Even if I went to bed early, my B&B's location close to the fire department made my night eventful (two fires apparantly) and my morning at bit slo-o-o-ow. I did have the time to get my registration done at the venue, get a cup of coffee and join the other Drupalistas in G104 for my first community summit.

Addison Berry greeted us, along with MortenDK and Holly Ross and topics were mentioned, topics covering different parts of the community around Drupal. You could discuss and help out with COD (Conference Organizing Distribution), dig into groups.drupal.org, work on drupal for non-profiting organizations and a bunch of other topics. I chose the topic closest to my situation right now - how to get local groups running and how to make people help out.

The problem in many countries

During the discussion many of us identified two major problems. First, it's hard to get people to get involved. The bigger cities don't see this problem, naturally, but smaller cities and even countries are facing the same problem. Second, the possibility of stress and burnout for those few who are getting involved and gives it all for Drupal. Many of us nodded our heads when the latter one came up in the discussion. And the same people seemed to have seen the same thing happening, fewer and fewer getting involved in the community. Well, they still attend meetups and camps, but they don't have the time nor the energy to help organizing.

So then what? We identified loads of problems, we wrote all down in a Google Doc for others to read and find courage and strength (as well as good tips and tricks) in. Next stop is to make a website where we make this information available for all those around the globe struggling with the same problems in their community - or want to start a local community group, or perhaps arrange a camp.

Other goals and tasks we identified this afternoon were to gather all the local groups we know about and try to find the other ones, so we can create kind of a catalogue of all local groups in one place. A nice thing that surely will be beneficial in the future.

Where do we find this information?

Until the website is up, and full of information, the best place to find the results of this particular discussion of the Community Summit on DrupalCon Amsterdam would be these:

• https://groups.drupal.org/local-user-group-organizers
• #drupal-groups on IRC

What about the rest of the day?

The Community summit ended at 3 o'clock, which was a bit disappointing, but work was piling up, so perhaps it was for the best. I also got to spend an hour downstairs in the Europe Foyer, where the sponsors had arrived and set up their booths. Got me some cool swag (stickers, stress ball in the shape of a rocket, T-shirts) and had really nice and interesting talks with a lot of people. After that, I went to Brouwerij Troost where the Community Summit dinner was held. They served the best burger I've had in... well heck of a long time. And the beer was awesome. Talked to a gentlemen about something called CMS-garden, which is a really cool project where open source CMS's are being presented at different conferences such as CeBit. We actually discussed such a thing earlier today during the summit, and behold - here it is. Amazing (to paraphrase an anonymous Apple employee).

Tomorrow it's time for Dries keynote and all the sesions to start. I'm really looking forward to that.

EDIT: Since the wifi is really unstable at DrupalCon, this post wasn't published until Tuesday afternoon.