I’ve taken some time to process everything that was said and happened at Drupal camp 2011.  Here’s some of my biggest take always personally from the day:

• Drupal is everywhere, there are 176 sites using it as of this writing and we are spread across every part of the university in some aspect
• We’re getting more accepted as a viable platform; without hard data I’m seeing about a double growth in the number of people that I now know are using Drupal from last year both from a developer perspective as well as site builder / user perspective
• More units are looking to install and run Drupal locally.  This can be seen not only in the current organic implementation of the platform but also in the conversations I had with people about running different distributions off their local infrastructure.
• Arts and Architecture is an all Drupal College and it seems like EMS is as well (informally).  This isn’t saying every site they have is Drupal, just that moving forward everything we is Drupal.
• Building the community is already resonating, I’ve had a lot of emails, yammers, tweets, and conversations about getting more involved and giving back to the ecosystem as a whole.
• The Wisconsin Drupal community is starting to pattern after what We are (and visa versa)
• The seedling concept seemed to resonate positively, many people seemed interested in the idea of taking finished sites and reverse engineering them.  Granted this is more of a local, by proxy, training initiative for PSU only but still a great one potentially.  If you want to use Seedling and post your sites to the PSU code area just let me know!
• A lot of people think they aren’t experts right now.  I’m not joking when I say this – Most of the time, I’m “the expert” because I’m talking the loudest.  There is no accreditation, these are just skills we’re all picking up as we go. There will always be someone 15% behind and 15% ahead of you in knowledge about a topic in Drupal, it doesn’t matter what it is.  I learned quite a bit from the event by proxy in the form of module selections people are using.
• ETS is currently investigating ELMS as a centrally supported, common good platform as part of the suite of tools made available to learning designers.  While its still very early on as to what that will mean, this is great news for the Drupal community at large. We can all benefit from the investigatory period and this should provide increased visibility to those working in Drupal.
• 1/2 our community is new, 1/2 has been here using Drupal for 2+ years.  That means there’s a lot of mentorship that can happen, let’s just get more open about what we’re all working on so we aren’t reinventing the wheel.
• We have a good number of “experts” that can chime in and at least offer some form of advice about what to do use given a list of needs.
• We want to have another Drupal camp.
• 137 signed up, around 110 came, and there were anywhere from 5 to 15 people in connect through out the day.

I hope everyone feels that they learned something positive about Drupal from our event.  This really was the community in action and we can do more things like this in the future with a slim to none operating budget.  This was an event entirely driven by people willing to donate a few minutes to a few hours of their time and I hope we can continue this momentum into the future.