Who is active?

I am/was somewhat active.

From what I've seen online, other major cities have their Drupal groups maintained by Drupal shops. They incorporate it in their business as a Question-&-Answer/ networking opportunity for Drupal enthusiasts and potential Drupal customers alike. There is a podcast with LevelTen somewhere(modulesunraveled.com?).

There aren't that many Drupal shops in Houston.
http://emunications.com/ in West(ish) Houston.
http://www.osscube.com/ in NW
Schipul.com no longer does Drupal, and are strictly python / their custom CMS. Nice guy met him at the python meetup.

jhr

Houston has always had more people like me who use Drupal in-house than actual shops. We used to have representation from Hearst, NASA, Waste Management, etc.

We used to have a pretty decent turn out at our meetups too. At some point just before we hosted the SW Drupal Summit we were consistently getting 20+ people each month, but now a lot of the larger entities that were using Drupal are no longer using it, like Hearst (Houston Chronicle), for example, and our numbers started to dwindle to the point where we were lucky to see 5 people at a meetup. The Summit was also a good illustration of the (somewhat frustrating) lack of local interest in Drupal, as we had more attendees from both Austin and Dallas than from Houston even though it was held here.

I wouldn't mind getting something together again. I know there are a couple people like me out there who are still involved in the Drupal community, but just not locally.

Being a freelance consultant, it is hard for me personally to find time. However, the Drupal group is great for knowledge sharing and so I can see what is and what is not being developed. Katherine, as always, has the sharpest eye as to trends and she knows the pulse of the people. A lot of what she says rings true from observation. That being said, I need to get with Houston people as I have an acquaintance that is looking to hire some Drupal developers (in Houston / from Houston) so need to get with someone.

Drupal in Fort Bend County (Southwest of Houston) is alive and well!

I also attended the Houston Drupal User Groups but found traffic to be a really a huge problem. Sometimes it would take me longer to get to the location than the actual meet-up lasted.

Let me propose a few considerations.

• I think we'll be stronger if we can have a larger group to draw from for ideas, presentations, etc.. So can we refer to ourselves as the Houston Area Drupal Users Group if "Houston" only presents a problem?
• I think rotating locations is a great idea. That means the drive will be worse for some depending upon the particular location. So what can we do about also setting up a video feed of the meeting? Maybe something as simple as a Google Hangout, WebEX, or GoTo Meeting so others can attend? Two or three laptops at a meeting might provide enough audio coverage for the remote attendees.
• If we rotate locations I would suggest standardizing the actual locations, like maybe four (North, East, West, South) assuming we have people in each of those areas. This this gives us regular locations to remember and not revolving ones.
• If possible, we should rotate our meeting agendas so it's not just about coding but the entire web development process.

How do those sound?

Looks a few of us are in the Galleria area :). We have conference rooms available here to do meetings as well. I'll be honest that I don't have enough time at the moment to put something together but if someone else does they are welcome to use our space for the conference. We can use Google Hangouts and anyone else can remote in. You can check out where we are located on our website.

We are located by 59 and Regency square....We provide drupal solutions and nodejs based cloud solutions....

Lets do a meet :D, We can accomodate up to 50 people...everyone won't have a chair tho

But I'm so much of a Drupnewbie... :p

My name is David Stagg and I own a company called New American Creative. I employ Drupal-based solutions (development-wise), but I also develop for Wordpress; it's all about picking the right tool for the job. I also do a bunch of design, which of course can be applied for use on any CMS.

I used to be the Creative Director at Schipul before parting ways amicably to start this company. It is true that Schipul moved to their own proprietary technology (a Python-based, nonprofit-focused CMS called Tendenci) and have all but abandoned the Drupal arm of their business. (They're still very good people, just an internal shifting of focus.) I wanted to remain in the open source realm as it has provided me a wealth of opportunity throughout my life; hence, the departure.

Having worked extensively with both Wordpress and Drupal, I try to champion the open source movement whenever I can (and not necessarily "just a Drupal movement"). When I led an open conversation with Dries and Matt (from Wordpress) in 2011, I couldn't agree more with their predilection: Open source gave freely to me, so I do my best to give freely back whenever I can.

I would love to see a larger meet-up, and I echo the sentiment of what others have been saying: The location and parking seemed to always prevent me from attending. The Houston UX Happy Hour does a good job of switching it from place-to-place each month and they have a great turnout. (Granted, it's more for socializing than for educating.)

I look forward to meeting some of you at upcoming monthly happy hours/meet-ups/grocery shoppings. As a front-end developer by trade, there are oftentimes I need help with heavy (programming) lifting and I'm sure there are reliable module developers and programmers I can lean on I just haven't met yet.

Regardless of the personal goals of each one of us, nothing will happen if we are not united :).

So lets start something!!!

I met Matthew earlier this week and we had a nice chat!! Some ideas where just chatted about but I think they are worth trying.

1. Drupal Houston Showcase, even though I agree with David in the sense I champion open source (have been doing it for the last 15 years or so) this is a druapal group, so lets focus. The best point I liked from Matthew's idea, it has to be a selective showcase(if the word works in there) not every site should go there, only really well graphically designed websites. Since everything goes through the eyes, I think it makes sense, and that can be a point of reference when a customers asks you "who uses that weird named software, drop all?"

2. We should decide on a steady meeting schedule without compromise... if you show up, you show up, if not.. well, it didn't happen. At least people will know that if they show some place(where?) at a certain date and certain hour, even without checking on the group, chances are someone is there....

3. Very nice helping each other and so, but that can be done through so many ways!!!! including, well, this forum, so even though that is one main goal of a group, it is clear that many here have companies and what we need is to have some business development. Now, I am new, and just poking around but this is my feeling: HOuston don't know or like drupal. Ad I think the hardest task at hand is that, we dont need to tell each other about the greatness of the CMS, but as a grou we should start going out with the word of the Drupal!!!!

Colleges, for an example... Lone Star college calls their web development modules about CMS Wordpress I and Wordpress II, just there is a need to help change that.

so my proposal is start looking into:

a. Making seminars/presentations for web development students at different colleges or universities, spreading the knowledge of drupal.

b. Trying to contact organizations or clubs or associations that have regular meetings and is attended by company owners and see if we can get presentations about internet presence and the advantages of using a CMS and of course drupal. (Eg, Rotary club tends to invite people just for general knowledge of the members and most of them own small businesses).

c. professional organizations.

I don't know.. I will need help to get this round up.. but do you get my feeling??

so, please, comments!!!!!

I am from north or houston i would like to be part of drupal group meetup,camp or anything!

Oh, camoatech, regarding Colleges and Universities - I think that's a great area to interface with. In fact, over the past year I have mentored four different graduate level capstone projects at UHCL, all four were Open Source focused and three were Drupal / SEO related projects.

I've been thinking that the "real" skills many computer science students need coming out of college (or even high school) relate to proper workflow definition / operation. Improved familiarity with SVN and Git for version control systems, and even things like Unfuddle and GitHub for online repository management where they can cooperate with a team on an effort (or even just recover projects easily if their computer dies). That and better skills with client relationship management, as in the Open Source world in particular, we are ALL salesmen and evangelists, even if we prefer to focus on development.

I would also love to see some of the UNIX / System Admin classes around evolve, or create new classes, which embrace more command line linux operations for MySQL, SSH / SCP, PKI key generation and management, SVN / Git tips and tricks (triggers, etc), proper configuration of dev / test / prod environments, bare bones (virtual) machine configuration, etc. Lots of things I've been intimately more involved in over the past few years. Heck, even good training on VIM, Emacs, and other modal editors which really improve development speed over non-modal 'word-processor' editors. I would love to see a curriculum explosion in the Open Source side of the computer science / computer information systems worlds.

And I would love some place on this side of town to interface with instead of having to be at UHCL for capstone mentoring. I like UHCL, but on days I'm not already down at NASA for other meetings / activities, its a real hassle to drive an hour each way just for a team meeting that may be 30 mins if it is a light week. With the way work has changed the past 6-18 months I'm more dynamic around town with different clients, and working remotely, so my only dependable schedule is my home base around Kingwood :) Maybe I need to make some new acquaintances at the Lone Star College campus nearby.

Perhaps you all could 'barter' developing a new site FOR the Village Association? Something to demonstrate the benefits of having an active DUG in the Village.

I'm good as long as we don't meet on the 2nd or 4th Thursday. In addition to being the Webmaster for the City of Baytown I am also in charge of the TV Station and have to air the City Council meetings.