Summary: David Bishop from NinetyOne Consulting and I sat down to chat at Drupal Camp Bristol 2015. Our conversation essentially covers three main topics: The sailing charity, Bart's Bash, invites you for a day out on the water in Barcelona harbor on September 20th! If you are coming to Barcelona for DrupalCon, come early. Contact David, who is kindly coordinating this and matching people with boats. Bart's Bash is an amazing charity in honor of a respected British Olympian, Andrew "Bart" Simpson, who died young in a tragic sailing accident. While organizing what they thought would be a small fundraising effort, the charity singlehandedly kicked off a new movement and inspired a new, international movement and community in sailing. More on this in the podcast audio! A great Drupal scalability and functionality story: David Bishop built the small, 2-page brochure site to support the initial funding effort and then ended up building it out to include mapping, community sign-ups and groups, real-time data-ingestion and -processing. In 2014, the site collected sign-ups and processed race data for 30,000 sailors in 17,000 boats from around the world - wow! More on this below ... Along the way, we talk about creating a new handicap system in international sailing and how Drupal got Bart's Bash into the Guinness Book of World Records. What a show! The path from zero to huge for BartsBash.com When I asked him why he's stuck with Drupal as his technology of choice, David said, "It's a platform that I have not found any project I haven't been able to build on yet." The website for Bart's Bash is a case in point. Build a one-page site for maybe 50 sailing clubs to honor Andrew Simpson and raise 10,000 pounds as part of their usual Sunday races (spoiler: they ended up collecting £366,391.95). In stead, within 2 weeks, 350 sailing clubs from around the world wanted to take part in the event. Added maps - During the year the event was being organized, 750 sailing clubs ended up being involved on the day. Added the Openlayers Module to create maps of the participants around the world, "and that was a really easy thing to plug in." Built participant sign-up and integrated JustGiving fundraising. Thousands of sign-ups pour in. "That was a big step. We built an online process for people to go through a six page sign-up where they gave us the information: what boat they were going to be sailing, they could sign up for a JustGiving fundraising page within the sign-up process. And the sign-ups started to come in. And we were starting to get the picture that this was going to be a busy and a popular site. As we got nearer the event, we passed a few thousand people signing up quite quickly." Added user-created sailing club pages to site. Sliced and diced the data with Views to show how big the event was becoming. - "There were two strong community-engaging tools that we used. One was the ability to create this directory of all these sailing clubs, which didn't exist before we created it. Secondly, it was how we used Drupal and lots and lots of break-downs of Views to show lots of top tens of different bloat classes in different countries to show the volume of people signing up ... so that you could see this momentum. Build handicapping and results calculation system in Drupal - Given that Bart's Bash was ostensibly a race, participants wanted to know know how they did. The organizers even created a new, international multi-class boats handicapping system, the "Bart Number", to make this happen. "In Drupal we had two challenges: One was collecting the results from all these sailing clubs. Sailing clubs traditionally work with CSV files. They were happy with that, but we realized on the day that actually asking 750 different teams to create a CSV file to one standard was problematic :-) ... They all uploaded their own data and...
