Update, August 20: After some more sponsors have come forward (thank you!), Drupalcon Szeged now needs about €10,000 of new sponsorship to meet costs.

Looking for a way to show your support for Drupal? Easy: sponsor the upcoming European Drupalcon. You'll be helping to fund critically important work--and increasing your exposure and profile in the community at the same time.

Drupalcon sponsorship: mainstay of the Drupal Association

Drupalcon is the single largest source of revenue for the Drupal Association, the non-profit that supports Drupal. Sponsorship revenues make it possible for us to tackle key Association priorities, from protecting the legal integrity of the Drupal codebase to improving the infrastructure driving drupal.org.

Revenue from past Drupalcons is directly funding pressing projects like our top priority this year: improving the drupal.org website. Sponsoring Drupalcon is a direct and concrete way to financially support the Association's work.

Profile and Benefits

Sponsoring Drupalcon is not just a way to support important work promoting the Drupal platform. It's also an opportunity for exposure and profile in the Drupal community.

The Drupal Association is pleased to announce the selection of a design partner in its Drupal.org redesign efforts. Through a competitive process, UK-based Mark Boulton Design Ltd. was selected. Their proposal stood out because of their work on Coolspotters and the upcoming Standaard.be (launching Q4 2008), their agile design approach and their highly-experienced project team including Mark Boulton as Creative Director and project lead, Leisa Reichelt as Information Architect & UX Research and Carolyn Wood as Content Strategist.

South by Southwest (SXSW) is an annual festival and conference held every spring in Austin, Texas, dedicated to bringing together creative indviduals from around the world for a week-long celebration of music, film, and interactive technology. The interactive portion of the festival features over 150 panel discussions on cutting-edge topics in the new media industry and culture, as well as a trade show, Web Awards Competition, video game tournament, and some great after-parties.

Not only was the main SXSW Web site recently redesigned and relaunched in Drupal, but there are a number of really great Drupal-related panel proposals suggested for the interactive festival, which which will be held March 13-17, 2009. We need your help to make sure that Drupal is well-represented at SXSW because it offers an opportunity to reach out to a lot of new people who are not part of the traditional developer community. This past spring's festival included a Content Management System Roundup panel with George DeMet and Tiffany Farriss of Palantir and Jeff Eaton of Lullabot that attracted more attendees than all of Drupalcon Boston.

You have the opportunity to register your support for these proposals by going to the Interactive Festival Panel Picker, which is a Web site that allows you to review, vote for, and comment on all of the more than 1200 panel proposals that were submitted. The festival's organizers take feedback from this site into account when making their decisions for which panels are included in the final program. You can create an account and register your opinions regardless of whether you're planning to attend or not. The Panel Picker will be open until August 29, and the final panel selections will be announced starting in October.

If you’re interested in having Drupal represented at SXSW, providing positive feedback for these session proposals is a great and easy way to show your support:

There has been a lot of work going on in the Docs team lately and we want to share that with the larger community. The biggest news that will impact everyone is that we are in the process of creating a new top-level handbook to be added to drupal.org, called "Getting Involved." It will be listed along with the other handbooks on the main Documentation landing page as well as be the new target for the Contribute tab. We have also been working on other plans and ideas to collaborate on the docs. Here is a run down of the cool stuff we have to shout about.

I've been working with Gábor for almost 5 years. First as a contributor to Drupal, next as my Drupal 6 co-maintainer, and more recently as a co-worker at Acquia. Yesterday, Gábor got married, so needless to say, a number of us traveled to Hungary to attend his wedding. In the picture below, you can see some of the Drupal people that were present.