Just a few years ago in 2009, Puppet Labs hosted their first Camp around Puppet. That camp had about 60 people in San Francisco, and I was lucky enough to be one of them. At the time, 60 people felt like nearly the entire community using Puppet. We learned a couple things at that conference.

1. The Puppet Community was really smart and amazing.
2. Puppet Camp was just as much about operations as Puppet.

In 2010, we expanded to Europe and had 80 people in attendance, then 100 in 2010 for Puppet Camp North America. In 2011, we ramped up with a European camp with 200 people, plus the first PuppetConf with 300+ people in Portland, OR.

PuppetConf was a huge success, and we are doing it again this year in San Francisco. Outside of PuppetConf, camps have gone viral on the ground. When a community comes together, we’ve been trying to respond by creating regional camps. We’ve had camps thus far in Atlanta, Edinburgh, Stockholm, Amsterdam, New York, Los Angeles. We’ve got upcoming camps in Dublin, Geneva, Chicago, Oslo, Nuremberg, Sydney and Kuala Lumpur open for registration. There are even more camps we are considering doing later in the year. Each of our camps this year have had at least 100 people, with Stockholm topping out at 180.

We love these camps, and they are largely community-driven. When a community rallies around a location, Puppet Labs tries to respond with getting people on the ground and sharing stories.

By the end of the year, we anticipate more than 3,000 system administrators will have been to Puppet event. This doesn’t count the growing numbers of Puppet User Groups, Puppet Hack events, Triage-a-thon participants, and community contributors.

We are still looking for speakers for the several of the upcoming camps, as well as PuppetConf. Speaking at PuppetConf is up, and you can submit a talk on the website. For camps you can email stahnma@puppetlabs.com or jose@puppetlabs.com and we’ll try to get things set up.

Thanks for an awesome experience thus far with our community events, and we look forward to seeing you at one soon.

Learn More

• Videos from PuppetConf 2011
• Call for Speakers PuppetConf 2012
• Puppet Camp Registration

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