DrupalCamp North East 2014 - Business Day

This morning, I headed over to Sunderland via Newcastle, for my first DrupalCamp business day.

From the Sunderland Metro station I walked over to the home of DrupalCamp North East, Sunderland Software Centre. On the way I took a detour through Mowbray Park and past Sunderland Museum and Winter Gardens (note to self: must make time to visit next time I'm in the region).

The welcome to Sunderland Software Centre was warm and friendly, the organisers have done an absolutely brilliant job of setting up this conference in a state-of-the-art venue.

Open Innovation

Today’s keynote session was from Professor Roy Sandbach of Newcastle University kicked off the first DrupalCamp North East with an inspiring and insightful talk about how sharing knowledge and IP with others can actually lead to discovering new IP or new ways to monetise ‘dead’ IP, and how in some enterprise organisations this is actually the key to essential, continual innovation.

Is Drupal right for your business?

The first talk after the keynote was with Mike Parker from Orange Bus, sharing his thoughts on why clients choose Drupal, and how they weigh up which platform to use. There are many considerations to make in ensuring that Drupal is the correct fit for the project that is to be undertaken.

Mike clearly articulated how to work out whether Drupal is the right underlying technology for your project. This must include factors such as the ultimate cost of ownership, and as is often the case, speed of delivery of a minimum desirable product. Most specifically Drupal ‘shines’ when used for more complex sites, but can also be a great option for rapidly creating microsites for small, medium and enterprise organisations.

After a raft of challenging and intelligible questions from Chandeep Khosa, we discovered some untold secrets about the name Orange Bus. Apparently the name was previously ‘Amber Shade’, however, when Mike and some others put forward the argument that there may be an opportunity to evolve the name, Orange Bus was chosen as an alternative and became the successor. Both names were inspired by an orange VW camper van which is incidentally now red.

Improving the procurement process

Paul Johnson from CTI Digital provided some invaluable insight into the well-trodden path to tender which he travels as a core part of his role. He imparted some great tips on both writing tenders from a client perspective, and responding to tenders from an agency perspective. This included his walkthrough of an average large-scale tender process.

Very clear advice was given for procurers to best ensure competitive responses from comparative agencies, as well as for Drupal agencies to follow when choosing whether or not to bid for work.

Paul imparted some key tips, such as making sure that your tender response documents are as good as possible, and explaining the importance of Post Qualification Questionnaires for both parties. A clear takeaway was to be aware that as an organisation you should know what project is a good fit and on what is not.

It is interesting to note in general how many tenders are sent out from all sizes of organisation which prescribe the features that they think they need, with no indication of what benefit their users will gain from them, or how these features fit into a more global business strategy. This can often be misleading, wrong, disjointed, and potentially a big waste of money for those organisations.

Public Sector Adoption of Drupal

Stephanie Hosny of Ixis delivered an excellent talk which started by looking back at the way the government digital services procurement landscape has evolved in recent years through innovations such as the G-Cloud, a tool that many agencies already use. G-Cloud offers contract buyers a transparent comparison of suppliers, and enables them to easily shortlist organisations that are potentially a good fit for the project they are looking to complete.

Stephanie also gave a great rundown of how to sell Drupal into Public Sector, for agencies and consultants, then cleverly reversed it for buying Drupal into Public sector, with a wealth of tips, links and methodologies to use if you are new to G-Cloud.

She then highlighted some of the challenges that occur when working with public sector, including some age-old arguments. A take-away for me was the extent to which many large government organisations find it a challenge to understand the huge benefits that can be gained by switching from old-style proprietary infrastructures with lock-in contracts to Open Source platforms where the products could be insourced. A number of humongous cost-saving examples were presented where Open Source has replaced previous proprietary solutions for government organisations.

Drupal for Good

David Van der Velde from Consult and Design took us on a moving journey which started with his setting up a ‘new media’ organisation and working on early websites for relatively large brands (whilst dealing with the headaches that came with developing for early browsers such as Internet Explorer 4.0!) through to suddenly having to change track due to becoming a single dad.

This forced him to rethink his plan and through new experiences he moved into working with charitable enterprises such as NGO Fathers Plus and workingwithfathers.com

David also highlighted the sheer number (hundreds) of Drupal distributions that are available for NGOs to make use of in a variety of projects. David continues to support their great work in the North East community in tandem with Consult and Design.

Commerce without borders

David Kitchen from Commerce Guys UK started his talk by highlighting Platform.sh which is a new cloud-based hosting solution which enables Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery through the development and lifecycle of a site.

David continued by talking in-depth about Drupal commerce and showed some great examples including the Lush.com and Cartier sites which have enables an extremely granular level of control over the content production process by using Drupal Commerce and integrating this with Drupal’s powerful content management features.

David also highlighted how Drupal continues to improve and grow in adoption across the globe. Already over five million sites now use Drupal as the underlying Open Source CMS.

The Value of the Drupal Community

Adam Hill from Consult and Design finished an excellent business day off with a talk which is bound to resonate across the whole community. He talked about how important it is to get involved with the community and the raft of benefits there are to gain from any level of involvement.

An interesting point was made highlighting Dries’ advice to try and employ a Drupal core contributor full-time if you have over 30 staff members. This helps your agency to contribute back, but also gives you vital in-roads into the heart of the Drupal community of developers, and access to first-hand and instant access to information regarding key decisions being made about the direction of Drupal.

Adam ended his talk with a recap video from last month's DrupalCamp Yorkshire in Leeds.

At the end of the day

Everyone that I spoke to seems to have gained a lot from coming to DrupalCamp North East. We shared and learned new things and forged business relationships and genuine friends. In addition, the refreshments, venue, and talks were all top notch! Thank you, we will come again.

Here are a few shots from the evening of the business day, starting with these two Drupal homies:

Hey Jeni, we're only on our first beverage. Chill for a mo', yo!

I think this is an infamous devil rabbit near the main station in Newcastle. Looks more like a vampire rabbit. Weird, but cool. Thanks for pointing this out Adam!

A calm chat with Morten and a bunch of others in a cool outdoor area near The Baltic.

The Sage (below), Gateshead, just across from where we were socialising. It is a bit like some kind of glass slug monster. Still cool.

#DCNE have a good rest of the camp!