Sometime last year, a local Drupalist named Kelly Albrecht reached out to me. He had this idea that came out of his own personal experiences, and was further inspired by NYC Camp and Forest Mars (Forest, of course, coined the acronym NERDS). The first-ever NERD (New England Regional Developers) Summit will be held at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, September 12-14, 2014. Its seed was, in part, the Western Mass Drupal Camp. But in the interests of making Drupal better, NERDS has a bigger mission and a bigger tent.

In starting NERDS, Kelly’s “a-ha!” moment came when he was having trouble finding good developers to hire at Last Call Media. He found an amazing new addition to his development team, but she had to be urged to apply for the job because she assumed she wasn’t good enough. Now she’s one of his best developers. All of this caused him to wonder: How many more closeted tech geeks, who are usually marginalized in our industry for various reasons, could be encouraged to learn the skills they need to be great web professionals?

Kelly was also thinking about all the other things going on right now in Drupal, and in other open source communities. We all know the incredibly important post by Larry Garfield, Getting off the island. Drupal is working hard to cross-pollinate with other open source technologies. I like to call that “tech diversity”. We also know that the Drupal community is working hard to increase human diversity in its community as well. And there is increasing awareness that diversity in open source, and in tech in general, will help make our technologies, our companies, and our working lives better.

As the NERDS steering committee came together to start talking, a clear vision started to form. What if we put a huge effort into making a richer, more diverse talent pool in New England? What if we put on a free, welcoming, friendly, annual conference, where people could come together to learn with and from peers?  Would that start to shift things for the better? What if we also brought Drupal, Wordpress, general web development, UX strategists, Rubyists, Python coders, hackers, and everyone together for this event, so that we could get off our islands and out of our silos and grow our communities? Would these connections then help spur momentum for ongoing collaborative, informal learning and business networking throughout the rest of the year?

So those are the main ideas behind NERDS. Kelly, myself, and a great bunch of volunteers are working to help make it a reality. Even though we’re new and a little disorganized, we’ve got momentum, passion, and the willingness to experiment and iterate. If being part of this idea appeals to you, please consider submitting a session by 8/15, volunteering to do planning tasks now or event tasks on the day(s) of the conference, or joining Acquia, Pantheon, and others in sponsoring the conference (there are many levels and options, and you can get mad karma points for sponsoring childcare). Tomorrow’s richer, better, more diverse open source communities will thank you.

NERDS in a Nutshell

• NERDS is a FREE collaborative learning conference. Yes, free. It you want a t-shirt with our awesome logo and meal tickets, you can pay more. But you don’t have to. Either way, if you want to attend, you must register to let us know you’re coming.
• Friday is a learning day for beginners and for experienced devs who want to level up and try new things (Susan Buck of thewc.co, keynote); Saturday is the main sessions day (Ashe Dryden, keynote); Sunday is sprinting day and a hackathon (Damien McKenna, keynote).
• Have kids? We will have childcare for ages 0-10, and a youth Scratch and maker track. Really.
• NERDS is a brand new, volunteer-run, sponsor-funded experiment. There’s already much momentum and over 50 excellent proposed sessions. It’s happening, and we need sponsors, volunteers to help before and during the conference, and we’re still accepting sessions until 8/15 if you’d like to submit something.