Look out Drupalcon, here comes BADCamp.

Drupalcons have always been the big ticket events in the Drupal community. There are typically two Drupalcons per year, one in North America, and one in Europe. Drupal Camps on the other hand, have always been somewhat less of an attraction for larger audiences, as they tend to have a limited global reach. But times are changing, and as "Drupal's reach expands":http://www.cmswire.com/cms/customer-experience/the-future-of-drupal-sustaining-effective-growth-016533.php and their user group grows, the Camps are becoming bigger and bigger each year. "BADCamp 2012":http://2012.badcamp.net/ was a well oiled machine. There were 1652 registered attendees, a couple hundred more registrants than last years BADCamp, and only a couple hundred shy of the 2012 Drupalcon in Munich. With the increase in attendance and the addition of new summits, it looks like BADCamp is slowly starting to bridge the Drupalcon gap. The main reason why this years BADCamp was such a success was the addition of five new pre-conference summits, giving them 8 in total. These summits allow for likeminded individuals, business owners, and prospects to collaborate, learn, discuss, and share on topics pertaining to their specific interests and industry. With the summits, individuals have access to a full day of targeted learning as opposed to a brief 45 minute presentation during the weekend. No longer is BADCamp just a weekend event, it's now a four-day learning experience. The summits from this year were: "Mobile Drupal Summit":http://2012.badcamp.net/program/mobile-summit, "Drupal Product Summit":http://2012.badcamp.net/program/product-summit, "Drupal Business Owners Summit":http://2012.badcamp.net/program/drupal-business-owners-summit, "Drupal Devops Summit":http://2012.badcamp.net/program/drupal-devops-summit, "Drupal UI / UX Summit":http://2012.badcamp.net/program/ui-ux-summit, "Core Developer Summit":http://2012.badcamp.net/program/core-developer-summit, "Higher Education Summit":http://2012.badcamp.net/program/higher-education-summit, and "Drupal Non-Profit Summit":http://2012.badcamp.net/program/non-profit-summit. This year we saw BADCamp solidify its spot as a community leader while effectively scaling and making it a must-do event for all Drupalers. ImageX Media was a sponsor for the Drupal Business Owners Summit. "Glenn Hilton":http://imagexmedia.com/glenn, the CEO, spoke on "How to Recruit and Retain Top Talent":http://2012.badcamp.net/program/drupal-business-owners-summit. His discussion covered topics like, where to scout talent, how to implement strategies to retain personnel, and retention tools. ImageX Media also sponsored the Higher Education Summit where "Kristin Boden-MacKay":http://www.linkedin.com/in/kbm13 from "Portland State University (PSU)":http://www.pdx.edu/ presented on her web services implementation strategies and how "OpenEDU":http://imagexmedia.com/openedu has helped PSU reach their online "goals and objectives":http://imagexmedia.com/project/portland-state-university. Kristin had a very compelling story and history that piqued the interests of the Higher Education audience. She drew on examples of ImageX Media's custom built simple content syndication system and the rapid site deployment feature that are both currently running on "pdx.edu":http://www.pdx.edu/. Though there were many exciting presentations at Badcamp this year, probably two of the most popular with the ImageX Media team was the great introduction to "Vagrant":http://www.slideshare.net/craigmceldowney/vagrantoverview and what it can do to simplify & enhance developer processes by Craig McEldowney. Also, the really interesting insight into what enterprise-scale architecture looks like and what needs to be considered in maintaining such architecture by Barry Jaspan talking about "Acquia Cloud's infrastructure testing.":https://github.com/bjaspan/testing-infrastructure As the state of the community constantly changes and grows while adapting to the demands of the market, it is great to see the individuals and businesses that constitute the community continue to push the envelope and make events like BADCamp 2012 the best Camp yet.