At the Hungarian community, we are organizing yearly local Drupal conferences ever since 2006 under the "Drupal Conference" and "Drupal Weekend" names. We've also just had our 22nd monthly meetup in a row. We've hosted Drupalcon Szeged 2008. Over these years, we've found that naming for all these events is tricky, and nowadays, the "Drupalcamp" name is sticky for local Drupal conferences. However István Palócz of the Hungarian community had a different dream around camps.
This year, we're gonna have the first Drupal Summer Camp in Hungary (and by the looks of Google search results maybe the first Drupal Summer Camp ever). Unfortunately (at least for my non-Hungarian speaking audience), the event is all in Hungarian (except all the jargon thrown around that is :).
The camp is on from the 23th of June to the 26th and is organized with community participation in mind. People can get experience translating interfaces and sharing their translations, look into drupal.org project maintainership aspects, work with the issue queues to get problems solved, etc. By the nature of being together for four consecutive days (with a complete dormitory floor rented for cost-concious and/or community addicted attendees), lots of hands-on experience can be gathered.
And continuing our good tradition of organizing events with side parties (remember SZIN from Szeged?), this summer camp will take place in Pécs, which is 2010's European Capital of Culture with a vast number of options for chilling out. (Check out more photos of Pécs on Flickr).
I'm looking forward to how this model works out, and am happy to share experiences with anybody looking to make actual summer camps in the future.
Sweet!
This makes me wish I knew even an inkling of Hungarian. Szeged was one of the best highlights of my Drupal experience so far (both because of the excellent planning and because of the location) and I'm sure this is going to be a fantastic experience for everyone attending.