I couldn’t be more excited to see DrupalSouth coming back to Wellington this year. In case you don’t use DrupalCMS, the conference is an annual volunteer-organised event that visits New Zealand every 3 years, featuring the latest open source progress and presentations.

For digital professionals in New Zealand across commercial, government and community sectors, you should think about coming! Along with other locals, I’ve contributed to the organising effort and am delighted to convene talks that appeal to all – developers and wider professionals involved in all aspects of delivering great services.

About Drupal South

DrupalSouth is a technical conference based around the Content Management System, a major global product in the open source space. Drupal is a preferred technology across many Australian government sectors, and the internal teams and vendors who work within Drupal deliver critical services. The conference brings those together who like to share, collaborate and learn.

My personal agenda has been to focus on the design, the content strategy and the service design talks – but the talks cater to a broad set of technical discussions that span the wider open source space. For example:

• Ackama’s Gareth Jones is showcasing our work in partnership with Google on the OSV Scanner project extending to Drupal security. See our blog and see the full case study
• Many of the talks feature presentations from professionals across high-profile Australian digital government programs, and explore how to succeed in high-complexity operating environments
• AI features heavily, with a mix of technical implementation discussions, and how we are leveraging and building innovation with the emerging technology and change today
• I’m particularly delighted to see talks highlighting the disability community, featuring design research and digital accessibility presentations

My takeaway is that Drupal South will be hugely valuable for both developers and digital managers. As a three-yearly event in New Zealand, locals should really consider if they can come. Let me know if you decide to make it.

Why does Ackama support Drupal South?

Ackama works in a range of technologies – and we continue to support new technology tools and approaches. Drupal has moved on from some historical perceptions, and has a strong global community, mature web architecture and is well positioned to deliver around the AI-progress we all encounter. Ackama has steadily grown our focus and specialisation in Drupal, as it provides a great framework to build upon.

For us, Drupal South provides a huge set of reasons to get involved.

• depth of experience and expertise from a major open source product. While there is a proliferation of tech tools out there, we prefer the benefits of an open source ecosystem. The open, contribution-oriented format promotes a collaborative way of working. This moves past a sales-driven culture and tends to attract professionals who are interested in technical quality and improving their practices.
• an engaged digital community including global leaders. We are excited to meet with a range of other web agencies and leaders of government tech teams. Some major global technical project owners will be in town in May and they’re regular contributors to the event
• an inclusive format, with open discussion of issues the industry faces such as diversity barriers – we can’t make change if we can’t openly discuss what is needed
• as Ackama embrace remote working, conferences provide us a great way to connect and have in-person discussions and professional development

Talking about the future for Open Source Ecosystems

Almost 10 years ago, it felt a bit presumptuous to adopt an Ackama tagline ‘Digital Ecosystem Solutions’. In today’s current digital environment, it is such a banal observation that our work and our clients grapple with an interconnected digital environment that demands constantly new capabilities and adapts to change.

Looking through the talk tracks, I’m looking forward to hearing what other companies are doing, and hearing thoughts on how the future of digital service delivery might play out.

Come Along

Have a look at tickets, and use that unspent training budget this financial year

• There is a hackathon on May 12th
• The 2 day conference format spans May 13-14 (Wednesday-Thursday)

I’ve also picked up that another conference, NZ TechRally is on the same week, Friday – so Wellington is really offering a lot in the digital space that week and you might want to go along there as well.

Also, if you can’t make it, stay tuned to the conference website, who record and publish the talks on Youtube.