Dries Buytaert

When I visited Brazil in 2011, I was so impressed by the Latin American Drupal community and how active and passionate the people are. The region is fun and beautiful, with some of the most amazing sites I have seen anywhere in the world. It also happens to be a strategic region for the project.

Latin American community members are doing their part to grow the project and the Drupal community. In 2014, the region hosted 19 Global Training Day events to recruit newcomers, and community leaders coordinated many Drupal camps to help convert those new Drupal users into skilled talent. Members of the Latin American community help promote Drupal at local technology and Open Source events, visiting events like FISL (7,000+ participants), Consegi (5,000+ participants) and Latinoware (4,500+ participants).

You can see the results of all the hard work in the growth of the Latin American Drupal business ecosystem. The region has a huge number of talented developers working at agencies large and small. When they aren't creating great Drupal websites like the one for the Rio 2016 Olympics, they are contributing code back to the project. For example, during our recent Global Sprint Weekend, communities in Bolivia, Colombia, Costa Rica, and Nicaragua participated and made valuable contributions.

The community has also been instrumental in translation efforts. On localize.drupal.org, the top translation is Spanish with 500 contributors, and a significant portion of those contributors come from the Latin America region. Community members are also investing time and energy translating Drupal educational videos, conducting camps in Spanish, and even publishing a Drupal magazine in Spanish. All of these efforts lower the barrier to entry for Spanish speakers, which is incredibly important because Spanish is one of the top spoken languages in the world. While the official language of the Drupal project is English, there can be a language divide for newcomers who primarily speak other languages.

Last but not least, I am excited that we are bringing DrupalCon to Latin America next week. This is the fruit of many hours spent by passionate volunteers in the Latin American local communities, working together with the Drupal Association to figure out how to make a DrupalCon happen in this part of the world. At every DrupalCon we have had so far, we have seen an increase in energy for the project and a bump in engagement. Come for the software, stay for the community! Hasta pronto!