Supported by the Drupal Association and multiple locals the Drupal-Austria Association has been organizing a tour through Austria to foster the community and to promote DrupalCon Munich: http://roadshow.drupal-austria.at
We have an active Drupal community in Vienna, but weren't aware of much community events in the rest of the country. As a consequence one of our goals was to bring Drupal and DrupalCon Munich 2012 to cities like Linz, Salzburg, Klagenfurt, Innsbruck and Graz and to get to know local Drupal users and usergroups.
In detail the main goals have been the following:
1) Evangelize and make some noise about Drupal
2) Convince people to start or foster communities in each of the cities
3) Get in contact with members of local organizations like schools, universities, governments
4) Convince people to attend Drupalcon Munich and spread the word
So we invited local Drupal users, web developers and other interested people, held short presentations about Drupal (Drupal intro, benefits, comparison to other systems), talked about the Drupal community and tried to explain why communities and events like DrupalCon are so important.
By doing this we gained a lot of experience in marketing Drupal and Drupal events. Travelling through Austria and giving talks about the benefits of Drupal brought us a lot of feedback by a wide variety of people (Drupal professionals, Drupal beginners, representatives, politicians, managers, …).
Because of this feedback we had the idea to present Drupal's benefits tailored to user types like "site builder", "themer" and "coder". We identified persons in our community representing these user types (for example fago as coder) who tried to market Drupal from their own perspective. We want to work on this further and maybe produce also screencasts or other marketing materials. Also the new version of drupal-austria.at is going to have special sections for each of this target groups.
In addition, we managed to find local use cases in every city to be presented. So we always had a different programm and this kept it interesting also for us.
What has been the biggest challenge? We had a very motivated team and it was very fun working on this project together. It was a great to see that people in our community helped out and took over responsibility for organizing one of the roadshow events. In addition we found great local partners, so organizing the events went very smooth. The biggest challenge has been addressing the different needs and expectations by all the different stakeholders in the audience.
The first event took place in Linz. Thanks to servus.at, Open Commons Region Linz and Wissensturm as venue provider we had a great time and interesting presentations, including Drupal for deaf people, Drupal and OpenGovernment, Apps4Linz and two local casestudies: oeh.jku.at and servus.at.
Event in Linz: http://www.drupal-austria.at/veranstaltungen/drupal-roadshow-linz
More pictures: http://www.drupal-austria.at/blog/fotos-der-drupal-roadshow-linz
Radio interview: http://cba.fro.at/54540
Next we have been in Klagenfurt. Josef Dabernig did a great job organizing this event and with the help of sponsors like Pitschek + Partner, University Klagenfurt and ÖH Klagenfurt we had additional presentations about Drupal video streaming, Aegir Hosting System / Drush and a Drupal Commerce case study: betterbgood.at. The room was packed and we want to thank especially also our speaker from Drupal Slovenia: Iztok Smolic.
Event in Klagenfurt: http://www.drupal-austria.at/veranstaltungen/drupal-roadshow-klagenfurt
Pictures and Slides: http://www.drupal-austria.at/report/nachbericht-zur-drupal-roadshow-kla…
Blog post: http://www.zensations.at/blog/zensations-hits-road-show
The third station was Graz. Organized by Oliver Köhler we had additional talks about Drupal website building, OpenData and multiple casestudies: neurovation.net, musiktotal.at and auslandsdienst.at. We really liked it! Thanks also our sponsors for Graz: Video2Brain (training material) and ESC Labor Graz (venue).
Event in Graz: http://www.drupal-austria.at/veranstaltungen/drupal-roadshow-graz
More pictures: https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.10150893871244738.444261.2500…
In May we had been invited to speak at a Linux and OpenSource Event in Vienna: Linuxwochen. This gave us the chance to speak to a broader audience than before. Thanks to the efforts of Nico Grienauer as organizer we managed to have again a speaker from Slovenia (Damjan Cvetan) and also Jeffrey McGuire gave a great talk about the real value of OpenSource. All did an amazing job evangelizing Drupal!
Event at Linuxwochen: http://www.drupal-austria.at/veranstaltungen/drupal-roadshow-station-li…
More pictures: https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.10151113786229738.470009.250058874737&type=3
Acquia podcast: http://www.acquia.com/resources/podcasts/acquia-podcast-45-meet-drupal-austria-roadshow
To Innsbruck we had been invited again. This time the OpenSource Experts Group Tyrol gave us the opportunity to speak at OpenSource Day Tyrol 2012. Organized by Wolfgang Ziegler we had sessions about Drupal Commerce, using semantic web to enrich Drupal content by STI Innsbruck and a casestudy about austrofeedr.at.
Event in Innsbruck: http://www.drupal-austria.at/veranstaltungen/drupal-roadshow-innsbruck
More pictures: https://plus.google.com/u/0/photos/117418785922810870830/albums/5742346…
Youtube Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p588gDnM-mk
The final event in Salzburg had to be cancelled, as there were only a few registrations. Probably everybody was already preparing for DrupalCon Munich, which started a few days later. During DrupalCon we held a Drupal Austria BoF, where we spoke about marketing Drupal in Austria, the Drupal Roadshow and future activities. There was a lot of energy and a lot of great ideas, stay tuned! ;)
Event: http://munich2012.drupal.org
Drupal Austria BoF: http://munich2012.drupal.org/content/drupal-austria-how-take-drupal-aus…
Press release: http://www.drupal-austria.at/drupal-auf-dem-weg-zum-weltweit-fuehrenden-content-management-system
Report by Austrian public radio: http://oe1.orf.at/programm/311244
Finally we want to thank all supporters, organizers and sponsors. You have been awesome! See you at the next Drupal event!