthy ecoshere around Drupal in the Netherlands made that we have the following premium sponsors; Microsoft, Radio Radio Netherlands Worldwide, Dutch Open Projects, Internet Unlimited, KPN, NCRV, OneShoe and Sogeti. Other sponsors include VLC (gold), Lucius, Acquia, Synetic, Wizzlern (silver) and Merge (bronze). Looking at this list there are at least two key things to note. The first one is a classic one, the distribution is skewed to the left meaning we made the premium sponsorship to cheap.

The second one is more important. The ecoshere around Drupal grew and outgrew the standard Drupal implementers. KPN (fortune 500, telephone, mobile, ADSL, high end webhosting), NCRV (public broadcaster using Drupal a lot), Radio Netherlands Worldwide (public broadcaster using Drupal, see Dries' site) and Microsoft are not the "standard" sponsors of an Open Source project. It shows that the market around Drupal is maturing and that parties that have an indirect stake are willing to invest and give back. And we do thank them for that, as well as thank our other sponsors!

Dries once told me he wanted to have local DrupalCamps in every city around the world. We are not there yet. But I do think there is a (bi-)yearly DrupalCamp in every free country around the world right now. And when these will become too big, there will be a DrupaCamp in every major city around the world by 2015 for sure.

Drupal is coming home in 2015, your home! But if you can not wait that long, sign up for the DrupalJam in Amsterdam, look the sessions and propose a session (login required). Please do contact me or Bart Feenstra if you have any questions. DrupalJam will rock!

A couple of weeks ago the Dutch Association of Journalists NVJ (125 years old) launched a "community" portal based on Drupal. While it was a soft launch, already 999 users have signed up, showing that the need for a place in this niche.

Registered users can blog, ask questions and provide answers, microblog / twitter messages in the site, be active in forums, create and read wikipages, build a portfolio, be-friend people to network, start or join (organic) groups and search for jobs. Employers can post job openings as well.

Lots of content types / functionality usually leading to bad user experience; where do I do what? However, the site is rather popular and gets lots of hits and people do find what they are looking for in the site.

It was build by my employer DOP.nu using core Drupal, many contrib modules as well as half a dozen own modules. The Crowds did the concept and Xlab the design and User Interface.

It is my opinion that sites like these show Drupal at it's best, a community site where people help each other.

A couple of weeks ago the Dutch Association of Journalists NVJ (125 years old) launched a "community" portal based on Drupal. While it was a soft launch, already 999 users have signed up, showing that the need for a place in this niche.

Registered users can blog, ask questions and provide answers, microblog / twitter messages in the site, be active in forums, create and read wikipages, build a portfolio, be-friend people to network, start or join (organic) groups and search for jobs. Employers can post job openings as well.

Lots of content types / functionality usually leading to bad user experience; where do I do what? However, the site is rather popular and gets lots of hits and people do find what they are looking for in the site.

It was build by my employer DOP.nu using core Drupal, many contrib modules as well as half a dozen own modules. The Crowds did the concept and Xlab the design and User Interface.

It is my opinion that sites like these show Drupal at it's best, a community site where people help each other.

In case you are going the Drupalcon Paris, we have the option to meet in person since I was able to get in as well. But be sure to talk to your boss / yourself and convince him or her that presence in person is a great way to align with the community, but sponsoring the con is the best way to get more out of it; love, a better conference for all, potential employees and most of all prospects.

Dutch Open Projects became a silver sponsor some time ago, and so should you! Now I do not know how the economic downtime is hitting on you, but in the Netherlands this crisis is only bringing more companies towards using Drupal. It used to be true, that people choose Drupal for the quality and stayed for the (lack of) costs, but there is a complete new mantra now: come for the lack of costs and stay for the quality!

So if you are being hit by the crisis, invest in your product and become a sponsor! If you are doing well -good for you-, refund some of your love in cash to the community by aligning your wallet with the community.