DrupalCon Chicago Scholarship Recipients Announced

The recipients of the DrupalCon Chicago scholarships have been selected.

We received an incredible 105 scholarship applications for DrupalCon Chicago. After careful deliberation, the scholarship committee has decided to award scholarships to the people mentioned below.

This year the our evaluation process was merit-based. Applicants were evaluated based on their Drupal code contributions or contributions to the Drupal community. A special priority was given to core maintainers to celebrate their hard work on Drupal 7 and in anticipation of the discussions about Drupal 8 that will be featured in DrupalCon Chicago’s Core Conversations.

Full scholarship recipients
Yves Chedemois
Stéphane Corlosquet
Michelle Cox
Bart Feenstra
Fernando García
Dmitri Gaskin
Ivo Van Geertruyen
Franz Heinzmann
Ariane Khachatourians
Daniel Kudwien
Francesco Placella
Roy Scholten
Bojhan Somers
Susan Stewart
Josh Waihi
Derek Wright
Everett Zufelt

Basic scholarship recipients
Alan Burke
Arshad Chummun
Mixel Kiemen
Marco Villegas

Special thank you
A special thank you goes to the following speakers (and their sponsoring organizations), who opted to donate their registration discounts to the scholarship fund, which allowed us to grant the partial scholarships that cover the hotel accommodation costs for those recipients.
Aaron Stanush (Four Kitchens)
Amy O’Malley (Palantir)
Ben Jeavons (Growing Venture Solutions)
Brandon Bowersox (OJCTech.com)
Colleen Carroll (Palantir)
David Needham (Chapter Three)
David Rothstein
Ezra Barnett Gildesgame (Growing Venture Solutions)
George DeMet (Palantir)
Grace Francisco (Microsoft)
Greg Knaddison (Growing Venture Solutions)
João Ventura (Trellon)
John Albin Wilkins (Palantir)
Ken Rickard (Palantir)
Kenny Silanskas (Acquia)
Kyle Cunningham (Trellon)
Larry Garfield (Palantir)
Lisa Rex (Growing Venture Solutions)
Matt Farina (Palantir)
Peter Wolanin (Acquia)
Rain Breaw (SunRain Productions)
Robin Barre (Palantir)
Todd Ross Nienkerk (Four Kitchens)

We would like to thank everyone who applied for a scholarship, and congratulate those of you who were selected. We hope to see everyone in Chicago for DrupalCon soon!

Comments

Congratulations to a great group!

Thanks to all of you for your great contributions, and so happy that you can come on a scholarship.

Thanks to the Drupal Association for making these fantastic scholarships available!

With 4,000 DrupalCon attendees

We can do scholarships for 100 people. We can certainly do better than twenty-one.

As this is a do-ocracy, i have no right to complain. I didn't do. But we should recognize as a community that this is a travesty. Yes, we should make sure first that everyone who has contributed greatly to Drupal and wants to attend gets to Chicago. We should be paying their travel and lodging and putting champaign there. (What is covered with these scholarships?) But we should *absolutely* look to bring new people as well, people for whom cost is a significant factor (which for Chicago and i'm sure for London is a lot of people). I don't know what to do (i can collect donations tax deductible but i don't have the scholarship list of course, nor can i offer appropriate publicity to people and companies who sponsor people), but people with ideas please let me know.

Congratulations to the scholarship winners! You are the folks we should be seeking out whether you apply or not (and i know Karoly did work making sure every person in MAINTAINERS.txt knew of the opportunity). There should be people who do not yet have a stellar contribution record given an opportunity also. I see no reason why we cannot offer assistance to most of the remaining 84.

The Do It Yourself approach is always good

Dave Hall is bringing universal unique IDs to Drupal entities, and making your Car Wash module if that's what you pay him for:

http://buyaline.drupalgardens.com

Solve two participation problems at once

Smaller and medium-sized shops feel cut out of the sponsorships of recent DrupalCons-- $4,000 entrance fee is pretty steep (even for a business like Social Contxt which is sponsoring Boston's Dojo group).

Looking in the Become a Sponsor prospectus i see this was offered-- but not highly publicized?

Scholarship Sponsor
FuLL-SCHoLArSHiP THAT WE NAME For You $1000
PArTiAL SCHoLArSHiP $500

(someone took advantage of the all-caps font used in the PDF...)

In this scholarship announcement no sponsor was named?

I think it could and can be opened up: let people take their applications public and let companies choose whom they sponsor.

I'm sorry, i should have gotten involved earlier, but scholarships for 21 core contributors is not where i thought the process would end for a conference that can costs $1,000 or more to attend (though i'm paying only the conference fee and crashing with people).

How much does our free lunch cost, by the way? I'd join a donate lunch fees to a scholarship fund movement!

I'm not really joking. Chicago Drupalistas and others leading this conference (not least Palantir) are doing a great job, and i would love to see the excellent transparency of DrupalConSF matched and raised, so don't get me wrong here— but if i see another $72,000 spent on coffee instead of on 72 interested Drupalistas without comfortable cash flow, i am going to feel sick.

DrupalCon Paris had local scholarships. At least make sure everyone active in the midwest Drupal community who wants to go gets in one way or another with a comped or reduced ticket.

Please.

The big picture: scholarships, budgets and DrupalCon success

I hear and appreciate your passion for scholarships.

All scholarship recipients receive a conference registration, ticket to the Field Museum party and an invitation to the Appreciation Dinner. Those soft costs are not deducted from the available pool of scholarship funds.

DrupalCon Chicago budgeted $20,000 for the direct costs of scholarships, which is consistent with what had been allocated in SF and CPH. For full scholarships these costs include cover air fare, transportation and hotel. You'll note that many of the full scholarship recipients are traveling in from abroad and the expenses associated with that travel are non-trivial.

In addition to the budgeted line item, we did create the ability to sponsor scholarships either partial or full. Megan Sanicki, the Drupal Association's Sponsor Coordinator, has done a great job of working with sponsors and making them aware of the offerings. While it did not get as much traction as we would have hoped, do not mistake that for lack of effort or interest on the part of the organizers or the Drupal Association. No sponsors opted to sponsor a scholarship, which is why none were named.

For DrupalCon Chicago, we offered speakers a $100 discount on their conference registration. Those whose badges had already been purchased or were covered under a sponsorship were encouraged to donate their discount toward more scholarships. In particular, we want to acknowledge and thank all the speakers (and their sponsoring organizations), who opted to donate their discounts to the scholarship fund:
Aaron Stanush (Four Kitchens)
Amy O’Malley (Palantir)
Ben Jeavons (Growing Venture Solutions)
Brandon Bowersox (OJCTech.com)
Colleen Carroll (Palantir)
David Needham (Chapter Three)
David Rothstein
Ezra Barnett Gildesgame (Growing Venture Solutions)
George DeMet (Palantir)
Grace Francisco (Microsoft)
Greg Knaddison (Growing Venture Solutions)
João Ventura (Trellon)
John Albin Wilkins (Palantir)
Ken Rickard (Palantir)
Kenny Silanskas (Acquia)
Kyle Cunningham (Trellon)
Larry Garfield (Palantir)
Lisa Rex (Growing Venture Solutions)
Matt Farina (Palantir)
Peter Wolanin (Acquia)
Rain Breaw (SunRain Productions)
Robin Barre (Palantir)
Todd Ross Nienkerk (Four Kitchens)

Their donations added $2300 to the scholarship budget, which allowed us to grant the partial scholarships that cover the hotel accommodation costs for those recipients.

It is inaccurate statement, but one often repeated, that SF spent $72,000 on coffee. That was their entire catering bill, and, while much of it was coffee, it also included lunches during training and other miscellaneous catering.

For DrupalCon Chicago, you absolutely will see more than $72,000 spent on catering, several times more, in fact. Our contract (like any hotel-oriented event) is predicated on a food and beverage spend, not on facilities costs, which is why lunch has to and will be included for Chicago. Coffee is also going to be provided because that is what people expect when they pay several hundred dollars to attend an international conference.

DrupalCon is not just a camp writ large. It is a major international Web conference for the designers, developers, users and evaluators of Drupal. There is a place in our ecosystem for low or no-cost camps and there is also a need for a high profile conference.

It is a very difficult balancing feat to create a conference that can scale (providing adequate wireless Internet and IPs for 2.5 devices per person!) to several thousand people, while retaining a very low ticket price. Even at $350 or $400 per person the ticket does not cover the cost of each person attending DrupalCon. We rely heavily on the generous underwriting of our sponsors.

It is important to the local team, as well as the Drupal Association, that DrupalCon be accessible, professional, community-centric and financially successful. DrupalCon North America provides the resources to fund the community's initiatives like the Drupal.org redesign and the Git Migration.

We understand that regardless of what we do not everyone will be able to attend in person and we're committed to making the content of the conference available online as quickly as possible, just as we've always done.

We're working very hard to make this event successful at all levels.

Thanks

I want to say thanks for the scholarship. This will be my first Drupal convention and I'm only getting to go because of it. Other than some donations here and there for my modules, and very, very rarely a paid freelance gig, I don't make money from Drupal. All the sites I do are either hobby or for charity and my modules I give away for free. I simply can't justify taking $1000 out of our family budget to go to a conference to learn more about a hobby. So thank you very much to the sponsors and everyone involved in making scholarships happen.

As to the catering costs mentioned above... I was involved in putting on a photography convention locally and was shocked at how much the hotel charges for things like coffee. And the real stickler is that you _must_ purchase from them. You can't just run to the store and buy coffee at a reasonable price. We ended up going without coffee because we just couldn't afford it and keep the ticket prices reasonable.

Michelle

Yes, but...

Thanks Tiffany,

May i note that the spent-on-coffee figure came from the organizers' own closing slides. Please do be more precise and more careful to explain why things cost what they do for the Chicago breakdown. Regardless, when more is spent on catering (even when the catering is subsidizing the convention center / hotel costs) than budgeted for scholarships, we have a problem. It's not your problem. It's a community problem.

And i don't think it reflects the actual priorities of the community, but rather, the ability to coordinate this tricky aspect of reaching the significant segment of Drupalistas who consider a world-class conference price-prohibitive-- at the same time as putting on a world-class conference.

Would it be possible for me to offer a Chicago-area applicant who did not get accepted a ticket?

Thanks,

ben

Not necessary

Accommodations have already been made for everyone local who applied for a scholarship and is available to attend.

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