Setting the group focus straight again

We encourage users to post events happening in the community to the community events group on https://www.drupal.org.
Gábor Hojtsy's picture

Yesterday, here at Drupalcon Barcelona 2007, we had a BoF to discuss organization of bigger events, like this conference we are here to attend. That ignited a lot of good ideas, which I hope to share with you soon. And of course it also raised the need to have a working group here for DrupalCon organizers, especially to share and give away their experience, so new organizers don't need to start everything over.

Being a (hopefully) good player, I was looking through the complete list of groups, and noticed that the existing "Drupal Camp" group was somwhat fitting the bill. The description said this is an organizer focused group, but there were two odd things: 1. event announcements posted here (with which admittedly I was also evil with), 2. courseware discussion going on. I talked to Gregory Heller, the group manager here, and he agreed that we need to clean up the situation. So I sat down and moved out all the events from this group (the event calendar RSS feed itself is perfect to catch all new events!), and also moved all courseware discussion to the actual courseware group, which was supposed to carry those.

To decrease any possible confusion, I also renamed the group to "Drupal Event Organizers" (as suggested by Gregory), so only organizational issues are posted, no new event announcements. (Remember you don't need to pick a group to post an event announcement, you can just post the announcement on its own). I did not modify the URL alias, because whether that is considered a good idea is not yet known (it would break the existing group URL, but possibly it would not cause more widespread issues).

This basically means that we are after DrupalCon organizers, regional Drupal event organizers, local Drupal Camp or Drupal Conference organizers and people who'd like to do booths and sessions at related events, and need some help or can share details. We are not after organizing training, announcing events, informing people about program updates, etc. I think this pretty well covers the original intention of the group and there are better places to do other things.

Don't worry about all the event information now only accessible in the event calendar (there was a very small number of events posted here anyway, compared to what we have in the calendar). I volunteered to take care of making events more usable and visible on groups.drupal.org, which I hope is not that big of a task, it is just that noone run with it until now. I think this is important for the project, for the local groups and for the organizers too. Let's show the world, that we are bigger, then they think so :)

So action points for now:
- share findings about bigger and smaller Drupal events here (post wiki pages) - Gábor (and hopefully Roberto) does for DrupalCon Barcelona
- make the events more visible and usable on groups.drupal.org - Gábor tries to make a plan, outline the stuff and see what is doable sooner, what is doable later

Comments

Groups Event Bug

starbow's picture

Hi Gabor,

If you are overalling events on groups.d.o, it would be great if you could do something about the bug that resets the event's month back to January when the event is edited. I keep forgetting about it when I edit BDUG announcements, and then the announcement is functionally gone from the calendar.

Thanks,
-tao

sure

Gábor Hojtsy's picture

This is on the agenda, and a lot more improvements, as soon as we find ways to bring this forward on the site.

Thanks!

Boris Mann's picture

This is great, Gabor. I would go ahead and change the URL.

Except....drupalcamp.com currently redirects to that group URL. I'm not sure who owns it, but ideally it should end up being on drupal.org DNS control and we can do CNAMEs. Looks like Noel Hidalgo owns that.

For a rule of thumb:
* a camp is a locally organized event, and is typically between 50 - 150 people; it is run in the local language
* a con is a major, international event, co-organized with the Drupal Association and is typically 250+ people; it is run in English

The interesting thing about both is that they cater mainly towards current Drupal users, with a camp having more "hello, welcome to Drupal" sessions, and a con usually has...none. Where do evaluators go to find out more? That's a bit like the DrupalShow that was open to all, except we didn't have a ton of intro sessions, how tos, or stuff like booths set up to demo and such.

I had asked before about the potential for something in between, and also the thought of larger regional gatherings. E.g. a Drupal Hungary or Drupal Canada etc. event. This makes a lot of sense for smaller populations (Canada) or the denser areas with a specific language (like Europe).

new URL, camp format

Gábor Hojtsy's picture

Sure, we plan to change the URL, and already have two path aliases point to the same group. Unfortunately Drupal picks up the camp URL and not the event-organization one. Moshe notes that fixing this feature request would help, but this is not for D6 but for D7 now: http://drupal.org/node/147143 Also, because this group is for organizers, it might not be a good idea to redirect drupalcamp.com here (although the camp format mashes organizers and participants more).

As far as I know a camp not only refers to a size and language orientation, but also to a format, right? I imagine what we call a Drupal Camp is like the BoF rooms in Barelona (but with bigger rooms). You have a big whiteboard with a matrix, and people volunteer to do discusssions, sessions and meetings in the available rooms. Wikipedia calls camps user generated conferences. That's a huge difference to things like the Hungarian Drupal conference, which apart from being user generated have all the properties of a Drupal Camp (local community, same language, money constrained organization, small venue, etc). Over here, the camp format does not work (people will not come if we don't have a fixed, inviting program schedule), so it might not be a good idea to call our conference a camp, just to confuse people. We tried to get people do lightning talks at DrupalCon Hungary 2007 but so far have no success in attracting people even for those small "user generated sessions".

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