Nick, Teaching in the Old Bakery at Roel Guldemond's House, Ossendrecht

Nick, Teaching in the Old Bakery at Roel Guldemond's House, Ossendrecht

Roel and Danielle Roel and Danielle Gera, making nice food fo us Gera, making nice food fo us Roel, Roland, and Henk Roel, Roland, and Henk

Over the weekend, Nick Blundell traveled to Ossendrecht, The Netherlands, to teach budding open source developers how to develop powerful websites using the Drupal website framework in a series of hands-on workshops. illuminate iCT specialise in the development of Drupal websites in the for UK non-profit and community sector and were delighted to participate in this event after an invitation from Roel Guldemond, who spotted Illuminate ICT at a workshop of the DrupalCon 2007, Barcelona.

For illuminate iCT, this event marks the start of a drive to improve access of the sector to high-quality, cost-efficient open source software through sector-driven open source development by the nurturing of talented, sector-oriented open source developers. In particular, Nick Blundell (himself a passionate open source developer) is now developing a series of introductory and specialist practical open source software development courses for potential open source developers. People often forget that, by its nature, open software is easily evolved by the people that use it, either through direct development or feature requests and bug reports.

A wide variety of students attended the workshops from (Belgium, Holland, China), some with expertise in other areas of software development and others who simply wanted to find out more about the possibilities of open source software. The close contact of teachers and students, and relaxing atmosphere (sleeping in tee-pees), allowed the students to quickly grasp the inner workings of Drupal so that, by the end of the weekend, they were able to customise the powerful website framework to suit their specific needs, and more importantly, they learned how to break down and solve problems from the experienced teachers.

See Toon's blog of the event here .