Announcing NYC Camp 2012

We encourage users to post events happening in the community to the community events group on https://www.drupal.org.
willyk's picture
Start: 
2012-07-19 (All day) - 2012-07-23 (All day) America/New_York
Organizers: 
Event type: 
Drupalcamp or Regional Summit

We're stoked to announce that the inaugural NYC Camp will be occurring this summer from July 20 to 22, 2012 at Columbia University, Faculty House.

This mini-con will be an epic weekend of Drupal, including:

  • Beginner Drupal Bootcamp training on Friday,
  • Sessions Saturday and on Sunday morning (focusing on advanced content), and
  • An afternoon of Drupal contribution and sprints on Sunday afternoon.

Attendee registration will be free of charge and open at http://www.nyccamp.org on Friday, June 1.

We'll be accepting session submissions at http://www.nyccamp.org from Friday, June 1 to Friday, June 15 and we'll begin to announce accepted sessions starting on Friday, June 22, four weeks prior to NYC Camp. Although we'll have beginner and intermediate content, please note that we are actively seeking many expert level hardcore dev sessions (to ensure all sessions rock, draft slides must be be provided with all submissions).

This is a new event in the Drupal NYC calendar and will be held in addition to the great Happy Hours, Meet-Ups, Playdays and Drupal NYC Camp events (DCNYC11 and DCNYC12). If you aren't already helping out with those events, we'll be encouraging you to pitch in with NYC Camp.

We'll have lots more exciting news to come, so please stay tuned in on g.d.o., Facebook or Twitter.

P.S. - Apologies for the initial typos, an errant slip of the mouse lead to a click on save instead of preview.

Comments

Registration information misleading

repoman's picture

Hey everyone,
Just thought I would mention that on this page it says:

"Attendee registration will be free of charge and open at http://www.nyccamp.org on Friday, June 1."

Meanwhile, there is no registration on that page, even though it says it would. Plus this is the page to signup, like a normal meetup and playday.

Just my 2 cents.

Thanks

willyk's picture

The registration will open at http://nyccamp.org later today. We left sign-up open here to facilitate people getting engaged in the short term. If for some reason that is problematic at things progress we will disable sign-up. Thanks for the feeback, your 2 cents are valuable and appreciated.

.

forestmars's picture

Nice catch; appreciated.

I'm curious to hear more

banghouse's picture

I'm curious to hear more about what is meant by "advanced content". Thanks for all the work you guys are doing to pull this off. I'm totally looking forward to it. Epic osm moar plz! :)

Patience Young Jedi ...

willyk's picture

... Your Yoda quote is great :). There's now some more preliminary info about the "advanced content" online here:

 http://nyccamp.org/schedule

 http://nyccamp.org/sessions

But as the Grand Jedi Master said "the deepest patience is needed" ... we'll be adding more content over the course of the weekend and and next week. In short, although we're going to have a great DrupalCamp Bootcamp for beginners, we've got some great surprises up our sleeve targeted at advanced and expert level devs.

We're totally looking forward it as well, and pulling off a great event.

Just signed up at site

MacRonin's picture

Just wanted to let you know that I signed up at the site.

Is the info(-at-)nyccamp.org address supposed to be valid? It bounced for me.

I was writing to it to let you know that the event sign-up email still has its default content.

Looking forward to it ...

Thanks for Registering!

willyk's picture

Great you see that you're so keen to register.

The info(-at-) account is valid and we just sent you a supplemental confirmation message from that account.

We started to turn a little pumpkiny-orange after a busy day today, but are very excited to have our first attendee register

We'll be adding more updates and content over the weekend.

Thanks for the additional

MacRonin's picture

Thanks for the additional info.
The mail I sent to info@ that bounced must have been before the account was fully setup

.

willyk's picture

When you registered we were actually in the midst of changing the address from info@ to registration@; sorry for the inconvenience, but a least it all worked out. Looking forward to putting on an epic event for you.

Erm, I just registered,

Snugug's picture

Erm, I just registered, followed the one time login link, and don't have a Password field to set/change my password.

Also, no link to propose a session.

thx

willyk's picture

Thanks for that catch, we'll address now and I'll post here once addressed.

I'm assuming that, after all

Snugug's picture

I'm assuming that, after all of what has transpired, this event is still happening? If so, I'd like to point out that there still isn't a way to propose sessions.

mail server issues?

ericG's picture

registered, never got the email.

Went back to try to get it to send me another but you don't have the site configured to allow me to click a "lost my password" link, so I can't

Thx, keepin' an eye on it

willyk's picture

Sorry about that, not sure why it didn't go through. We just forwarded you another confirmation.

Thanks for the head's up, we'll keep an eye on the mail server issue, but it tested out ok and pretty much all other attendees seem to have accessed their account after receiving the confirmation message.

The request new password link is also enabled now too, thanks for pointing that out.

Signed up

rmenes379's picture

Looks like it went through, anyway. But definitely interested in attending!

You can't have a left brain without a right brain. Keep them both going!

Excellent!

jdonson's picture

Thank you for the excellent free offering.

I will be sure to promote this in NYC.

Jeremy Donson
Database and Systems Engineer
New York City

Heads up! Camp site event reminder issue.

banghouse's picture

FYI, I just got this in email: "This is a reminder that you've registered for NYC Camp, which is occurring next weekend at Columbia University's Faculty House from July 20 - 22." Looks like a COD event reminder misconfig.

Sorry, the reminder was sent

willyk's picture

Sorry, the reminder was sent out on a cron run. Please disregard. Strange things is that the COD settings and the event/sign-up appear to be correctly configured. We appear to have run into something similar to this issue:

http://drupal.org/node/856140

We've disabled the reminders until we sort it out so that it doesn't happen again. Apologies to anyone who received the reminder.

Just signed up. Thank you!

Alexander Allen's picture

Just signed up. Thank you willyk!

Who are you?

Alex UA's picture

So, this seems like some sort of splinter group of the NYC camps. I don't know if I care (yet) and thus don't know what my reaction will be (yet).

Other than pissing off all of the people who organized all of the other camps, what was the purpose of taking such a potentially confrontational step?

Who is in charge here? Who does the $ go to? Who is providing oversite?

Where are your meetings held? How do people get involved? Why wasn't there any feedback requested before you decided to take matters into your own hands?

Why should we trust that this isn't about the egos of a few members of the community who couldn't play well with other members?

You really need to say a lot more here, because as it stands, this looks like something to be attacked, not embraced, from where I sit. This doesn't look like community, it looks like a couple of people trying to hijack a community, but that's mostly due (at the moment) to the (seemingly) secretive nature of the planning that led to this big shift in the NYC community.

Alex Urevick-Ackelsberg
ZivTech: Illuminating Technology

Hey Alex, Have you seen this

drnikki's picture

Hey Alex,

Have you seen this thread? http://groups.drupal.org/node/231853

Slight confusion

Tresler's picture

That is the Drupalcamp NYC - 12th version.

This is an inaugural "mini-con" supposedly a different event altogether.

Honestly, I don't see the problem here. Event creation is free to all members. This is an event. Why should it anger anyone?

What do you mean?

Tresler's picture

It says right there:

Brian Short
Forest mars
Willy Karam

It's a different event than DrupalCampNYC 12 - A point they could make clearer in the title, but seems clear enough when they explicitly state it in the description.

And what money? It's free of charge. I imagine they will be accepting donations or sponsorships and that info would be good to have made public, in fact, I think we would require it, if this is happening in the name of the NYC group, but as any such collection would need to go through some account, somewhere, I'm reasonably sure that will happen (if it doesn't the NYC group admins will have to get involved).

One of the things that frustrates me about the NYC community is the constant over-permissioning of events. You don't need to know how everyone feels about an event to host one. If people hate it, they won't go.

Ultimately, event creation is unmoderated in this group. Unless we're proposing to change that, the organizers can do whatever they want.

Also, who is suggesting this is a splinter group (forest is a group admin) and who is pissed? Am I missing somethign that you came out swinging for?

It's a different event than

Alex UA's picture

It's a different event than DrupalCampNYC 12 - A point they could make clearer in the title, but seems clear enough when they explicitly state it in the description.

I get that. But how is it different, and why does NYC need a different camp? I'd love to see some improvements to the NYC camp, but I'm wondering how this helps anyone other than the organizers.

And what money? It's free of charge. I imagine they will be accepting donations or sponsorships and that info would be good to have made public, in fact, I think we would require it, if this is happening in the name of the NYC group, but as any such collection would need to go through some account, somewhere, I'm reasonably sure that will happen (if it doesn't the NYC group admins will have to get involved).

That was my assumption as well (that they will need donors), though if Forest and the other two (whom I don't really know) want to foot the bill, it's a moot subject. With that said, I don't think that they should do anything that indicates that it's related to the NYC groups, it's just my opinion, but IMO since they are doing it cowboy style they shouldn't get any of the benefits of working within the community.

When other members (who shall not be named) took it upon themselves to start a site without the group's permission you led the charge to get them to pull it down and go through the group. What's changed?

One of the things that frustrates me about the NYC community is the constant over-permissioning of events. You don't need to know how everyone feels about an event to host one. If people hate it, they won't go.

Yeah, the NYC community can surely be a handful (drama central), but while "over-permissioning" seems bad, avoiding collaboration and input before claiming that this is " a new event in the Drupal NYC calendar and will be held in addition to our great Happy Hours, Meet-Ups, Playdays and Drupal NYC Camp events (DCNYC11 & DCNYC12). If you aren't already helping out with those events, we'll be encouraging you to pitch in with NYC Camp."

Actually, it is not related to this g.d.o group or the NYC calendar other than via a few members taking it upon themselves to claim it so. When litwol did it, many of these same members were up in arms, and this sort of hypocrisy really rubs me the wrong way.

Take down any mention of the NYC group, remove it from the front page of g.d.o., and then I have no problems with doing an end run around the NYC community. Otherwise, this camp should not be able to claim that it is part of that community without that community's permission.

Also, who is suggesting this is a splinter group (forest is a group admin) and who is pissed? Am I missing somethign that you came out swinging for?

Unlike litwol? IIRC he was the group admin when he started that whole controversy. Also, who is suggesting? I am (via the people that contacted me with their concerns).

I'll ask again: why wasn't this brought to the group first? Why weren't the other organizers of past camps invited to participate?

Collaboration sucks, it just sucks less not collaborating.

Alex Urevick-Ackelsberg
ZivTech: Illuminating Technology

Some fair points

Tresler's picture

Good points, let me tackle them one-by-one:

A) 'But how is it different, and why does NYC need a different camp?"
The first part I think is clear - its more mini-con than camp. The DrupalCamp crew came up with their events and schedule, and presumably, these people wanted something else and made an event to suit their needs.

The second, part I don't really think needs to be answered because I don't see this event as conflicting. I mean, why does the group need anything? Because some group members want it, that's why.

B) I inquired about the money. There are donations, being processed by the D.A. This will require transparency in the books, the same as other camps. I'm presuming Forest, in his capacity as admin is making sure that will happen. Forest, please correct me if I'm wrong on this point.

C) "Actually, it is not related to this g.d.o group or the NYC calendar other than via a few members taking it upon themselves to claim it so. " - How is this different than the playdays, meetups, happy hours and otherwise. People in the group took those upon themselves and claimed them to be group activities. The only difference I see, is no one jumped up and called foul on those.

D) "When other members (who shall not be named) took it upon themselves to start a site without the group's permission you led the charge to get them to pull it down and go through the group. What's changed?"

This is a good point, but a bit misleading. The site I led the charge against was a site claiming to be the new home of the NYC drupal group. Something I was, and still am, firmly against.

The 'event site debate' has been argued multiple times, and last I checked: We agreed as a group to allow them, Although that link appears to be dead (One of the exact reasons I opposed it in the first place), it was rather lively when DrupalCampNYC10 was happening: http://groups.drupal.org/nyc/drupalcamp

E) Finally, what input are you looking to give? As far as I can tell, you and I are both going to get as much input as we get into DrupalCon? Session proposals, and potentially voting that will probably be ignored, the same as it is for DrupalCon.

Fundamentally, I think what I'm trying to say is that there is a difference between starting a new event and hijacking an existing one. Right now I don't see them hijacking the existing one. Previous endeavors to control camps that the group as a whole organized I was against and would be against again.

I'm not sure what you wanted the group consulted on, before they made their new event? You reach a point where you can't vote on everything. If you have a concern about use of funds, that's valid.

Ultimately, I think a function of this group is to facilitate more events. This falls under 'more events' to me. And in the spirit of meritocracy, I'm willing to let the people doing the work have a good bit of leeway on things in the interest of getting more events to happen.

Of course, if they violate to code of conduct, or try to hijack it for advertising dollars or to promote a single company in a way not in keeping with other camps and cons, that will need to be addressed. But right now, I don't know what they've done, that other events in the DrupalNYC group lineup haven't also done.

re: (B) above, and Money

joebachana's picture

One more point to elaborate. We found that to help facilitate balance sheet management, we needed to 'appoint' a local person we all trusted as a finance coordinator, with checks and balances between that person and the DA, as well as the lead organizer. Last year there was a pilot agreement with the DA to use that organization's services for fiscal sponsorship. The services included accounts receivables collections and maintenance in the DA's bank, as well as accounts payables, either by check or Jacob's credit card. You'll follow this node to see that a creative solution the DA offered was for us to appoint a local resource to be given the credit card: http://groups.drupal.org/node/182374. We believe we put in very strong checks and balances, and in fact the balance sheet for last year's camps are easily inspected here on this g.d.o wiki: http://groups.drupal.org/node/173184. I believe the final balance sheet between our local group and the DA can be found here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AkV88XCY-msxdFhPbEVRNGdSTmd...

The DA now requires the local Drupalcamp community to sign a legal agreement for the fiscal sponsorship. We had been circulating it the past few weeks with the intention of then posting a discussion of it on the g.d.o, since none of us is authorized to sign such a document. This obviously was taking some time, but it is what it is.

The concern we now have is that the DA is either going to have to manage two different NYC relationships, or we somehow have to manage the three camps being done by two different groups. That, to me, is a real problem, since I have no idea how people on the other side are going to raise or spend money, and I definitely don't believe we should be commingling funds. A subtlety to this is that if the community is indeed getting behind the NYCCamp, which it has every right to do, then Rich now involuntarily has to be involved in bookkeeping for them -- that is, unless they go the funding of their event totally autonomously without the DA's fiscal sponsorship.

Joe Bachana
First Employee at DPCI
1560 Broadway
NY, NY 10036
212.575.5609
www.dpci.com

The reply I got when I asked about money was:

Tresler's picture

The reply I got when I asked about money was:

"Sam - Yes, the money will be handled through the DA. I reached out to Jacob prior to proceedin"

And that sponsor support was already well underway.

This in turn raises 2 questions:
1) Who signed a legal agreement.
2) What is the transparent method of accounting being used.

I'll reach out to Jacob and Willy about both.

I am following up with Jacob

Tresler's picture

I am following up with Jacob later today, but I know from initial talks that the DA will not allow two relationships in one group - with good reason. I'll find out who that one person who they have concretely on file asap.

This raises the very real question - how are we handling event accounting internally amongst events with different organizers.

I think if Rich is our 'treasurer' then this should be because the full group wanted it. I'm not comfortable with the person chosen for one event defacto being the go-to person for all events.

Is the fine point here: Is

Tresler's picture

Is the fine point here:

Is this a group advertising an independent camp on G.DO/nyc or a 'group sanctioned event'?

I'm not sure I care - it seems like a free Drupal event that is good for the NYC community. Until I see something that indicates ill intention (as stated above, overt profiteering or something of the ilk) I'm just glad people are taking initiative.

Background information

joebachana's picture

Hi Sam,

You're right -- more events focused around Drupal learning and contributing are ultimately a very good thing for the community. Let me give you a little background on what has happened and you can judge whether this particular situation is a fork or not.

A group of us had been meeting to discuss plans for NYC Drupalcamps in 2012. Willyk was in these sessions along with a number of other Drupal community folks who will identify themselves if they'd like to. We unanimously agreed upon a smaller unconference as the first event, to be held late sprint or very early summer. EricG offered to be the lead organizer, and he had some difficulty securing the Poly location since that organization was acquired by NYU and thus the venue is no longer free. In any event, by mid-April we were being told by Andres at Poly that June 23rd was available. FYI we had contemplated the unconference to be a no-sponsor event, just developers and other Drupalistas getting together to do good work and have great learning sessions.

There was some disagreement on what the second event should be. In my opinion as past lead organizer, I felt we should do a one-day event like last year's held at John Jay, but do it better - better organization (solve some hiccups around food, venue/room organization) as well as add services that people wanted (job fair, sponsorship kiosks, etc). Willyk had an idea to do a two-day minicon, ideally for free, patterned after BADCamp on the West coast.

We took a vote, which happened just a few weeks ago, and the consensus was to do the one day event as well as we could, and to try to then throw a bigger event in 2013. Willy then dropped out of the planning group, and within a week we saw the nyccamp.org site launch as well as the g.d.o event page -- for July 20th, one month after the unconference. I'll add that Forest and Bshort were at no time a part of the planning calls, although Willy was at all of them and took a lead role in scheduling them.

The concerns the original planning group has:

  1. the difference of a month for these camp events is causing us to pause and reflect. Is it a good use of community money to have two events so close together? Can we get enough volunteers without hurting the 7/20 camp, or vice versa? Will attendance be brisk for both, or will one or the other suffer? We feel we're making a sensible choice here to reflect, although the planners are all upset since the unconference we've been planning for months is now on the line.

  2. Contrary to everyone's beliefs, sponsorship money is not unlimited. The nyccamp is going to require private funding. Columbia Faculty House is not a cheap venue and doing this kind of event is going to cost a lot of money. Having done fundraising work for many years now, a couple of them in the Drupal community, I'm often told "I already gave this year" or "we've committed our donation monies to such-and-such event/cause already." Thus, the second event of the year, which we planned for November or December time frame, was going to cost around $25,000-30,000 to fund, and this free event is going to add to the risk that there will be some sponsors who have 'already given.'

  3. The general stress that we have all worked hard for the kind of transparency in communication - via RedMine project management, via all open Google docs on all meetings, via continual communication throughout 2011 on the proceedings of the camp team, via the Mayfirst list. The desire to continually adhere to some traditions set by people before us, for instance that no infrastructure should be placed on individuals or corporation's servers for fear that someone would 'take their ball and leave' if dissatisfied. All of this important work that the community asked of us is being neglected.

As a side note, the actual name of this new event, 'nyccamp' pronounced "Nice" camp, was actually Richbaldwin's idea. Rich is one of the core organizers of the Drupalcamps, I can't speak for him but I'd have been annoyed if someone just took my idea on something that I wasn't made privy to.

No one should stand in the way of anyone's passion to do good, and I think many people will agree that a multi-day event is a great idea. There are other events going on where nobody has any control or authorization over. Another example is the "Drupal" Business Summit, which is being organized and put on by a Toronto-based company here in NYC, apparently with the blessings of Acquia, who used to throw those summits in various cities. Anyone can do anything. I applaud Willy for at least calling it something other than a 'Drupal'Camp, although honestly, none of us has rights to that without the community's consent (and some coordination with the DA).

Our points against NYCCamp were that it would be too sudden (July), that summer is hard to get maximum attendance since people go away, that it was too close to the June unconference, and that we wanted to work out some speed bumps on camp planning in general before undertaking such an ambitious venture. Those points were completely ignored and the NYCCamp marketing happened literally a week after the vote was taken, as if someone had been working on all the marketing content, the website, the logo/graphic, the COD/reg site, etc.

Now you can decide with more facts in hand. Others may have more information. For my part, I'm poised to help EricG on DCNYC11 if the community and the organizer group feel its worthwhile to have it be put on. We may wish to start a discussion page off this one so as not to co-opt the original intent of the posting.

-Joe

Joe Bachana
First Employee at DPCI
1560 Broadway
NY, NY 10036
212.575.5609
www.dpci.com

Ok...

Tresler's picture

I'm not sure I see how this drastically affects your current plans. One by one:

1) Proceed with the unconference. If I understand correctly, you're worrying about attendance instead of worrying about getting an actual sign up page up (at least I can't find it.). Correct me if I'm wrong, but hasn't our biggest issue with attendance to date been that we get too much of it. These things 'sell out' overnight regularly.

2) I don't see how this is avoidable as we grow. The only way to 'regulate' sponsor-money-asks would be to regulate who can have official events. At the moment event creation is free to all. Unless we want to have a discussion to change that, then sponsor money, by its nature, is first come first served.

3) I agree transparency is essential, but where I disagree is that input-from-all is essential. I think this is a paralyzing force in the Drupal NYC community.

It sounds like the organizing body for the first two events had valid concerns about resources (volunteers and money) and opted not to do this mini-con. Willy K wanted it bad enough that he found those resources. Unless he took them directly from the existing committee I would just see them as additional resources.

As far as the name of the event... see my other comment on naming. I think it adds confusion more than anything else, but I'm not sure what can be done about. Rich can be annoyed about (I probably would be) but he didn't buy the domain for it.

If we just removed the word CAMP from the event name, I think these are two different things entirely.

re: fiscal sponsorship + fiscal responsibility

joebachana's picture

Hi Sam,

I pondered your post, slept on it, since I value your input. I know you've done work on the camps and other activities in the past, so I want to know I respect the feedback you're giiving. And I'll emphasize that as many events as we can get going, all the better.

Your post brought up a core issue I wanted to elaborate on with respect to 'anybody can do anything.' Yes, I agree that Willy has the right to put on his event so I'm not questioning that. However, we have on account (we meaning NYC Drupalcamp planners, which agreed is a very amorphous and fungible designation of volunteers) about $3,700 wiith the DA. This after a 10% fiscal sponsorship fee was deducted by the DA, which we had not anticipated but are accepting (this can and will be addressed on a different thread so as not to 'fork' the conversation).

The planning committee last year, which consisted of approximately 8-10 consistent volunteers, all agreed to what is called a 'prudent capital reserve' for continuity of camps. There are start up costs such as deposits for venue space that we need to maintain so as not to be a possible encumbrance upon the DA budget should there be some failure and the camp goes in the red.

There was concern about the prudent reserve being too large a sum of money that would cause competing interests to want to use those funds in different ways, so the majority vote came out to a $3,000 operating capital budget. Those who felt it should be $0 acquiesced as did those who felt it should be significantly higher.

Earlier in the year, we discussed the unconference be a $25/per person charge for admittance - the budget for the camp was set at $3500 for premises, food, drink, signage, badges, and other minor costs. We estimated that there would be 100-150 attendees and so proceeds would cover the camp. Thus we would leave the prudent reserve for the larger camp in the Fall, which will require up to $30k and will also need a down payment to reserve the space. We discussed going for sponsorship dollars early on for the unconference, but elected not to since we had concerns about asking twice OR asking sponsors to sponsor two events, which we found last year to be tricky (again, could be another discussion post).

In the end, we all voted on a no-sponsorship $25 fee for the unconference.

Then, as of last week, with the announcement of the free NYCCamp, we grew concerned that attendance would be affected if we were to charge for the unconference just a month prior. Thus, the NYCCamp group necessarily affected our budgetary plans for 2012 as follows:

  1. Either we charge as planned for the unconference and risk a shortfall, thus dipping into the prudent reserve allocated for the larger conference, or,

  2. We do NOT charge, dipping into the prudent reserve entirely but having a more successful event attendance-wise'

As you can see, in either case, the risk is loss of funding for the event later in the year. Anyone might argue that is not a big deal, since sponsors have deep pockets and don't worry about it. However, for me, part of doing these camps is doing the right thing fiscally - making sure we're creating value not only for the attendees but also for the sponsors. There is an antagonism among the Drupal community that sponsoring organizations 'owe' the community money since they make their big coffers of revenues by delivering Drupal services. However, I'll argue that EVERYONE owes the 'tithe' to Drupal and the sponsoring organizations are not alone. And they, just like attendees, deserve commensurate and fair value for their contributions.

I want to be clear that willy at no time has asked for access to those $3700. He is indeed going after the money elsewhere. The effect upon our planning efforts is simply that we have to think about what the right use of the existing funds is to continue forward with the events we hope to put on in the future. We factor in prudent reserve as well as what we'll charge attendees and what we'll be able to collect from sponsors. We also have to be careful about commingling funds with the now-separate nyccamp group.

Thanks again for your feedback Sam, I really appreciate it.

Joe Bachana
First Employee at DPCI
1560 Broadway
NY, NY 10036
212.575.5609
www.dpci.com

More thoughts later, but the

Tresler's picture

More thoughts later, but the the handling of funds for events from different organizers without an agreed upon set of group regulations gives me the heebie jeebies. Now that I understand the extent of the financial implications of this event I think we are hitting upon some concrete things the group does need to determine to proceed.

a) How/who is the official funding-handler for all group-sponsored events - Are they elected or chosen by the 8-10 person committee, and what are their concrete roles/responsibilities.

b) How do we handle budget requests from all events? Do we have a standard around this?

Ultimately, I do think anyone can have any event. That does not imply anyone can access/use group funds without a consensus.

So I've been trying to figure

richbaldwin's picture

So I've been trying to figure out where to jump into this thread so that it makes sense.

Just a brief history, I've been around the NY community for the past three years or so. I've been involved in the past 4 camps and at least one training session over that period.First as a volunteer and then being a more active participant on the planning front. I don't contribute to core, or test modules, as a matter of fact I've really haven't done active coding in a few years. So for people like myself we see volunteering and other soft skills as our way of giving back in environment where the dev reigns.

I think it was two camps ago, we were sitting around asking for volunteers. Tom_o_t asked for a volunteer to do the book keeping...everyone kind of looked around the room and finally i hesitantly said I would do it. I really didn't really want to, but I wanted to participate. I also did the food with Lippe. The camp was successful, we closed the books and all was fine. I thought that was the end of that role.

At the camp last year at John Jay, again in another planning meeting, a volunteer was asked for the book keeping...no one again stepped forward. Joe asked if I would be be willing to do it again, since I was familiar from last year...I once again hesitantly agreed. This time I didn't offer to do any thing else as I wanted to attend the sessions. Still on the day of the event I pretty much ended up doing more than my fair share with the lunch effort.

During this camp a discussion started that it would be much easier if we (the NY community) could receive a credit card from the DA just to make smaller purchases easier, as people were using personal cards (me included) and then submitting for reimbursements...messy. For larger purchases, contracts, etc. we go through the DA. The DA agreed and assigned a credit card to the NYC community. Credit cards are not assigned to groups, there needs to be a name on it. My name is on the card and we have a limit of 5K I believe.

As far as I remember Tom posted a notice for comment to the NYC community for discussion.
http://groups.drupal.org/node/182374
No one wanted to appoint anyone through a back door. I don't remember too many comments, I definitely dont remember any dissent. So I stepped into a role that I hoped would be uneventful and pretty straight forward. Just keep track of the money coming and going out.

Now as you may notice I have not been actively participating in this discussion for reasons that I think are obviously clear. I try really hard to be impartial and not take positions that could be seen as favoring one or more sides. I have my opinions but in the public space I adopt an agnostic attitude.

So how do we keep track of funds? We have a fairly simple, transparent system in place.

  • All transactions are posted to a public google spreadsheet, that anyone can view at any time
  • The DA has full access, provides oversight and can make entries to the spreadsheet. On the planning side we create a budget. We then enter actual monies spent (compared with budgeted amount). This is further crossed checked by someone at the DA that enters the actual dollar amounts coming in or leaving the account.
  • A couple of people of the organizing committee (usually the chair and project lead at least) also have write access to the spreadsheet. Google documents have version history so its very easy to reference who made changes and when. Again this is all just book keeping as we have no bank account per se. All of the community's funds are held in a DA account and all expenditures are cross referenced.

We have a 'primitive' accounting system...but it works.
There is oversight, accountability and full transparency, otherwise I would not be involved.

I'm not sure I'm willing to address all of the other concerns wrt the unconf, mini-con, nyc camp here. This was simply a description of how we got here and how community funds are handled. I have my opinions but will possibly do that as an ordinary member of the community in another reply...but not tonight, this took long enough.

One question

Tresler's picture

Hi Rich,
First off, let me just say thank you. It's clear you've stepped up where needed and done a great job. Any posts I make referencing your position (e.g. http://groups.drupal.org/node/235658 ) are not directed specifically at you, merely using the sensitive nature of funding and tracking of spending as a good example for other things.

Second, related to this particular thread, who, or what process controls the purse strings? i.e. Do event organizers wanting to push sponsorship money through our group DA account approach you directly, or is that something that has to go through a vote, or is that your decision, or something else altogether? Have we done separate 'event accounts' before in which we keep different event monies separate? Do you feel comfortable with the event as it is currently set up?

Thanks again.

Sponsors

scottwolpow's picture

The Drupal Camp NYC will soon post our policies and positions.

Thanks Rich

willyk's picture

Rich - Thanks for taking the time to post your comments. Note that a volunteer has stepped up to assist on the NYC Camp team to handle bookkeeping/accounting matters, as you have on DCNYC (someone with a finance/economics background). As such, we would not need you to take on that role for organizing purposes. The NYC Camp model would ideally follow the same model and DCNYC, but would likely not require use of the credit card setup for DCNYC events. NYC Camp will be following the same transparent/primitive system as you outlined, save that we will be producing an annual report made publicly available to summarize the event for attended, sponsors and the Drupal community. It would be ideal if we would also provide you with R/W access to NYC Camp financial documents, in addition to those would be provided to our organizers and the DA?

  • Willy

I'm not sure you understand.

Tresler's picture

I'm not sure you understand. If any money is going through the DA account at all, it has to be done by Rich, currently. I had a very clear conversation with Jacob Redding regarding this yesterday. They will only deal with one person, and transferring it has to be at Rich's discretion.

Only posting this for clarification.

joebachana's picture

Sam,

You're correct in this. Last year's camp was set up to have checks and balances so that the finance coordinator and the camp organizer would work with a group to plan the budgets, present them to Daniel Finnerty, who at that time was our liaison at the DA, then abide by them. If we had any need to change, we'd present that information both to the group and to the DA.

I'd like to point out that for better or worse I set up the accounting spreadsheets, which I did using a starter Google doc that Thomas had prepared for earlier camps.

With respect to funding of any camp we had done in the past, as well as our current approach, we project the overall budget requirements, then discuss what % should come from sponsorship and what from attendees. To hearken back to an earlier post I made, we attempt to leave the prudent reserve alone for seeding future camps only.

Last year's camp had an estimated budget of $20,000. We calculated 500 attendees at $25pp for a total of $12,500, then the balance to be made up in sponsorship. At that time I volunteered to go after the sponsorship dollars, which I did again using a legacy spreadsheet that Thomas had put together but that I had enhanced with new companies from DCNYC9. Thus, in acquisition of funds for DCNYC10, part of my role was sponsorship dollars. The setup of receivables through the camp website was done by Father Shawn with some assistance from EzraG, QA'ed by quite a number of us.

As for budgeting of all aspects of the camp, it was generally done by the same core team, with some input from members of camps past who were not as actively involved.

The overarching point here is that we built in transparency into all aspects of the camp last year, particularly around fiduciary responsibility. This was done at the behest of Jacob and the DA. I had been approached about holding the credit card locally but I declined since I thought that role should be handled by an independent financial coordinator. Plus, I had a lot on my hands with the camp organizing in general.

There is a meme that has clearly been put forth in the above threads - sorry to say it Willy but you've been tendering it for weeks now, that you or 'people' didn't like the way the camp was run last year. A number of us felt the same way in past years, but what we did was join up to improve upon the processes as well as the offerings here in NYC. We definitely didn't hit it out of the park last year, but we did a great job and the results were terrific.

There were key areas that we could and will improve in this year's camps. In general people get burnt out in the Drupal community anyway, so naturally we assumed people weren't going to come back. But honestly, virtually all the doers of last year's camp are back. Many of the people who had many opinions about how we should have been doing things last year haven't come back, and thats fine. We're really doing ok. Sam, if you can come to a meeting coming up next week, we'd be really happy to see you since you have a lot of input. But trying to mend some of these things which really will just get sorted out by us working together isn't going to happen on node 234363.

Now, lets put aside memes and innuendo about whether a planning group is legitimate or the people in that group are nice or popular or the ones that a power player in the local NYC region would want installed. Lets focus on the business at hand. With respect to how finances are running in 2012 and which events we feel should be covered under the rubric of our planning group.

Our requirements are simple. None of us has the right to sign anything from a venue or vendor and call it a Drupalcamp event. We give legal agreements to the DA to review and sign, specifically since the DA has some obligation in fiscal sponsorship to protect us as well as itself. It is my understanding that Willy has personally signed some letter of intent with Columbia Faculty House. Again, he has every right to do this, and the Faculty house is a beautiful venue to hold an event, particularly a free one.

Second, none of us has the right to fund something individually and call it a Drupalcamp event. We specifically make venue deposits or vendor downpayments and such through the DA -- there is a solid process in place for requisitioning those kinds of payments for camps and they are scheduled - never immediiate, in consideration of the busy schedule of resources at the DA. It is my understanding, although Willy would have to corroborate this, that he used some of his own money as a down payment for Faculty House. I hope that this is not true since that stresses me out for him.

Third, before we can enter any premises for a camp, we must have suitable insurance commensurate with the needs of that venue. The DA does not provide this. We have in past years been graciously provided this through Zivtech, which is Alex Urevick-Acklesberg's company. Now I've mentioned his name since he's been a good and neutral sponsor of the Drupalcamps past, including funding, but he and I have had NO conversations about this thread, so while we are friends, I don't want you to feel that I have put him up to his postings here since I did not. In any event, insurance is fungible and at the discretion of the planning group, so there is currently no restrictions or requirements from the DA on who this can be done through. We merely know that it in itself is a requirement.

Given these things, arguably any individual could come to the existing planning group, which consists of me, RichBaldwin, EricG, AmyCham, ScottWolpow, and Bob Phelps, with a new participant Annie Stone as of the May 9th meeting (although she did attend a few calls in April) and either join up or just pitch an idea for any kind of event. Let me add that while that is the active planning group, we have other people helping us as well as providing invaluable guidance, community members like as Father Shawn, Kelly Bell, Thomas Turnbull and others. We are also getting great intermittent guidance from AlexUA, Matt Cheney, and others who have been active in camp planning in other parts.

What's my point? There's nothing broken here other than our desire to put on even better camps that are more fun to put on. Last year was too much of a herculean effort, and yes, the work was done by about 5-7 people in toto. Of those, everyone has returned to work on the camp except Mark Reilly (alienresident), since he and his wife are having a baby any day now and he (the smart one of the two of us) is taking off time to be a great dad.

I'll emphasize that we will continue to post invites for people to join up. But what I don't think is cool is this negative energy of coming in with this cloak-and-dagger meme that things were run badly last year, since they weren't. They were run as well as volunteers with full time jobs and full lives could possibly do. And this year's camps will be even better, and hopefully more fun to put on.

My role: I'm trying help support EricG in his camp and ScottW in his. I'm a project manager and am good at helping get stuff done. Yes, I'm a prickly New Yorker and people who love getting stuff done love that about me since I'm persistent and thorough. People who say they're going to do something but then don't come through? I'm not sure that kind of person is ever going to like a guy like me, and they will generally say things like "well there are people who say they didn't like the way things were done." But we're built differently and life is too short to spend time with people like that. Honestly, Willy's one called out role in last years camp was completion of the DCNYC10 sunset review which was to be a collaborative process. I don't know whether that work got done, but if it were and if it were concise enough so we could just garner the top 3-5 things we could do better out of it other than the ones we already know (better food organization, exhibit area for sponsors, job fair, closer together rooms, onsite registration, better handling of waitlist), we'd all be in a better place and willy would have made an invaluable contribution to the betterment of the NYC camp planning group that predated him and me and will likely postdate any of us if we continue to improve upon our methods, templates, and tools.

I'm going to suggest a meetup next week which will coincide with our DrupalcampNYC11 planning group to invite new folks to come in - even audit how we're doing things. We use RedMine and that can be audited as well, although we had a server running on Forest's credit card last year and that was spun down so we need to restore the database from last year so you all can take a look at how things were done down to the task level.

Joe Bachana
First Employee at DPCI
1560 Broadway
NY, NY 10036
212.575.5609
www.dpci.com

See Drupal trademark policy

ezra-g's picture

[edit]

None of us has the right to sign anything from a venue or vendor and call it a Drupalcamp event
[snip]
none of us has the right to fund something individually and call it a Drupalcamp event

That's incorrect. Per the Drupal trademark policy, anyone gets automatic use of the Drupal trademark in several situations, including:

"4. The Drupal trademark is used for the title of a camp or meet-up."

First let me say to those who

brandorr's picture

First let me say to those who have run and are running New York Drupal events, including the monthly gatherings, the DrupalCamps, and NYCCamp, thank you all for being organizers, I know it's a ridiculous amount of work. (Especially the camps.)

Some thoughts for those planning the unconference:

1) I think a $25 dollar door fee for the unconference is completely reasonable, and plan to attend both summer events. (As I suspect will many others.)
2) Putting on my sponsor hat for a sec, we (Brandorr Group LLC is open to sponsoring both (all) NYC Drupal events this year, and I don't think we are an atypical company here. Please feel free to reach out.
3) I really love unconferences, and am looking forward to participating in a devops track. :)

Thanks,
Brian

Naming

Tresler's picture

There is some confusion on name space happening.

Is there a better name you could come up with to reduce confusion around he existing DrupalCampNYC name?

Drupal Mini-con NYC or something?

The Backstory- At least as I saw it.

scottwolpow's picture

Moved from Meet-up thread and slightly modified.

For those who do not know me, I am Scott Wolpow. I am the chair of the group that is planning New York Drupal Camp 12 aka Mini-Con.
I was also involved in Drupal Camp 10.

In March I took it upon myself to start the process of planning the next camp. I reached out to Joe Bachana, the chair in for Drupal camp 10. He suggested I speak to Willy K about Co-Chairing.

On March 16th I contacted Willy and we had a brief conversation. Willy stated he had many good ideas.

He had created an entire plan, which I thought was sound. The one thing I did not agree with was the timing of the event. I did want a larger event over three days.
Willy proposed having it in the early summer.

I know that Eric G had been planning his un-conference and I did not want to interfere with that.

Willy still thought we could have both. I did not agree.

However I also felt we should get the committee running again.

Willy then decided to have 3 weekly calls with those involved to discuss the event.

Willy and myself were to be co-chairs.

As the five people on the calls discussed the issues, it became apparent that the majority did not feel we should have a three day event
Everyone but Willy wanted to have it in the fall or early winter.
As stated, I also wanted a three day event, but realized that I had to agree with majority rule.

Willy disagreed and became upset. I understand he spent quite a bit of time on his crafted plans, but events are run by the community, for the community.

In a private call I asked him why the instance.
He told me that the community wanted the event in the summer and it had been discussed that we should have a big event with deep pocket sponsors.
It should be free and must be held at Columbia U., so we can grow.

I asked him who in the community and he mentioned the names of others, but they were never on nay calls.
As far as I knew they had zero interest.
I even reached out to one of them and he had zero interest in any events beyond attending.

Confused I decided to have the call posted on GDO. I wanted to make sure that any person who had any opinion could speak.
I also wanted to make sure I was not exerting any undue influence.

At this point we had not voted on anything.

On the third call Willy declared that if we were not going to do it his way, he would not participate. I could not understand why, but each is free to do what they want.

Willy asked for yet another call to convince us to have it in July and to only follow his mandate.
When it was clear that we were not going to have a second vote he quit.

In a second private call, he told me that the agenda was already decided and we need to follow the plan.

I asked him who decided this for the community, and he was evasive.
I asked him why the people who were 'deciding' our events were not on any calls, he replied that they were burned in the past.
Not really sure why they could not come forward.

Then, last week the bomb hit.

Willy and a new group went ahead with their plan.

I asked Willy why the new group never posted or discussed if this was to be a community event.
Again he had no answer.

When Willy presented his plan, we thought he was looking for a consciousness, not a rubber stamp.

Why I am not brand new, I was not around for the past events.
I know there were issues with past events and people seizing control, or something like that.

I thought that any community support event was supposed to be discussed in the open.

I guess I was wrong we can all just do what we want.

I do hope we can still have the unconference. This new event has placed it in jeopardy. The Winter event will happen.
We are in the planning stages and will launch or site shortly.

As to why our group did not comment or clarify on the what was posted?

We have zero desire to cause any tension in the group.
Our belief is that you can call it anything you want.

We, of the Drupal Camp 11 and 12 wish Willy, Brian and Forest well with their event.
If you wish to help with the Drupal Camp 12 AKA mini-con, please join the list.
All are welcome. http://bit.ly/uNO71t

I posted this under my own volition because I believe ain the truth.
Magna Est Veritas, et prevalebit.

Scott Wolpow
Drupal Camp 12

Thanks

willyk's picture

Scott - Thanks for expressing your thoughts and concerns. I appreciate the time and effort you put into this. For those following the discussion, note that further details of the meeting/feasibility plans Scott's referring to are in the meeting agendas/minutes that I prepared in our collective Google Docs.

While obviously anyone is free to comment here, I recommend that we try to limit comments going forward to community members who share Scott/Alex/Joe's concerns (e.g., the 3-4 other team members involved). Getting these corners fully articulated seems pretty healthy and should help make for an informed dialogue in future. I'd especially like to see us avoid having things digressing or be argumentative, which would undermine our shared purpose/passion for Drupal.

  • WillyK

LoL

Alex UA's picture

That's all very considerate sounding, but you really need to address the specifics of what Scott says you've done, because as he describes it you've clearly violated the Drupal Code of Conduct: you've eschewed collaboration, disrespected the people you claimed to be working with, and were completely inconsiderate of the time others have put into this. In addition you failed to consult with the others in this group before you announced your new event.

I could go on, but as it's being described your behavior is not in line with the values of the Drupal community as a whole, and this event should not be allowed to remain on the front page or get listed on this site while you take such an aggressive and antagonistic stance against other members of the NYC community.

I know collaboration is a pain, but giving ultimatums and bypassing the community is not acceptable behavior. Giving lip service to listening and collaboration after trampling both under foot just shows how little respect you have for us all, and I really don't like to be dissed. I doubt you wanna diss me, so why don't you drop the bs and give us your side of the story?

Alex Urevick-Ackelsberg
ZivTech: Illuminating Technology

Replying Later Today & DDOC

willyk's picture

Alex - If it's okay, I will reply at the end of the day today, as I'd like to allow enough time for any others to present their concerns. In particular, apart from Joe, Scott and I, (i) at the May 21 vote on scope one other person present voted and (ii) on the May 14 scope vote timing one other person present also voted. Hopefully, those who voted, others who abstained from voting and others who might have missed the meeting will have time to express their concerns here, even if just with an anonymous +1 by your, Joe or Scott's comments. I've also e-mail those above who voted and posted on Twitter and on Facebook to get comments from any others who might share your concerns.

I don't want people to take sides (quite the opposite), but would like to have any many concerns on the table a possible. When replying, I will be certain to address the concerns raised thus far:

  1. Community Health,

  2. Compliance w/DDOC ideals/values, and specifically my personal conduct with regard to Alex's comments on considerate, respectful, and collaborative, and my efforts to consult, seek help appropriately, and step down considerately

  3. Transparency,

  4. Finances,

  5. Sponsorship,

  6. Event Naming,

  7. Event Scope (uncon, camp, mini-con),

  8. G.DO/NYC Sanctioning, and

  9. NYC Cohesiveness/Fracturing.

For the record, I'm a vegan zen buddhist and devout satyagrahi/pacifist, and I I didn't intend to diss you or trample/disrespect community values (quite the opposite) ... I apologize to you for doing so.

Just one point

ericG's picture

for the most part, I am trying to stay out of this debate. I fear that a very divisive situation was created by this fork and we as a community are at risk of fracture as a result. So I'm going to keep my participation for the most part one-to-one. I have not had the time to fully organize my thoughts and I want to make sure I'm in a good frame of mind when I reply to your private messages.

However, I feel I need to say one thing here. When you start talking about how only a few people voted and then you reached out to others on twitter, etc. to get more input it seems to are playing both sides of the line you drew.

When we tried to discuss certain issues on the mailing list, you shut down those debates saying that all debate had to happen in your conference calls. When the conference calls did not go with what you wanted, you reached out for input of others.

I feel that there was a lot of less-than-transparent maneuvering during the entire process which is why I stayed out of it -- and since it seemed clear that the majority of the organizing community was coming from a place I trusted and agreed with I did not see where it would do anyone any good for me to jump into the confusing calls.

I have to admit that I feel a bit worried about the future of the community and a bit stepped on by how you handled this over the past couple of months. This is going to take a long time to sort out and should have been handled with more concern for the health of the community and not the idea you wanted to push on it.

You demanded a process, everyone agreed to go along with that. Your own process led to a result you did not want. You then abandoned your process and are playing the failure of the process you put forth against your own desire to put on this event. That leaves me not wanting to participate much in this debate.

So with that, I will go back to trying to organize the unconference in an environment that has become unnecessarily very divisive, confused and competitive.

Sorry

willyk's picture

EricG - I just wanted to apologize for making you feel "stepped on". I had certainly not intended for that.

Scott and I reached out to you on Apr. 18 regarding holding a camp in the "summer months", and your reply on Apr. 20 was:

    "I'm still not totally in agreement with the logic of having them close together but you seem confident and I've been wrong before. So, let's do it and put this out there in a unified way to set a tone that these are indeed two events that will enhance each other.""

We had proceeded on this basis. However, had you been adamantly opposed to a summer event proceeding, then I likely would not have gotten re-involved in the DCNYC efforts.

I will try to address your other concerns more fully when I reply (i.e., "the lines drawn", "shutting down debates", "transparency" and "divisiveness").

  • Willy

My Reply

scottwolpow's picture

Yes, I said that. You are 100% correct. I also said "put this out there in a unified way".
But the DCNYC group did not agree, ergo it was not unified.

My only concern is that all the events are successful.

There is no reason to address, on my part, any other concern.

private email posted out of context, well done.

ericG's picture

Please, in the future, refrain from posting private communication between us publicly and out of context. Thanks.

this is a lot like Occupy

niccolox's picture

this description reminds me a lot of the Occupy movement.. especially here in Oakland

when OO was all the rage, "the process" was god. When the community started actually saying things certain private elite networks didn't like, such as "dont f#$king smash shops you idiots" they did an internal fork and did their own thing

and guess what, OO, like Humpty Dumpty, couldn't be put back together again

are they the same people?

This is a whole lot of brand

Tresler's picture

This is a whole lot of brand new information for me. I need a little time to process it. I was under the impression originally that this was a brand new event that hadn't been brought to the DrupalCampNYC comittee before originally, then after Joe's post I was under the impression that this was just a question of attendance, resources, and accounting.

At this point, I still think all three events can still happen (June unconference, This mini-con, and a late year event). I need to think some before I offer up any more to this conversation than that.

I agree Wiily

scottwolpow's picture

My sole purpose was to answer the questions people posted.

We all should agree that we must have 100% transparency on holding any community based events.
Private events of course are just that, private.
They do not need community input or support.

By no means do I want to promote anything but a healthy dialogue.

I do think that all community members have the right to comment.

I hope all will post positively, but failing that , please avoid attacks on well meaning people.

I firmly think if you do not like how things are going, roll up your sleeves and jump in.

My thoughts

ericduran's picture

:) Hey everyone,

So I've read the thread, I'm on the mailing list too even thought I barely (if ever) participate.

This is all very confusing. I, just like a couple of people on this list, assumed this was the smaller unconference that had been discuss before. But now I see this is a completely different event.

I hate to be the one to say this, but I think this separate event is bad for the community. Sorry :-(

The NYC community has had its share of issues in regards to hosting websites, accountability, transparency, etc....

That being said, the last DrupalCampNYC was one of our biggest camp and probably one of the most successful one. We had a website, mobile apps, a party. The attendees, sponsors, speakers all seems to have enjoyed it (I don't have any hard facts but I'm just talking about general word of mouth here :-p).

These all seems like stupid, petty thing, but this was not possible in previous camp because of issues this community had to overcome in order to make everyone involved comfortable in having all these "stupid/petty" things.

Sadly this event, whether being hosted by the same people that organized the last camp or not, is being promoted as a Drupal NYC event. Yet by the looks of it is not. Maybe is just a naming thing. I'm not sure.

I'm worry that this event is going to cause more issues in the NYC community and soon we'll be back to not having any of our petty things which the organizers of the last camp had to work so hard for.

Well that's my 0.02. As always people are more than welcome to ignore me :-p I was asked to share my concerns so I did :)

NYC Camp is a g.d.o/nyc Event

willyk's picture

Eric - NYC Camp is intended to be a Drupal NYC or g.d.o/nyc event, organized and operated by Drupal NYC group members/volunteers, and sponsored by supporters of the Drupal NYC community. Note that the base group of NYC volunteers/sponsors have already been arranged (we would not have announced NYC Camp without that in place), and same was arranged in a manner sensitive to the "issues" you raise. In this regard, NYC Camp is not a "separate" event.

In particular, the NYC Camp name is intended to avoid confusion with DCNYC events, which already involve a great uncon and a large camp under that branding umbrella (i.e., similar to how NYC Playdays and other events have different non-DCNYC names despite being similar to what other communities treat as camps and the BAR Camp origins of the naming convention).

As I will elaborate further in my reply to the thread, NYC Camp would help to ensure that both DCNYC events are a success and that the NYC community as a whole is stronger (e.g., see the top of this post where all g.d.o/nyc events were promoted when NYC Camp was announced).

Hopefully this provides some clarity, although I don't imagine it will change you assessment. Thanks for taking the time to providing your .02, it certainly will not be ignored and there is certainly no need to apologize as I was hoping people would express any concerns they have.

  • Willy

The Players

scottwolpow's picture

Un-conference (Drupal Camp 11)- Eric G is the chair, Amy, Annie Stone, Bob Phillips, Joe B and myself area assisting.

July Event- As far as I can tell Willy K, Brian Short and Forest Marr

Drupal Camp 12- Scott W (that's me) is the chair. Amy, Annie Stone, Bob Phillips, Joe B, Richard Baldwin and with help from a few others.

A Few Others?

willyk's picture

Scott - Can you please clarify who the "few others" are that were assisting? I ask in part because I worked pretty closely on the DCNYC stuff, and besides Father Shawn attending a meeting, I don't recall/see from the meeting minutes that there were any others present at the meeting or who had confirmed their participation.

I ask only because this is relevant to my reply to this the thread later today. In particular, it relates to my deep concern on my part that the 4-5 folks left involved at our meetings did not constitute a very diverse cross-section/quorum of the NYC community (i.e., that count excluding me and Annie who just joined last week), most of whom had after past events retreated from the planning process to the sidelines.

If that has changed in the last 10 days, and other participated at the last meeting then please let me know (i.e., particularly people that have participated at prior camps re-joining the process).

  • Willy

A few others.

scottwolpow's picture

Willy,
Go out and have a successful event. I plan to attend.

We are not competing because this is not a game. The only winners are the community.
See you at the meet-up.

Replying Tomorrow

willyk's picture

Gang - Apologies, but I will need to wait until tomorrow to post my reply to the thread. There is one key community member that I reached out to today regarding his concerns, and who indicated that he would reply tonight. He hasn't had a chance yet to do so yet, but I'd like us to get all the concerns on the table. I would ideally also like some time to consider his comments before I reply. So apologies for the delay, but I will reply tomorrow, not tonight as I'd hoped.

  • Willy

My Reply

willyk's picture

Gang - Below is my reply to the concerns expressed. I have done my best to provide as much clarity/insight as possible, while hopefully encouraging collaboration:

    1. Volunteers: NYC Camp is being run by an overall "Organizing Team" that includes 25 members with particular roles, with same involving an overlapping Planning Team (leading up to the event) and Execution Team (during the event). This Organizing Team is lead by our "Coordination Team", consisting of Myself, Brian and Forest. These 25+ team members consist of people who are not already working on DCNYC11/12 planning, but who will continue to attend/fully support those events (including me). Each team member has a discrete scope of involvement and can be relied upon to execute same. Note that a small contingent of the team is from outside the Drupal NYC community in order to reflect the broad scope of the event (see below). I have not listed the 25+ team members here as I don't want to draw lines/sides. I would simply encourage all Drupal NYC members to support the success of all our local events. Further information on how to participate will be posted on g.d.o soon. In short, NYC Camp will not be draining volunteer resources/momentum from other Drupal NYC events.

    2. Sponsors: Prior to announcing NYC Camp, our Organizing Team secured base funding for this event from initial sponsors (i.e, $12,500). This initial funding was sufficient to: (i) conduct the minimal scope event that NYC Camp organizers had contemplated and (ii) ensure that NYC Camp did not draw upon funds currently in the Drupal NYC account needed to continue funding the successful DCNYC events that generated such funds. Our initial sponsors had actually agreed to contribute up to $25,000 for NYC Camp; however, we felt that this was not the best approach and instead that (i) sponsorship should be opened up more broadly to ensure balanced representation by the community and (ii) that it would be best to preserve those extra sponsorship dollars in case DCNYC12 fell short in meeting its sponsor/budget needs this fall or alternatively for NYC Camp 2013 use. Our initial sponsors also agreed with this 'safety net' approach. It should also be noted that as NYC Camp proceeds in reaching out to other sponsors over the coming weeks, we intend to make it very clear that if a sponsor only has budget to support one or two Drupal NYC events, then we would ask them to only sponsor DCNYC11/12 and not sponsor NYC Camp. NYC Camp will follow a similar approach in future years. Although NYC Camp will deliver substantial value to sponsors, it will not be an overly 'corporate event' (in fact, 3 of our 5 initial sponsors wish to remain anonymous as they're products are confidential). Our view is also that more successful Drupal events in NYC (especially a large 3-5 day mini-con such as NYC Camp) will help produce more local Drupal projects and developers, which should in turn assist local sponsors with their business and ability to continue their generous support of Drupal NYC events. In short, NYC Camp should not be the drain on sponsorship resources that is mentioned in the concerns above.

    3. Money/Cash Flow: Some community members have raised concerns about allocation of money and cash flow for DCNYC events. In light of the above sponsorship approach, NYC Camp will in effect be a 'self-funded' event. Further, NYC Camp is being operated in a very fiscally prudent manner, in that we are not taking on any event scope without know that it's already funded (i.e., we are not depending on ticket/t-shirt sales, etc.). This approach ensures that we will not incur a financial loss, only an excess of sponsorship funds. WRT any such excess sponsorship funds, 90% will be donated to a Drupal initiative designated by the NYC Camp team ("Overflow Donation"), and the remaining 10% will be contributed back to the DA account for any purpose the NY Community chooses (NYC Camp organizers will have no say in the use of these funds). In the event that these excess 10% funds are not wanted for use by the Drupal NYC community or used within the 12-month period window required for tax purposes, they will be donated to the Drupal Association. The annual Overflow Donation will be publicly announced prior to NYC Camp and our raising sponsorship funds. For NYC Camp 2012, any Overflow Donation will be made to the VDC initiative chip-in. The Overflow Donation will vary year-to-year, and could be as little as a few dollars to potentially a few hundred/thousand, but will be kept to a minimum. In short, NYC Camp monies are handled in accordance with community values and NYC Camp should not hinder the cash flow for DCNYC11/12.

    4. Accounting: NYC Camp will like to follow the same financial accounting model as DCNYC, but would likely not require use of the credit card setup for DCNYC events. NYC Camp will be following the same transparent/primitive accounting system as Rich outlined, save that we will be producing an annual report made publicly available to summarize the event for attendees, sponsors and the Drupal community. A senior economist with actuary, bookkeeping and accounting experience in the government sector will be taking care of day-to-day bookkeeping for NYC Camp. However, if Rich has capacity, it would be ideal for him to also have R/W access to our financial materials for oversight audit/transparency reasons and to assist in coordination with the DA so they only have 1 point of contact. I would hope that as a g.d.o./nyc event, NYC Camp could use the NYC DA bank account in the same manner as other local events, and ideally avoid the need for a second account (i.e., hopefully we'll have many diverse events in NYC in future, w/out an account for each). In short, NYC Camp accounting will adhere to the traditional (or higher) NYC accepted practices.

    5. Scope: While the definition of Drupal events is a moving target, their appear to be 4 majors categories at present: Unconferences (1 day event, 50-200 attendees), Camps (1-2 days event, w/100-450 attendees), Mini-Cons (3-5 day events w/400-1500+ attendees), and Cons (1500-3500+). More specifically Mini-Cons appear to be emerging to fill the gap between Camps and Cons, and seem to involve all the elements of a Con (Training/Summits prior to multiple days of Sessions, Keynotes, and Evening Events). Three excellent examples of the MiniCon format are BADCamp (3+ days/TBD), Capital Camp (7-8 Days, Jul 23-30), and MDDS/Wisconsin Drupal Camp (4 days, Jul 26-29). NYC Camp will span 4-5 days once full breadth of our events are announced. As such NYC Camp clearly falls into the Mini-Con category, and its scope is very different/distinguishable from the other Drupal NYC events.

    6. Content Focus: NYC Camp is also clearly distinguishing itself from other DCNYC events by its strong focus on advanced content. While NYC Camp will involve a beginner and intermediate track, we are striving to reflect NYC's many advanced enterprise devs by running multiple advanced tracks (e.g., advanced, expert and genius/chx tracks). Ultimately the exact advanced tracks and sessions will be determined by Brian short and his sessions/program team, who have total autonomy over this area. In short, the content focus of NYC Camp is very different from other DCNYC events.

    7. Timing: As noted above, I reached out to Eric in April to confirm that we could do the events 1-month apart. The public group documents that I circulated between last October and this spring all also outline planning for proceeding with a summer event. Further my hesitant decision to participate in some recent planning with Scott, was predicated on exploring matters fully with a different approach and a broader representation of the past/group Drupal NYC organizers which never materialized (see below). Also note that if you compare dates/timelines, NYC Camp is actually ahead of pace relative to where both DNYC10 and BADCamp stood at this juncture last year, so trust that we will execute well.

    8. Naming: NYC Camp organizers felt that it was important for the event to be branded distinctly from the DCNYC events, given that it has the very different scope and focus noted above in #5 & #6. Further there is already some confusion between the DCNYC UnCon and Camp events, and we want to minimize that. It should also be noted that there is some debate as to the source of the "nice"/NYC name, but I will allow the relevant parts to discuss those 'micro matters' with Rich/Joe if they wish, and hopefully we can focus on the 'macro issues' here.

    9. Transparency: The NYC organizing team had planned to open a thread on G.D.O on Monday to discuss Drupal NYC Events and governance (similar to that which Tresler started yesterday). Further, most of the information conveyed in this post was to be posted to the NYC Camp web site on Monday/Tuesday. However, Alex made his post here before we had a chance do so and things have flowed from there. My suggestion would be that once we eventually finish the current discussion in this thread, that in due course we continue the broader discussion in Tresler's or another new thread. While I support NYC Camp and my conduct being discussed here, the issues at hand are older and broader than same, and warrant long term community consideration, effort and planning as Tresler pointed out. In short, we had planned additional dialogue/collaboration, and still hope this can occur.

    10. DCOC: I have at all times strived to comply with the DCOC, and thank Alex for raising his concerns regarding same (whistleblowers should be praised, not shunned). Specifically:

      a. WRT DCOC "Be Considerate, Respectful & Collaboration": As stated repeatedly, my first and foremost priority has been the health of the Drupal NYC Community. IMO, it's very sadddening that roughly 2/3 of the organizing team for the last DCNYC event did not return to participate this year (including me), notwithstanding an additional call out on g.d.o. While I'm certain that the DCNYC events will still proceed and be very successful, I withdrew from that process because I felt that the remaining 4-5 team members involved were not a diverse reflection of the community's wishes and they they wanted to pursue a direction that was not completely reflective of community values/preferences. For instance, note that at the most recent vote on a 1 vs 2+day event, I voted for the latter and I suggested that additional community/organizer outreach be done to see what sort of event our community of 2000+ members wanted to see occur -- this suggestion was ingnored despite ample time to do so with the fall camp being 6 months away. It was this disregard which lead me reach out on a one-to-one basis to the many community members which I did. I didn't do this a view to discouraging collaboration, but rather encouraging it. As noted above, I had already reached out to EricG regarding a summer camp, and my participation at Scott's request was based on pursuing at least some of the core objectives I'd outlined; otherwise I would be looking to contribute to Drupal in other ways/events. When I circled back to discuss this outreach feedback with DCNYC team prior to the NYC Camp announcement I was told flat out: "We are holding a one day main event and a pre-event for basic training. This is not up for debate or discussion. 2) We are not discussing the future planning of other of events at this point. 3) No explanations of one's past actions. The meeting will be for executive planning and establishing formats to move forward." In reply to a subsequent message following the the NYC Camp announcement, I was told "There is no reason to meet with us." Several members of the NYC Community expressly indicated that they I went above and beyond in meeting these 3 DCOC obligations. Please note that some of the suggestions I was reaching out to discuss with DCNYC planners still remain open ... i.e., Joe helping MC NYC Camp keynotes, Amy w/photography, Scott w/t-shirts, Bob w/volunteers, Shawn w/registrations, and Rich w/audit ... all limited-time commitments during the event. Vice versa, many NYC Camp team members are keen want to pitch-in as extra hands on the weekends of DCNYC11/12.


      b. WRT DCOC "Conflict Resolution, Uncertainty & Stepping Down": Some have mentioned "egos"/"agendas", I don't believe that I have been pursuing or pushing my own agenda. To the contrary, over the last year or two I have tried to reach out extensively to Drupal NYC and other Drupal community members to get a feel for the sort of event they would like to see in NYC. The response has fairly uniformly been that everyone want to continue to see the DCNYC events occur (including me), and that without question they would also very much like to see a large mini-con event like this occur and grow in NYC. It should be noted that I did not try to stop the fall DCNYC event from occurring, but rather just channel my efforts toward supporting a new complementary event, NYC Camp. In proceeding with NYC Camp, we have not discouraged the DCNYC events from proceeding, and have actually cross-promoted them from the 'get go' and even tentatively tried to help ensure a strong base of sponsorship for the fall event should their fundraising efforts need a hand. In short, I think its also telling that NYC Camp is strongly advocating all 3 events proceeding (DCNYC11/12 and NYC Camp). I strive to ensure that my agenda is dictated by the community, not vice versa as some have suggested here (although there are differing definitions of "the community"). WRT to mentions of secrecy, the DCOC says when asking a question that care must be taken to do so in an "appropriate place" ... which is what I endeavoured to do. If anyone that I spoke to feels otherwise, I'd ask them to speak up here (especially Tresler, who may feel misled). I also find it puzzling that as a first step Alex didn't just drop me an e-mail/GDO contact inquiry, as that would seem like a logical first step.

    While I could share more information/backstory in my defence, I think that it would just be divise/unhealthy and I would rather simply accept those criticism of me than do harm to the community or fellow members. Simply put, I turn to the words of Teddy R: I strive to be a perfect servant of Drupal's best interests, and "with all my heart and soul with every particle of high purpose that there is in me I pledge you my word to do everything I can to put every particle of courage of common sense and of strength that I have at your disposal and to endeavour so far as strength is given me to live up to the obligations you have put upon me and to endeavor to carry out in the interests of our whole people the policies to which you have today solemnly dedicated ourselves"". In short, if anyone else feels that I've violated the DCOC, I would encourage that to make there concerns known here if they have not yet done so, and the community can render its verdict.

    11. Cohesiveness: NYC Camp is absolutely not intended to be a "splinter" or "fork" of the NYC community (organizers, sponsors, volunteers or attendees) -- quite the opposite. NYC Camp is aimed at opening up new avenues for more organizers, sponsors, volunteers, speakers and attendees to participate in Drupal NYC events -- the absence of which has been problematic for some. Traditionally, we have a surplus in all 5 of these areas for all Drupal NYC events, and that is most certainly the case with NYC Camp and the overwhelming support received. I am hopeful that the conduct outlined above is sheds some light on NYC Camp's efforts to support a stronger, larger healthier Drupal NYC community & DCNYC events. Further, I think that there is little risk of community fracture given the small number of objections posted here (4-5 people) relative to the 20+ Drupal NYC members involved in organizing NYC Camp, the approx. 100 NYC Camp registrations received in 3 Days (despite the absence of a formal announcement), and a solid NYC Camp following on Twitter/Facebook and ... most importantly the apparent interest of all organizers to ensure that "all the events are successful". That said, I recognize/respect the concerns of this vocal minority, and am keen to see them addressed appropriately (ideally at an in person meeting), so that we can work through things and ideally all emerge healthier/stronger from this experience.

    12. G.D.O/NYC Sanctioning:. I believe that events being sanctioned by g.d.o./nyc are informally predicated on: organization/involvement of the event by Drupal NYC community members, general/majority community support for the event, and compliance with the values and ideals of the DCOC. I sincerely believe that NYC Camp and my conduct meet these 3 requirements. However, if based on my reply here the Drupal NYC Community does not concur, then NYC Camp should likely not proceed and I should most likely withdraw from the NYC Drupal group. I will leave that assessment up to the Drupal NYC community.

If you have managed to read this far with out falling asleep, clicking delete or slipping into a coma, thanks for doing so -- you're a total trooper and your time/attention are appreciated. Hopefully the above answers reply to some of Alex's original questions/concerns relating to leadership, money, meetings, involvement, feedback, trust, egos/hijacking, and community. If you feel my disclosure is not adequate, then please feel free to query further. To those who I may have angered/upset (e.g., Sam, Alex, EricF, Joe, Scott, ErciD), I am sorry ... not "buts" or qualifications to spoil the apology, just a straight up "I'm sorry". I defer to the Drupal NYC community organizers to instruct how we should proceed.

In closing, Drupal has given us all the good fortune to spend our days playing together in our wonderful collective (but fragile) community sandbox with the most amazing Drupal devs and code imaginable. I don't perceive the this as an entitlement, but rather as a revered privilege and the opportunity of a lifetime. I owe the Drupal community more than I can every repay to it. When Dries opened his DCon London keynote, he expressly called out NYC as a "prime example" of Drupal's promise. As New Yorkers, I suggest that we have an opportunity to come together and answer this call. As Eric Duran noted, in doing so we will run the risk of failing and digressing back to petty issues. However, to paraphrase Einstein, our challenges likely can't be overcome with the thinking that created them. With that in mind, I would ask that we allow DCNYC11, DCNYC12 and NYC Camp to proceed on the faith that we can rely on our collective character, integrity and collaboration to rise to the challenges at hand and ensure the success of these events and our shared passions for realizing Drupal's promise.

the more this goes on the more confused I get

ericG's picture

The more this continues the more confusing it all gets.

You say you are working "with the community" however it really seems you are working "in the name of the community" which is a very different thing.

You say you have sponsors, but do not give any information on who they are.

You say you have 25 people working with you, but when you were pushing this idea in the organizing group, none of those folks ever attended or put in their opinion.

You asked for a different process, many of us were uncomfortable with it but everyone agreed to give it a try. If you had been able to bring these, yet unnamed, 25 people into the meetings you yourself organized the decision could have gone your way and the divisive sillyness avoided.

At one of the meetings you organized, we all promised to never again pass along criticism with the tag line "a bunch of people say..." or "people are upset with x" unless the people themselves would step up and be accountable for their own criticism.

This group promise was made in the interest of avoiding divisive name calling. However, much of your communication about this invokes unnamed sources and "the community" in the exact way we all promised to avoid.

As a number of comments on this thread state, you don't seem willing to address the core issues being raised, you keep spinning things in tangential ways that divert from the discussion people are asking you to have.

The more confusion added to the mix the more the community is going to be hurt by this debate.

I personally will end my participation in this thread here. This discussion needs to move to a more appropriate venue: Hopefully we can use the upcoming unconference as a venue to debate and hash out some of these very large and very serious issues. See you there.

In unity and struggle,
--Eric

Truthiness

joebachana's picture

willy,

Thank you for posting this, since you make your thoughts and intentions known. I am gratified to hear that you have two sponsors that will cover your NYCCamp. I would request that you collect only the funds that you need on a camp, consistent with our goals of staying cash-neutral on camp events so as not to create a possible divisiveness in the community of where to spend/donate/give excess funds. I also think it is a great idea for you to keep a separate bank account for this event you are throwing, since it will simplify administration of this while we sort out these issues that have clearly forked the group.

A few points of concern:

  1. Here is the link to the DCNYC10 volunteer group.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AnpDisTb88A9dFZwNS12bk9hVDJ...

Please note that Carlos and Nadir signed up for things on that first planners meeting in Spring 2011 but ended up not being able to participate. Also, last year Mike Nichol's role was in setting up the infrastructure then he bowed out of participation for the remainder. That infrastructure part of the camp was managed by Brian so I do not know the exact nature of the issues but I'm assuming this was associated with dissent around how the servers should be set up.

In any event, of this group, only Robbie, Mark Reilly, yourself, Forest and Brian Short have not returned to camp planning. that is not 2/3, and also you should consider that among you, Mark Reilly did a huge amount of work on the design side and launch of the website, and Robbie did a great deal of work on the content side. Thus, to the current group that is working, the team is still intact with the addition of Annie and ericG back in the mix after a hiatus from DCNYC10.

Of that list, you claim that 2/3 have not returned back. Lets just be clear that you can't just say something and that makes it true, since your statement is an untruth.

  1. Sponsorship and transparency: You can't on the one hand say that your camp is going to be transparent in its reporting and in the same paragraph state that there are a few sponsors who will remain anonymous. I can't speak for others in the community, but I find that unacceptable. I want to know where money is coming from that is funding community events. Again, if it is a corporate event thrown by a few interested parties, by all means go for it. But I don't believe this should be an event that should be under the auspices of the DA unless there were full disclosure. Further, you can't on the one hand say you can generate all the revenues you need but then go back and say you're going to generate smaller donations from more companies, then use the proceeds to seed/fund other events. For what purpose? Control? Why would you go against all discussions that have gone on in the past few years, well before my involvement even, that the camps should be cash-flow neutral? If you really want DCNCY11 and 12 to be healthy, only collect that what you need, and from the fewest possible sponsors. We promise we'll do the exact same.

  2. Financial accounting/bookkeeping and transparency: You can't just say that a senior economist with actuary, bookkeeping and accounting experience in the government sector will be taking care of day-to-day bookkeeping, that's not good enough. There are people with those CV's who are serving long prison sentences for doing very corrupt things. I'm really hoping it is a great person because that is going to gladden my heart that you found someone to help, but the community deserves the name. Rich is a known person in this community and as you saw from his earlier post, he did this because someone had to, not because he had any designs on dollars or control. He's the perfect guy for that work. Further, asking him to do oversight adds undue hardship on him since if there are issues, then he has to be the one too arbit/remediate with your finance person which seems unfair. Again, in this case, if you create your own bank account, this is going to be a non-issue.

  3. In your statement within 10A, you wrote:

"While I'm certain that the DCNYC events will still proceed and be very successful, I withdrew from that process because I felt that the remaining 4-5 team members involved were not a diverse reflection of the community's wishes and they they wanted to pursue a direction that was not completely reflective of community values/preferences. "

Powerful writing, but it is untrue. The 6 members of the organizing team (that is three more than your organizing team, one of whom told me you 'roped' him into this, although he might have just been trying to be polite to me since we're friendly) are some of the most diverse people I've ever met, from different companies, backgrounds, religions, ethnicities, skill sets, and life stories. It is true that Eric and I work together now at DPCI, but the others work either at their own companies or for other Drupal shops. So why would you make such an abjectly false statement except to just foment doubt and increase factionalism in the community? And who are you or anyone else to say what the direction is of the community value or preferences? All we were trying to do was plan an unconference and a conference for later in the year with great speakers and learning opportunities. How can you possibly garner from that that we were not going to reflect community preferences? Honestly Willy, for the past few months you have been hammering down this vision of a few day event, and based on our bumpy experiences with the one day event, all we kept saying was lets get the one day done right, solid, just an ace event, and do it better, smoother, with less strife. Now where do you jump from that as a really important goal to we're not representing the community's wishes? It is just really upsetting.

Going on, you wrote:

"announcement I was told flat out: "We are holding a one day main event and a pre-event for basic training. This is not up for debate or discussion. 2) We are not discussing the future planning of other of events at this point. 3) No explanations of one's past actions. The meeting will be for executive planning and establishing formats to move forward."

This, too, is not truthful. we had already held several votes over several meetings, at YOUR request, and in each vote, the group came back with a 1 day minicon for later in the year. On the last vote we agreed to try to add a 1 day of training prior. Everyone was really getting frustrated with you. I in fact got short with you and I apologized to you both publicly and personally about that, but I was really getting frustrated since it seemed like you had an agenda.

Its easy for 2000+ people to vote for a 2 day, or 3 day or whatever minicon - but to organize and put on a professional event that has great sessions and is executed flawlessly? Thats up to the organizing group to decide what they can accomplish. I don't think anyone disagreed with your vision at all -- it is an exciting one. It was just that we agreed we should wait a year to do it really right.

When you wrote this:

"In reply to a subsequent message following the the NYC Camp announcement, I was told "There is no reason to meet with us."

I felt like this was something out of Fox News. You ommited an important fact here, namely that you had already announced that you were doing a camp that very day. The night in question was last Wednesday, we were having an unconference planning meetup last Wednesday and we saw your news and were just reeling. We had no information at all, and we needed to use the time to figure out what to do. You had a live website up with the domain name Rich thought of, all the content written, a g.d.o page, a Facebook page, and obviously a COD implementation already pre-implemented and ready to go. You had been working on your minicon all along Willy. You were going to do it no matter what, and you're conveying to us, who are still trying to methodically plan out together the best course for the two camps this year, that we're not representing the interests of the community when we're still garnering that information?

Again, you can't just declare something without giving the full facts.

Then you write this statement:

"It should be noted that I did not try to stop the fall DCNYC event from occurring, but rather just channel my efforts toward supporting a new complementary event, NYC Camp."

If you look back to the volunteer sheet from the start of the year, you clearly said you couldn't take on any other role other than scribe and what I was calling the "Josephus" whose role was to just keep taking notes of what went well and what didn't so we could improve on future camps. Now you are making it seem like you had other roles that you just didn't complete but rather focused your efforts on the NYCCamp. In essence, you had already determined we were going to have the NYCCamp, but why in heavens name would you ever say something like 'not try to stop" the fall event from happening when it was one of the best camps we've ever had, or at least that is according to the attendees on the surveys. For those who hadn't seen the DCNYC10 surveys and didn't get to go to the camp, its worth scanning this document (again, keeping documentation of the past is one clear way to keep transparency. SAYING you'll be transparent but not providing the information is the opposite of that):

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AsIw7NWkMqD-dHJwQ0htNHZzOUJ...

Back to your writing:

"we have not discouraged the DCNYC events from proceeding, and have actually cross-promoted them from the 'get go' and even tentatively tried to help ensure a strong base of sponsorship for the fall event should their fundraising efforts need a hand. "

You are taking a paternalistic attitude that has background in the meme you are creating that our group is illegitimate since you falsely stated that we don't have the 2/3 quorum that you cite. We don't need your assistance in gathering the funds. We ask only that you gather the funds you need and no more, or you WILL destabilize the community and create a controlling power that is exactly what we were told to avoid by forebears in the community who did planning of these in the past.

re: Sanctioning: Your event should proceed Willy, and everyone hopes it is not only going to be a smashing success but that it will go on for years as a NYC institution. I have no opinion about whether it should be on g.d.o or not, thats for others to decide. My only issue here is that you do not commingle any of your funds or legal commitments with our work in NYC Drupalcamp planning. Thus, if you can keep your books, your bank accounts, your accounts receivable and payable distinct from our work, and if you can assure us that you are not going to overreach on your fundraising BEYOND that which you need, then our groups not only can co-exist, but may very well likely collaborate in the future.

As far as the less-than-veiled digs at me or my fellow organizers, kindly stop them. They're transparent as day and they are hurtful.

Joe Bachana
First Employee at DPCI
1560 Broadway
NY, NY 10036
212.575.5609
www.dpci.com

Meetup is tonight

ezra-g's picture

This discussion needs to move to a more appropriate venue: Hopefully we can use the upcoming unconference as a venue to debate and hash out some of these very large and very serious issues.

The DrupalNYC meetup is tonight and many key 'Camp organizers are signed up to attend, so hopefully we can have an effective start at discussing these issues in person.

tonights meeting

joebachana's picture

Scheduling an important meeting like this on the fly for tonight is not fair. I personally have to be at my childrens' school for an end-of-year art night presentation by them. Since willy and I are at the epicenter of this, you guys having that meeting tonight without me is really going to be depressing.

I would like to believe that we could schedule this for a future date for the interested parties, without co-opting tonight's meetup and so that everyone, myself included, can plan our schedules accordingly to be there.

Joe Bachana
First Employee at DPCI
1560 Broadway
NY, NY 10036
212.575.5609
www.dpci.com

It's just a discussion.

forestmars's picture

I feel obliged to point out this community has a regular designated monthly meeting, where these sorts of conversations happen (regardless whether someone suggests such) in addition to our forum here. My sense is that is was obvious to many if not all the interested parties here that this would be a topic of discussion at this evening's meeting.

And of course the meeting itself was not scheduled on the fly, it happens every month on the same day. I agree that the topic itself is important, however I'd like to encourage those who are interested in important topics to participate regularly, whether or not they think there is going to be some sort of critical vote that affects them personally.

I'd also rather not see this issue framed as having certain people at the epicenter. This is primarily a discussion of group process, and I am concerned that the main issues have already become too clouded by personalities.

Also, while I am sympathetic to anyone who feels that important decisions might be made at a meeting they didn't plan on attending, however I'm fairly confident this is not going to happen. And really, I doubt that anyone in our group has the power to stop this from being discussed this evening, again whether someone suggests as much or not.

However it is true that this will likely be an important discussion, as this is an important issue that is currently impeding the group's ability to function, as well as it's reputation in the larger Drupal community.

meetup is just a meetup, not the community's plenary

ericG's picture

Just one point of clarification: As has been discussed many times in the past, the meetup is one of the community's regularly scheduled events. It is no more "the community's monthly meeting" than the playdays, beers or other events.

This meeting is absolutely

forestmars's picture

This meeting is absolutely designated as a regular monthly meeting. You're correct that it doesn't have a superlative official designation, however it actually is more of the community's monthly meeting than say, a handful of Drupalers getting together in a bar to drink beer. In fact, the drinking event is specifically intended to be agenda free (as explicitly stated in the event description) while the monthly meetup serves as the main forum for addressing issues such as are being discussed, in person.

I do understand that other events, such as the unconference also give us an opportunity to to meet and discuss issues and concerns, and I don't have a problem with that. In fact I think it's healthy, as long as we can expunge the chimera of officialdom that seems to loom over how ALL of these meetings are perceived. In that I think we're in agreement.

And I do sympathize with those who take issue with location or entrance policies of the meetup (or any event) not limited to real name, phsycial ID scans, etc. As a group we have endeavored to accommodate those concerns, and also to make clear that the group's inherent organisation is a heterogenous fabric of events, online discussions and interpersonal relationships all unified by a shared passion for Drupal.

re: tonights meeting

ezra-g's picture

Scheduling an important meeting like this on the fly for tonight is not fair.

I'm simply saying that the meetup is an opportunity to start discussing these issues, not a definitive end-all meeting of any kind. It's hardly "on-the-fly -- Today's meetup is on the regularly scheduled 1st Wed of the month slot, and was specifically announced on May 27.

re: tonights meeting

joebachana's picture

Hey, Ezra, no worries, I know what you meant. My point wasn't that this monthly regularly scheduled meetup (which I know about and attend as much as I can) was scheduled on the fly but rather the intent to schedule a meeting to discuss the matters on this thread would be rushed and unfair without all the participants. Everyone should be in the room, particularly since there's so much hearsay referred to in thread and a meeting with just some of the people is just going to create more of that.

Wish I could go just to enjoy the meetup in general since they're awesome (and without strife, which is a relief). But family first and this thing was scheduled in my kid's school months ago, end of school year thing.

Joe Bachana
First Employee at DPCI
1560 Broadway
NY, NY 10036
212.575.5609
www.dpci.com

one last important question

ericG's picture

At one point in the debate, before you forked away and announced this event, you have brought up an idea that worried me, so I have to ask this question: Will this be an all volunteer-run event or do you intend on paying some people for their participation/effort/assistance?

30 Volunteers

willyk's picture

Yes, NYC Camp is as an all volunteer-run event being worked on by 30 volunteers

just to be clear

ericG's picture

there's been a lot of dancing through grey areas in the past few weeks so let me rephrase this a bit for complete clarity:

There will be no money spent on labor other than that put in by the staff of the venue (paid for by the venue itself) and by the company providing food (paid for by the vendor of the food itself). No other labor will be purchased in order to facilitate, organize or run the event. No one will be paid to make presentations or otherwise be subsidized by sponsor funds.

It that 100% correct?

Thanks for putting up with the nit picking on this, but I want to make sure we're all clear.

I'm looking forward to the list of volunteers and sponsors becoming less of a secret as well.

100% Correct

willyk's picture

That is 100% correct ... And to be especially nit-picky/detail oriented, note that sponsored funds are covering travel costs of sprint leaders/organizers/key sprinter and same were earmarked for that purpose when committed. As noted earlier in my post, an annual report with financial will be publicly available for review after the event.

how many days?

ericG's picture

There's contradictory information on this post, the homepage of your event's site and on
http://www.nyccamp.org/news/announcing-nyc-camp-2012

This post states:
July 20 to 22, 2012

the headline that shows up on the homepage of your site and the post linked to above states states:
July 20 to 21, 2012

But the first paragraph of that post states:
July 19 to 23rd, 2012

so which is it? is this a 2 day event (20-12); a 3 day event (20-22) or a 5 day event (19-23)

jdonson's picture

Please use nyccamp.org for all event details.

Meanwhile, whether for this event or for future ones,
I have started a discussion about how to organize related topics
so that there are possible tracks that serve all Drupal Subject Matter Experts (SMEs).

Please help flesh out some hot topic sets for all major expert types....

http://groups.drupal.org/node/239053

Thank you!

Jeremy Donson
Database and Systems Engineer
New York City

Keep it coming!

Alexander Allen's picture

To willyk, forestmars, and all the wonderful people that contributed to this event, my most sincere thanks goes to you for all the time that you put into this gathering. I had a great time, keep the good stuff coming.

Glad you had fun!

rmenes379's picture

It was great fun this weekend! Busy and crazy, but fun!

Hopefully we can rock even harder next year!

You can't have a left brain without a right brain. Keep them both going!

Sad I missed it :-(

MacRonin's picture

After signing up early, I'd been looking forward to the NYCcamp for a while. Unfortunately at the last minute work pulled me out of town and I missed it.

The schedule of sessions looked great. Hopefully there are videos for those of use who couldn't make it.

Thanks again for putting it on.