Posted by robknight on July 31, 2008 at 5:01am
Hello everyone,
We seem to have a building Drupal community by the beach here in Santa Cruz as well as on campus at UC Santa Cruz. We're still forming, so we aren't very big yet (~20-30 Drupalers spread throughout SC).
My question is, should we call this group (GDO/bay-area) home and join in under the "Bay Area" umbrella, or are we geographically challenged enough to need our own group here on GDO? I'd love to hear your thoughts on this and any recommendations for getting a group together would be much appreciated.
Thanks and cheers,
Rob
Comments
My wife currently attends
My wife currently attends UCSC as a grad student, so I might be able to tag along if get a meeting up and running. Santa Cruz is a lot closer to San Jose than the SF and Berkeley groups are.
As for if another group is needed, is see that this group is just shy of 300 members, which is only under the Washington DC and Newyork user groups. If you think you can have a sustainable size, maybe branching out would be good. But staying in all one group lets all the members have better visibility into what is going on in the region.
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Dog Parks via Drupal
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I say create a group
I recommend you create your own group. Then cross-post to the Bay Area group only for posts that merit a wider audience.
I say this because some of us get emailed with each post. And we dont want a lot of email about Santa Cruz when we're interested in Berkeley - or vice versa.
Isn't this a bay area group, not just a berkeley group?
I'm not sure i agree with Dave's comment. This is a bay-area group, and in the past, when folks from the south bay and far east bay have asked whether or not to create their own group, the group response has been to stay in this group as an umbrella for all bay-area and surrounding communities. While Santa Cruz may seem light years away from Berkeley, it's quite close for those in the south bay and other southerly locations.
I'd suggest to keep the group here. Besides, imho, there isn't enough traffic in this Bay-area GDO group to warrant splitting yet.
Well, I went the "create a
Well, I went the "create a new group and cross post to bay-area" route for BDUG. My primary motivation was to be able to use the cool new sub-pages-as-tabs feature, to be able to have focused resource pages. YMMV.
What we really need is subgroups :)
Hey Tao, Did you create a
Hey Tao,
Did you create a new group here on GDO or are you referring to the Google Group for BDUG?
Here
http://groups.drupal.org/berkeley-users-group-bdug
The google group is just for managing the mailing list.
subgroups
boston created pseudo subgroups by creating tabs. However, the BDUG is an awesome display of what can be accomplished with Panels - and it would behoove more groups to consider doing similar things
--
mike stewart { twitter: @MediaDoneRight | IRC nick: mike stewart }
Bay Area Panels Page
You mean like this? http://groups.drupal.org/node/36/BayAreaHome
;-) Accepting input....
The Smoking Goat aka Greg Beuthin
http://parisoma.wordpress.com
http://consultinggoat.wordpress.com
The Smoking Goat aka Greg Beuthin
http://www.commerceguys.com
don't split without a compelling reason
I'm not so sure 300 BAD members is real. the "300" number of the bay area is in large part due to the fact drupal people like myself join multiple groups - in an effort to stay in the know.
people actively contributing (by coming to meetings and posting/sharing) in the group is real. and being able to find new members is key to growing and networking. I feel its easier to find new people for a local meetup if there are fewer places to look. Boston has created category (tags) to help identify locale interests (e.g. sf, nbay, ebay, sbay, etc). We're probably going to do the same in LA.
Right now we have multiple groups (LA, SoCal, OC, and even Santa Barbara, SD regularly cross post) - there's really only a lot of synergy and momentum in the LA group. The people driving the LA group has changed since it started - but its been smooth in large part because everyone knows what's going on with eachother - with job changes/ relocations/ etc. It's really helped with networking to have a single group.
We had 44 people Tuesday night and only 20-25% first timers. I feel we're so active due to the networking (virtual &/or face-to-face) that occurs within the group. group organizers tend to come and go, and month-to-month the amount of time people can contribute varies. Having a larger group helps share the volunteer workload.
my 2cent
edit: oops just re-read that. didn't mean to suggest SD & SB don't have synergy or momentum - just my poor grammar. LA area only has one really "active" group
--
mike stewart { twitter: @MediaDoneRight | IRC nick: mike stewart }
compelling reason?
To me the reason to split is not about numbers of members. It's about keeping up with my emails. I was interested in meetings around San Francisco, but I checked GDO fairly infrequently, so I missed a number of them. Now, I'm subscribed to receive email notifications. But this generates a lot of email. (For example, every comment on this thread).
That's why personally, for me, its better to have more smaller groups, with only important threads cross posted to the larger group. If there's too much traffic not relevant to me on this group, I'll turn of email notification and start missing things. Similarly, the SC group might have members who want email notification about SC events, but not everything going on in the north bay.
cutting through the noise
that's a valid concern. you might consider using iCal feed if you're only interested in events. or perhaps an rss reader instead of email subscriptions.
I use Thunderbird so I have a single client for both email and rss/news. and iCal feeds for various groups feed directly to my Google Apps calendar. for me it works pretty well - and has the benefit of reducing email noise of gdo (and other rss news sources).
--
mike stewart { twitter: @MediaDoneRight | IRC nick: mike stewart }
Google Groups as another alternative?
The SF meetings are now at a size that it makes sense to have a GoogleGroup email list..... I know of several people who miss the mtgs regularly cause they don't visit GDO or haven't set up email subscriptions - yet would be fine with a GoogleGroup....
The Smoking Goat aka Greg Beuthin
http://parisoma.wordpress.com
http://consultinggoat.wordpress.com
The Smoking Goat aka Greg Beuthin
http://www.commerceguys.com
Thank you all for the input
Hey everyone, I appreciate all of the discussion around this. I think we'll probably follow Tao's model and have a separate group and cross-post important information to both groups. I want to be sensitive to information saturation and keep people's inbox's happy. We're an open source loving bunch here, so if we've got information to share, we'll be sure to let you know.
Thanks again for all of your input.
Cheers,
Rob
South Bay Drupal Meetup
Late to the discussion here. There's a South Bay Drupal Meetup for those who are interested (Rob, you're already a member, right? Do the other Santa Cruz folks know about it, too?). Anyhow, my own take on splitting vs. not splitting: when it comes to information, I like to know what's going on in the entire Bay Area. But when it comes to regular, ongoing face-to-face meetups and presentations, local groups/venues are way easier.
South Bay
Why aren't the South Bay folks organizing on G.D.O infrastructure? It makes it hard to find, at the very least, cross post some announcements here too.