Notes from the Local Users Group IRC Meeting

This morning I attended an IRC meeting for local group organizers. Here are a few notes of interest:

• We can sign up for free books to be sent to the group from APress. They do expect some mention for being sent books, but it might be nice for us or The Working Center to have these resources. Is this something we want to do? http://www.apress.com/community/usergroup_signup
• There was talk about IRC channels for local groups. One of the issues with IRC is that many individuals have never used it before, and web IRC widgets help to solve that. One recommended was Mibbit, though I don't know if it's possible for us to insert it without access to the Full HTML format. There is also a module wrapper around it over at http://drupal.org/project/mibbit_irc
• It was suggested that a good format for some meetings was to have everyone present something on the same topic for 5 minutes each. This allows a breadth of information from a variety of perspectives to be discussed. Think of it as "Speed dating" with Drupal :)
• Another idea was a "hackfest"; everyone brings a laptop and Drupal problems to work on. Or, put one laptop on a projector with a Drupal install so everyone can follow along. See http://dougvann.com/blogs/dougvann/09-01-31/drupal-hackfest-definition