Calling all Local User Group Organizers

The Auckland Drupal meetups organise on mettup.com too and have grown from 6 to 30 in just a few months. Meetup.com seems to be great at getting people interested in events who have not previously attended. How do we get better integration between gdo and meetup? So that events created on one site show up in the other site and vice-versa.

Hi guys -

Vancouver, Canada checking in here. We've been in sort of a transitional period lately. The group is old (I've been attending for about 3 years, and it was around before that), but the company that used to host the meetups downsized a while back, and then we also lost our favourite alternate tech meeting space shortly after.

Also, some of the key figures in the local community have moved onto other things, and just now are new people starting to come together and rally a bit more.

I was a co-organizer of our last DrupalCamp here in summer '08, which pretty well burnt me out on any major event organizing for quite a while (I've been working on Docs stuff instead) but I'm still one of 2 group admins. Luckily we've got a bit of a new model here for camps in the Pacific North-West now after Seattle held the amazing PNW Drupal Summit in the fall - this is a more developer oriented event (with a preceding event focused more on end users), that we now plan to rotate between Seattle, Vancouver, and Portland each year. We hope this will let us better share the responsibility of organizing these events and hopefully avoid burnout only doing one each 3 years.

Vancouver is up this fall, and a group from the Surrey User Group (a branch of the Vancouver User Group, in a suburb of Vancouver) has taken the lead on the Summit planning for this year with a bunch of helpers from the larger group.

As for the Vancouver group, though there was a bit of a lull, the meetups have picked up again, rotating various venues, and I've personally experimented with hosting a couple coworking events, which have been quite fun, but not super well attended. Vancouver just uses the g.d.o, but Surrey also uses Meetup.

Colorado has 4 meetups happening now. Denver, Boulder and Colorado Springs happen each month and Grand Junction happens somewhat irregularly.

Boulder had an event similar to Vancouver this fall losing space and some of the people who organized/provided content, but is now in a more permanent venue at the library which works fairly well.

Denver keeps rolling along, more or less as does Colorado Springs.

We are in the midst of planning Drupalcamp Colorado for 2010 that is tentatively June 12th/13th in downtown Denver (don't buy your train tickets just yet - we are looking into one other venue which might change the date).

We do tend to use both Meetup.com and groups.drupal.org. At the beginning of meetings I like to ask where people heard about the event to know which marketing methods work. Lots of them find it on both the Colorado meetup.com and groups.d.o, so we keep doing both. We sometimes also cross-post to other mailing lists when we have a meeting that is particularly well suited to those people (i.e. new folks who are non-profits or something).

These are valuable tips, much appreciated.

It sounds like many groups have gotten a boost from using Meetup, and I capitulated and posted our meeting on Meetup (http://www.meetup.com/Montana-Programmers/calendar/12621232/) but I have several reservations

• Cost: Meetup is $72 every six months, while g.d.o. is free
• Dogfood: Meetup isn't doing anything that can't be implemented in Drupal, although they have rolled it into a nice package. IMO Meetup has a more attractive look and less intimidating presentation than g.d.o which is a win, but again that could be solved with some theming/UI work.
• Duplication: Doesn't make sense to me to do only Meetup and ignore g.d.o., since that's where many new interested people will come through. We've already seen that in Montana, where folks from Bozeman and Great Falls found us through g.d.o. Therefore each event will need to be double-posted and you have 2 totally separate systems for RSVP, sending announcements, discussion thread on the event, etc.

In the end the issue is reaching the largest number of interested people, so we should probably use Meetup, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc as well as g.d.o. Just takes a lot of time!

Looking forward to more discussion and input from experienced group leaders regarding meeting format, content, etc. I'll definitely report back from our first couple meetings and let you know how it went!

– Andy

We had our 2nd official Western Montana meetup Tuesday evening, fewer than two weeks after the first one. Only nine people had RSVP'd but we ended up with 17 people! They really came out of the woodwork, with several Drupal n00b's present, so this is already a great sign.

After introductions we decided to do a "what's Drupal good for" impromptu presentation: attendees made a list of the kind of sites they wanted to see (news & media, nonprofit/social action, ecommerce, social networking, photo galleries, etc) and a few of us ran through some high-profile Drupal sites in each of those categories, as well as some of our personal sites. I was nervous that it wouldn't be as compelling as a prepared presentation, but apparently people loved it, as you can see from the comments on Meetup and g.d.o.

Because we have folks ranging from complete n00bs to experienced developers, we've decided to do two meetings each month: one will have a 'beginner's track' presentation on Drupal basics to help newcomers get comfortable, and the other meeting will be open to presentations on anything, including more advanced topics. I've noticed people have lots of questions and there are people eager to answer them, so it's important to leave enough unstructured time after the presentations so people can interact/clump together informally.

Evan Lovely, an experienced Drupalista, has offered to set up individual Drupal sandbox installs on his Dreamhost account for anyone in the group who wants to get started playing around, a wonderful offer (he's going to show me how he does it using Drush) and I also suggested people try the Acquia Stack installer for a quick way to get up and experimenting.

It's so exciting to see this coming together, looks like we really have the embryo of a vibrant Drupal community here!

I really appreciate Doug starting this conversation, hoping to continue it!

– Andy