The people from Indymedia and Quadrupal are organizing a Belgian Drupal Summerschool this month, an idea that emerged from the Belgian Drupal User Group meetings.

The workshop, entitled "I installed Drupal. What's next?", aims at beginning Drupal developers and end-users and covers all the Drupal basics such as installing modules and themes, setting permissions, working with nodes and cck, ...

Participants are asked a modest contribution fee which will be entirely donated to the Drupal Association.

A big thanks to the organizers for promoting and teaching Drupal in Belgium, and for supporting the Drupal Association!

From drupal.org:

The Drupal Association wants you to be informed about what is happening, and welcomes any feedback or suggestions you may have to help Drupal flourish. In addition to the official Association announcements that you can find on the front page of the Drupal Association site we are glad to announce the Drupal Association Planet.

Association-related blog posts made by Permanent Members of the Drupal Association will keep you up-to-date about the most recent developments. We are committed to make sure that all relevant comments to these blog posts will reach the Board of Directors or the General Assembly.

We just had our 200th registrant signing up for DrupalCon Barcelona. This is great news, and I'm sure a lot of other people are planning on joining us as well.

We have a great location with plenty of space, so that shouldn't be a problem. However, keep in mind that La Mercè, a huge yearly Barcelona street festival, is being held during the weekend of DrupalCon. This is definitely an extra reason to visit Barcelona in September, but it also causes the accomodation to become rather scarce and pricy the more the date approaches. Therefore, if you want to attend the best DrupalCon ever and you didn't register yet, now is the time to act! Make sure not only to create an account at barcelona2007.drupalcon.org but to complete the whole registration process and to pay the registration fee of 50 euro.

We're also still looking for people wanting to give a presentation, so if there's anything Drupal you'd like to talk about, just login to the DrupalCon website and click the 'create content' link. Sessions range from the beginner to the die hard programmer level so there's definitely a place for your ideas!

In these comments, the organization of a Drupal theme contest came up again. This idea has been discussed many times before. I promised to communicate more about what the Drupal Association is doing, so I can tell you that a theme contest has been discussed a few times already within the General Assembly.

Actually, as a Permanent Member, Earl Miles wrote a detailed proposal for such a contest. The Association was discussing some of the implementation details, but the project has been delayed a bit because more pressing issues, such as organizing DrupalCon Barcelona, researching a sound membership structure, and tackling the drupal.org infrastructure had to be addressed first.

So, I expect the theme contest idea to be discussed again in the near future.

A couple of weeks ago I registered driesknapen.net primarily with the idea to finally have an e-mail address that's independent of both my ISP and current workplace. However, some people convinced me to start a blog here as well - an idea I'd been playing with for a while anyway.

First of all, I intend to use this webspace to post regular updates on my work as a Board Member of the Drupal Association. A lot of stuff is going on in the Drupal ecosystem, and the Drupal Association plays an increasingly important role in some aspects thereof, although this may not always be as clear as it should be to the Drupal community. Communicating what I'm doing will hopefully be a contribution to that.

Time permitting, I'd love to write about the other things in life I care about as well, such as photography, science and my family.

So, welcome!