How we merged BarCampMalaysia and DrupalCampKualaLumpur

When I started probing the Malaysian Drupal community a while back about the viability of organizing a DrupalCamp in Kuala Lumpur in July, many people were enthusiastic but not so many were able to find the time or energy to pitch in.

I still felt like going ahead – the challenge of remotely getting an event up and running was just too much fun to let go. Najib helped map out some venues, t-shirt vendors and caterers and we steadily got somewhere.

However, “somewhere” is “nowhere” when you can count the members of the organizing team on the fingers of one woodcutter’s hand. When Scales offered his advice (thx!) to drop the idea or get more local people in place, my nagging feeling that the lack of resources might prove to be a problem was confirmed.

I started looking outside the local Drupal Community and found my way to the communities around Ruby, Wordpress, Joomla, mysql and Open Office. As it turned out, some of theme were in the early stages of organizing a BarCamp in Kuala Lumpur at the end of July too.

It didn’t take us too long to figure out the best thing for both our events was to merge so we could share resources, venue, sponsor attention and, of course, attendees.

The final result is BarCampMalaysia with an embedded Drupal track.

It’s sooo cool to see hackers working together across project boundaries. I <3 cross-polination.