Find us at Stanford Drupal Camp 2015!

We are super excited to be sponsoring and participating another year at Stanford Drupal Camp – the awesome event that brings together Drupalistas from the Bay Area and the University. Check out our sessions and stop by the Four Kitchens booth for stickers and pencils! There’s also a limited number of Four Kittens t-shirts up for grabs!

##Creating a culture of empowerment

Todd Ross Nienkerk

Come learn why empowerment is the foundation of all successful teams and demonstrate how the open-source philosophy as modeled by the Drupal community can be applied to organizational culture.

What is empowerment? Why does it matter? How can an organization create a culture of empowerment?

The guiding principles of empowerment:

1. Build an organization you would want to work for.
2. Give people control over their destiny.
3. Make trust the center of your culture.

How to cultivate empowerment:

1. Personal brands. You shouldn’t be afraid that people will leave. If you’re afraid people will become “too good,” then you’re not offering something they want — and you know it.
2. Go virtual. Allow your team the flexibility to work from home — or anywhere in the world.
3. Adopt agile methodologies. Allow teams to self-organize around projects and problems.
4. And much, much more…

##The Future of the CMS

Todd Ross Nienkerk

We need to rethink what we mean by “website,” the purpose of a CMS, and the role of the designer when architecting a web system. We will discuss:

1. The tension between a design and a CMS. Should your design be optimized for your CMS? Or should you modify your CMS to achieve your design? In other words, are you walking the dog, or is the dog walking you?
2. “Headless Drupal”: Drupal as a backend with alternate frontends. Drupal’s theming layer is difficult to master and expensive to upgrade between major releases. We will discuss how the frontend and backend can be decoupled to provide better experiences for users, developers, and designers alike.
3. The future of the CMS and how you can “future proof” your web project and process. For example, we will discuss when a CMS should be “decoupled” so that the frontend and backend are entirely separate.
4. The role of designers in a web project. Drupal’s theme layer is very flexible and can accommodate just about any design. It’s important for designers to remember, however, that they’re not really creating a page — they’re building a complete system to house the all of the site’s content and functionality.