DrupalCamps are essential events for Drupal communities in each country. It is with great enthusiasm that we sponsored and participated in the latest DrupalCamp, organized by the Drupal France association in Rennes, from March 28th to 30th, 2024. This event brought together 250 digital enthusiasts, providing a platform for exchange and sharing on various crucial topics such as responsible digital practices, accessibility, and integrated design systems within Drupal.
A rich program filled with discoveries and innovations.
Over the first two days, participants attended a variety of conferences covering a wide range of levels and topics, followed by a Saturday dedicated to contribution. This day allowed us to collaborate with the most passionate individuals in the French community to advance Drupal (reflection on the impact of the removal of the Statistics module from the Drupal 11 core, translations, launching new initiatives within the UI Suite initiative).
Let's also applaud a very commendable initiative for discovering Drupal with an initiation session spanning the first day, which enabled new users to quickly achieve autonomy, facilitating their immersion into Drupal's powerful features.
The success of such an event reinforces Drupal's position as an essential solution for developers and businesses looking to optimize their digital presence.
Focus on Inclusion and Accessibility
While other articles on our site will focus on Drupal-specific sessions, I wanted to share my interest in the morning plenary of the first day: "From Observer to Responsible Actor: Addressing the Impact of Racial Biases in User Experience," skillfully and enthusiastically led by Marcy Charollois.
Numerous examples were discussed regarding the presence of racial biases in digital technologies, with very concrete cases such as the impact of skin color or traditional tattoos on facial recognition in phones or the avoidance capability of autonomous vehicles. However, it was also emphasized that a sense of exclusion can manifest in much more insidious ways among users, stemming from choices of images, colors, or editorial biases in user interfaces. This broadened the inclusion issue to gender and disability situations.
I believe that this plenary resonated with an audience who found themes close to the values upheld by open-source software but who may unconsciously succumb to cultural biases. It is everyone's duty to take a step back on these issues.
It certainly resonated at Smile where, navigating for over 30 years within the Open Source ecosystem, we have, since last year, brought together a wide range of expertise within our Responsible Digital offering which follows a holistic approach addressing topics such as eco-design, low-carbon architectures, or, closer to Marcy's conference, accessibility and content writing optimized from a SEO and inclusion standpoint.
The video recording of the plenary as well as other sessions will soon be available on the Drupal France association's YouTube channel, thus allowing for wider dissemination of the knowledge shared during this event.
Our Ongoing Engagement with Drupal
At Smile, our active participation in DrupalCamps organized by Drupal France goes beyond sponsorship. We also had the pleasure of speaking at no fewer than four conferences. It was also an opportunity for us to officially announce the sharing of Sobki on drupal.org, a Drupal installation profile allowing non-technical users to easily harness the power of Drupal through a no-code and design system approach.
If you want to learn more about this project stemming from our R&D efforts, for which we offer end-to-end support, I invite you to discover our article on Sobki. Whether it's about this project or to learn more about our Responsible Digital offering, feel free to contact us.
