DrupalCampPDX 2008

I'm a Drupal programmer and a co-founder of CraftySpace, a web development company in Eugene, OR. I started my career as a software developer creating desktop applications and web applications for Fortune 500 companies using proprietary technologies. In 2002, I created a custom content management system for SCORE, because there didn't appear to be any commercial or free systems at the time that could have been adapted to SCORE's needs. In 2005, I was excited to discover Drupal, and a year later found some partners to start CraftySpace, where I now get to work nearly full-time with Drupal. Over the last two years of running my first company, I've discovered that it takes a lot of time and energy to get a company off the ground, which hasn't left me with much time or energy to give back to the Drupal community. As CraftySpace starts to mature as a company, I'm looking forward to spending more time engaging with the Drupal community. I'm happy to be seeing so many new people discovering Drupal each year and helping to create such a vibrant community.

Andrew started working with Drupal back in 2005 when he was working at KPSU, Portland's college radio station and hasn't looked back. In 2006 he worked with Sam Keen and Eric Drechsel to start a Drupal group in Portland, at this point he does his best to remember to post the monthly reminders. Andrew's current role at Sticky building an internationalized, Drupal based website for a major sports apparel company based near Beaverton that can not be named leaves little time for him to maintain the audio, flickr, image, and station modules.

Andrew grew up an orphan in North Dakota, after the terrible Plone-Clone wars. He lost his entire tribe to a tragic accident involving a poorly written module that sent a steam-tank bezerk. He pledged to go to Washington DC to protest the government's relative inaction (they never knew about the war), but all the cars had been flattened, so he had to walk. He used a Joomla-based satellite system for guidance, but ended up in Portland instead, where he decided to stay. He swore that from that day on he was a Drupal guy, and then pledged to go to college and find a way to stay there as a student for as long as possible. He throws some of the best parties on campus, but he's always late and misses the best parts.

Ben Kaplan is a best-selling author, nationally syndicated newspaper columnist, and accidental web developer. He directs the Ben Kaplan Center for Educational Opportunity and has authored 12 best-selling books and CDs, including "How to Go to College Almost for Free" (HarperCollins Publishers), the leading book in the genre with more than 350,000 copies in print.

Now an award-winning public speaker and Harvard-trained economist, Kaplan delivers live presentations to audiences of more than 30,000 each year at high schools, colleges, corporations, and community venues worldwide. A regular guest expert for leading media outlets, he has been featured on more than 2,000 TV and radio programs, including appearances on "Oprah," NBC, CBS, ABC, CNN, Fox News Channel, National Public Radio, and the BBC.

Kaplan also writes the popular "Live 'n' Learn" newspaper column--a weekly education column that shows readers of every age how to maximize both traditional and unexpected learning opportunities at school, home, work, and in everyday life. Ben's column is syndicated to leading newspapers and magazines nationwide.

Kaplan became a Drupal enthusiast partially by accident: He stumbled on the wonderful world of open source web development while creating and deploying new websites in support of his books. Three years later, he manages his own Linux servers, delves into an increasing amount of PHP code, and proudly shouts, "If Drupal is wrong, I don't want to be right!"

After graduating from Seattle University in 2000 with a BA in Visual Arts, Brian began his professional career as a web developer and graphic designer. Under the guise of pairodime.design™, Brian has worked with numerous small businesses; helping them to develop branding, print collateral, internet presence, e-commerce, brick and mortar integration and e-marketing campaigns.

According to myth, Brian began building an empire made of solid gold in the shape of large pyramids. In fact, many believe that the treasure of lost gold is somewhere in this room. If you find it, we ask that you kindly return it to the administration office just down the hall and to the right.

For further information, please Google: portland graphic design – If you do in fact meet Brian in person – “tell em Large Marge sent ya.”

Danton Mendell (Dan Mendell) is the President and CEO of NeutralSpace, a new company whose focus is experimenting with and deploying collaborative technologies. One of NeutralSpace's first endeavours will be to focus on building content and structure in both ICANNWiki and ICANNBlog so that they may become self sustainable industry resources.

He comes to ICANNwiki from emark Solutions, a B2B Outreach and Marketing firm. Before that, he was Founder and President of 1-800 Support, a leading networking technology and ultimately CRM centered call center and outsourcing company which was acquired in August of 2000 by an investment form and ultimately sold to ACS.

Before founding 1-800-Support, Mr. Mendell spent 6 years with a technology training and netwroking company called Pacific Dataware as its President and CEO, 2 years with Intel Corporation as a Senior Systems Emgineer, and 2 years with the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory designing diagnostics and internetworking for a major fusion energy experiment.

Mr. Mendell holds a BSEE from Clarkson University and MSEE from the University of California at Santa Barbara, and an MBA from the school of hard knocks. Mr. Mendell is also an avid snow skier, water skier, certified professional scuba diver, and a real nice guy.

Dan's diverse web experience includes freelancing for small businesses and nonprofits, building and maintaining online courses and support web sites for Syracuse University, and building news and entertainment sites for a radio company. Dan's enthusiasm for the web is equaled only by his passion for putting the needs of users first. He studied information architecture, search engine design, and usability, among many other web-related topics, while completing his master of science degree at the Syracuse University School of Information Studies.

David Price is a Managing-Partner of OYOAHA, a strategic design firm specializing in Internet Technology and Internet Culture. An academically trained mechanical and bio-medical engineer with advanced studies in philosophy and theology, David has always been interested in knowledge theory, particularly the study of sign and symbol as they relate to language and communication. Starting in 2001, David managed the development of an e-commerce application and fulfillment process that eventually generated gross annual revenue exceeding one million dollars. A move to Portland, Oregon in 2004 provided a brief freelancing and consulting career before David became a Managing-Partner for OYOAHA. He now directs strategy and development for OYOAHA while maintaining a personal, active involvement in Portland's music culture as well as a small number of entrepreneurial business endeavors.

Via OYOAHA, David has been developing with and contributing to the open source Drupal CMS framework since late 2006, which is respectively a short amount of time and means you should take everything he says with a grain of salt (regardless of how convincing he may seem).

Lastly, David is one of many on the small team that has planned and organized Drupal Camp PDX 2008.

I'm a South African with 20 years in programming and IT -- over twelve of them in the USA -- who has only recently discovered Open Source. Now I'm an evangelist. I've been doing Drupal less than a year and PHP for a couple of years. My past experience helps me immensely in many ways, but is a hindrance in others as I worked with proprietary software on giant systems. I'm adapting quite nicely and loving the Portland lifestyle and Tech groups (I only moved here about 2 years ago).

I'm big on helping others. I have helped run many conventions in the past and managed to get myself involved running DrupalCampPDX 2008.

Jenni started designing web sites in 1997 "by hand" before switching to Drupal in 2003. Currently Jenni is self-employed, working from her home in Gresham to create sites for political groups and organizations, campaigns, non-profits and small businesses using Drupal and CiviCRM.

This election cycle she has worked on sites for campaigns from Portland City Council (www.nickfish2008.com), to state legislature (www.friendsofcyreena.com), to U.S. Senate (Novick for U.S. Senate). She also worked to convert static html sites to Drupal sites for several other candidates.

Jenni's professional background includes working as a reporter and managing editor for community newspapers, in a Congressional office, and for political campaigns. Since getting involved in politics in 1990, Jenni has put in thousands of hours on campaigns, building party organizations, and getting people elected. This experience has helped to drive the focus and track that Jenni takes when building activism web sites.

Web site: www.nu-look.net

Jerry Chrisman is a creative media producer with extensive experience in graphic, print, and environmental design as well as web and digital media development. Earning a Bachelor of Arts Degree in 1993, Chrisman graduated with honors from the University of Houston Honors College.

After graduation, Chrisman performed a two year design internship at The Douglas|Group, an international environmental design firm in Houston, Texas. He was subsequently hired on staff as a junior designer.

Desiring milder summers, Chrisman relocated to Portland, Oregon in 1996 working as an Art Director and Media Producer with two Portland firms, Sapient Health Network and Oak Tree Publications. In 1998 Mr. Chrisman struck out on his own and established Jerry Chrisman Design.

With clients ranging from small business owners to Fortune 500 companies, Chrisman accumulated a diverse and robust client base.

Focusing further on digital media production, Chrisman expanded the company and became Grip Media in 2001, adding programmers, audio engineers, and copy editors to staff in addition to an already talented group of designers.

Chrisman has worked extensively with Drupal, finding it to be the perfect tool for designers to get more done without the aid of programmers.

Lev Tsypin has twelve years of experience in the Internet field. In the 1990's he worked as a consultant with Computer Sciences Corporation (CSC) and Inforte Corporation in Chicago. Before venturing out on his own, he served as the Director of Programming at Pop Art, Inc. in Portland, OR. In addition to several side businesses, Lev now operates as a web developer and Internet consultant under the guise of Level Online Strategy.

He began working with Drupal over a year ago on a site for the Girl Scouts. As a consultant, the initial draw of Drupal were the features and value that could be provided with minimal custom development for clients. As he became more familiar with Drupal, however, it's power as a development platform also became clear and he is working on several web apps based on it including http://momhub.com and http://greenrenter.com.

Matt Westgate is Lullabot's co-founder. He graduated from Iowa State University in Computer Mediated Technologies, a degree program he literally built from the ground up to focus on the emerging field of web applications and information architecture. Matt enjoys teaching and has given presentations and workshops on many different facets of the web including Implementing RSS, Using Drupal as an E-commerce Platform and Understanding the Drupal APIs.
Matt is an Internet enthusiast and web developer who appreciates how easy the web makes his life, and he strives to empower others to do the same. He's a proponent of open source software and a core developer of the Drupal project. He was also the original author of the Drupal ecommerce package which received national acclaim. Matt recently finished the book "The Professional Developers Guide to Drupal".

When Matt isn't geeking out, he enjoys being outdoors running, jumping, climbing, pretty much anything active. Matt also maintains a daily sitting meditation practice and is studying to become a Big Mind faciliator.

Matt lives in Oregon with his wife, Cori, along with 2 of the most docile ferrets you'll ever meet. More information about Matt at his personal weblog.

Michael’s pursuit of excellence, and attention to detail is what has turned his hobbies into careers. First it was with Audio Engineering for live events, which eventually provided the extra time he needed to work on his first love; software. It was during an attempt to improve his blog that Michael started with Drupal three years ago. Since then he has continued to master PHP, the Drupal APIs, maintain modules on drupal.org, and overall become a part of the Drupal and web-development community, and now is bringing that experience full circle with his position at Open Sourcery.

Mike has spent over 10 years working on the web in nearly every capacity; information architect, designer, developer and manager. After a short stint at an educational startup in Boston, Mike found him self at the public broadcasting station WGBH. Here he worked as the lead web designer for the American Experience history series designing diverse web sites for such topics as “Tupperware”, “Seabiscuit” and “Chicago”.

Returning home to Portland gave Mike a chance to try something new, namely Drupal. As the only web person at a local health care company, he developed a comprehensive intranet for over 1100 employees with Drupal.

Mike is currently with the Open Source Technology Center at Intel where he is redesigning how the many open source projects they run will be powered by Drupal.

Philippe Blanc is the Founder and a Managing-Partner of OYOAHA, a strategic design firm specializing in Internet Technology and Internet Culture originally launched in France in 1998. Trained as a fine artist in Nice, France, Philippe's focus in computer and digital art influenced his interest in programming, which eventually lead to full-time Java software engineering. He continued his art career as well, which then included shows in New York, Germany, San Antonio, and Portland, Oregon, where he now resides.

OYOAHA has developed and released two Java based open source projects ("Look and Feel" and "Softlime"; look and feel applet and 3-D rendering applet, respectively), which were both well received and implemented by the Java community. Since late 2006, Philippe shifted his open source development focus toward Drupal and, when not overwhelmed with client projects, supports three UI and Display focused modules: GWT, Liquid Layout, and the CSS & JS Injection module. His art practice continues as well with a number of shows planned for 2008.

Roger Leigh has worked as a graphic artist, animator, technical writer, videographer and programmer since 1985. He was a founding partner and the president of iExpert, a Connecticut company that developed a pioneering Internet content management system (CMS) and served the Fortune 100 Human Resources market.

After riding the roller coaster of Internet startups, Roger moved to Portland in 2001 to find a more laid-back lifestyle. He now works on various charities and creative endeavors. He uses Drupal on several nonprofit or educational websites, including KBOO Community Radio, CNRG Portland, Poetry Northwest, and eOrganic, a project by the horticultural department of OSU. With his wife Lani Jo, he has produced several documentary features, including 'Acting Out', which recently was an official entry in Docfest Stratford in Ontario.

Theresa is a designer who has worked in the corporate world -- even a stint at Lucas Arts -- before moving to Portland. After three years at the interactive firm Curiosity Group, she decided to start her own company, Pridemore Design which is three years old and still growing.

Theresa specializes in both print and web design, creating identities for small businesses and organizations. Taking client and business personality, target markets, and user experience into consideration, she creates the logos, image and web presence that best reflect the client.

She has created a number of Drupal theme designs for other Drupallers, focusing on creating easy-to-navigate sites that make the most of the Drupal infrastructure without "looking like Drupal". Some sites she has worked on include Harlem Success Academy and Fairy Magic Mail.

Theresa is a designer first and foremost, but also a "Jack (Jacqueline?) of all Trades". Her skills include photography, film, dry pastels, bookmaking, digital illustration, and fiction writing.

Theresa designed the logos for DrupalCampPDX2008 and the PDX Drupal Users' Group, and also the buttons and t-shirts you'll find at the con.