Update: We started this conversation based on creating a camps.drupal.org specifically for the planning and announcement of DrupalCamps. The thread has now been moved over to a discussion of improving groups.drupal.org to better help meetup and event organizers.
If you hold Drupal meetups, Drupal Camps, Drupal Jams, Drupal * please get involved as we are discussing the features that you so that you can focus on the organizing and not on the technology.
Old Topic
I'd like to start up a discussion on the creation of a new site for Drupal.org. Camps.Drupal.org. I've had this discussion multiple times via emails and I would really like to bring it out in the public so that we can hash it out as a group.
decision: camps.drupal.org is a bad idea... we're talking about improvements to groups.drupal.org
I've watched numerous groups from around the country recreate a new website for each and every DrupalCamp that they do because groups.drupal.org doesn't provide the necessary functionality. I 100% agree with everyone that has done this but what I'd like to do now is figure out how we can create a tool that provides that necessary functionality to run a DrupalCamp, DrupalJam, etc.. I think a central place to plan, organize, register and hold a DrupalCamp will help the marketing as well as the attendance of the camps.
The momentum is to encourage more DrupalCamps and I want to figure out if we can create a simplistic tool that everyone can use so that organizers spend more of their time on recruiting knowledgeable speakers, encouraging attendance instead of spending hours on creating a website.
So this is what I think.
Standard Drupal install
OG for each Camp (event enabled)
--Wikis for various organizing pages (sponsors lists, food lists, etc. etc.)
--OG Registration (just sign up for the group)
--ability to export the attendance (CSV or other)
--Forum for camp discussion
--Session proposals (CCK type? or simply in the forum.. maybe steal what's on drupalcon.org)
I know I can think of several other items that are useful but these are ones off the top of my head. Most of this code is written and the logistics figured out (Drupalcon.org is using it right now, Badcamp created it, etc. ).
I understand this would take a lot of work but I honestly don't think that is a problem. The folks in NYC have already discussed making this a group project and I'm sure we can rope in some other groups to help create this.
My big question is....
Is this useful?
Or
Does community prefer having and creating their own individual websites?
Comments
Own websites
My guess is that one of the following is true for most camps:
I would say that if more things are needed here on groups.drupal.org to support camps better, to draw up a list and see if we can't implement them here. Off the top of my head, the ability to "susbcribe" to events would be good. Adding more websites to maintain probably won't help.
HOWEVER....working on making a Drupalcon / conference organizing install profile is probably a good goal, too.
Considerations for a Combination of Both?
Having offices in multiple geographical locations, I like the idea of the Camps.Drupal.org site. That said: I also know that individual groups like the idea of their own site, and any solution needs to take into consideration the needs of the local group as the priority.
From a “we would like to be a sponsor, and send speakers standpoint” we should reflect on the problems the NYCgroup has with this very issue. Somewhere buried under 5,000 emails about “what to build” or “what not to build”, is an offer to sponsor the event and help in other ways. We are doing our best to make sure that offer doesn’t get lost, but it would have made things a lot easier if they started on a site like Camps.Drual.org and then migrated to their own site.
Jeff Badger
right here
i really don't think it is wise for drupal.org to splinter into too many speciality sites. lets start a dialogue and a feature list instead of saying groups.drupal.org doesn't have the features we need. what are those features? what are your ideas for integrating them into this site? i want to make this site work for events like a drupalcamp. i want each group to have multiple homepages with custom layouts with panels. and exporting attendees is a small step. so, lets keep talking and making this site work.
agreed.
-Jacob Redding
-Jacob Redding
Needed Features
The new attendees tab is a big step forward (however, having to click the "I am not attending" link to register is unacceptable ui). The new event types are also very cool. What else would I have needed to do BADCamp on g.d.o?
Things that were not must haves, but were really nice:
Pie in the sky:
PS - I love the new live-preview!
Install profile
The install profile has been brought before and I think its a great idea.
I have two main goals with this idea.
1) Similar to groups.drupal.org provide a central place for people to DISCOVER the camps, meetups, etc. That is definitely my #1 goal.
2) Remove a massive chuck of work of running a camp. Recreating a site each time is a real pain and everyone ends up doing the exact same thing.
In addition to that people have complained that g.d.o just doesn't have the necessarily functionality. I'd like to get a grasp on exactly what is needed so that we can either
(a) get people to help build an install profile (maybe a working session at one of the camps, as its a great learning experience)
(b) add the functionality to g.d.o or, if necessary, camps.d.o
Jeff: You definitely didn't go unnoticed, I'm just trying to get people organized first so that no sponsor's time/energy/donation is wasted. Soon we'll have a good plan and we'll call you guys up ;)
-Jacob Redding
-Jacob Redding
better event calendar
as for better discovery of events and more specific calendars, please see http://groups.drupal.org/node/6957 and comment there.
Conference organizing distribution?
Could this serve as a framework for what you're looking for?
http://groups.drupal.org/conference-organizing-distribution
I agree that all communication should be contained on G.D.O. Building a site is not a bad thing either, if its a collaborative learning project and the site/install profile/drupal product makes it back to the community.
Gus Austin
PepperAlley Productions
Gus Austin
Feature list
Being unaware of all the bells and whistles of g.d.o, but aware of what I would want to organize a camp, lets start with:
Event Calendar -
Wikis -or- book pages
Mailing List - like the development or consulting list, but specific to the camp, possibly integratable with forums.
Sub-groups - Inside a DrupalCampNYC group I would want to be able to make 'Sponsorship Organizers', 'Food Organizers', 'Marketers', etc. Each with their own mailing list or forum.
Reusable - No need to start from scratch on DrupalCampNYC1, DrupalCampNYC2, DrupalCampNYC3, etc.
I'm sure there is more, but that would be a good start.
Tresler Designs
CNDP, LLC
A "nice to have"
someone spent some time developing a nice badge PDF generator. It'd be great to use this so attendees can pick them up at the beginning of the camp. Prevents people like me with horrible handwriting from being unknown because others can't read my chicken-scratch.
From conversation with Moshe
From conversation with Moshe i got the impression that camps.drupal.org will /not/ happen. more correctly, he said he doesnt like the idea of another *.drupal.org and i can agree with him because of the following:
Instead, he is FULLY OPEN to g.d.o improvements.
so i would like to redirect our efforts to create mockups for g.d.o improvements.
the things that /i/ would love to see here are
1) Richer content:
* video integration: whether hosted on g.d.o or embed link to other hosting locations (youtube etc)
* audio integration: lullabot-like podcasts. again, either hosted on g.d.o or elsewhere. i think we should host those on g.d.o because file size is smaller and that way we can better ensure content delivery.
2) personalized group pages:
* homepage is customizeable: moshe said he's thinking to add panels to g.d.o, but i dont think he has the time to dedicate to this so its our (community's) job to get this show on the road
* group subpages: allow group admins create more pages for the group. alongside that allow custom menu item creation for those pages.
* VIEWS!!!: yes boys and girls, adding custom views go g.d.o is an option. given the danger of using this, we need to come up with really good use cases and real secure and /non-server-intensive/ implementations before this can get into g.d.o.
** possible solutions here is that we could think of some 5-10-20 common use views that we know are safe and just pass arguments into them. so we let group admins use those views instead of defining their own.
3) the following is outside of the scope of the discussion i had with moshe.
G.D.O was meant as networkign between drupalers. the way things currently happen isnt very appealing. at least for me things are just too plain and disconnected. i would like to borrow some ideas from linkdin, facebook and other popular networking sites. if we can identify a few core networking ideas from them and implement them for g.d.o i think we will be able to increase importance of g.d.o by alot.
I am probably neglecting to mention a number of things but this should get a good discussion going.
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Sometimes interesting things appears on http://litwol.com
custom blocks
Why not start easy? What about custom blocks for each group? There ist so much unused space on the right side.
It would make a great start if I could add one or two custom blocks to the right side. One for an extended welcome message and another one with quick infos on the next meetup. Something like that.
A RSS feed for each content-type so that i can parse a feed with just the events
I just joined the groups,
I just joined the groups, had to create a new account since the one from drupal.org did not work, then I could not figure out to post (no new post link/button), when I tried to contact the manager of the group I registered for, to ask how, I'm notified I can't contact more than 3 persons per hour. This was the first time I try to contact anyone. I wonder if it's because I'm a new member, but there is no FAQ/introduction/rules/welcome I can see.
don't forget custom Drupal installs for all participants
I was at a great weekend Drupal workshop hosted by Twin Cities Open Circuit at the science museum, and everyone got a free Drupal install for a month by registering with (i believe) SundaysEnergy.org, and that install had a really fantastic and robust set of modules which got toggled on for all subsequent training sessions. I learned far more than I expected to, and the whole event was filled to capacity with Minnesota drupal n00bs and pr0s, all getting a lot done because everyone had their own kit to mess with, but the kits were identical.
I think that any camp install profile should have this kind of mechanism tacked onto it. Way to go, those guys did a great job! ( i think such a thing was done via drush and Ubercart)
copy of the install..
Could you try contacting those that hosted the event so that we could get our grubby little hands on a copy of the install? I'd love to check it out and see what they came up with.
Also direct them to this page so they could comment too.
Thanks!
-Jacob Redding
-Jacob Redding
Install profile
Cross posting..
jredding pointed me to this discussion..
I had started a similar (although mainly focus on install profiles) discussion on http://groups.drupal.org/node/9160..
Main difference that our user groups are not solely directed at organising event but also double (or triple or quadruples) as
* Forum for beginners (experienced people are lead to D.O)
* Translation collaboration
* Local Drupal Directory Service
* Local Show Cases
* Business Marketing
* ....
I would like to setup a BoF at drupalconBoston.. Will any of you be around?
Belgian Drupal User Group lover - http://drupal.be
Belgian Drupal User Group lover - http://drupal.be
too late for a BoF but...
Its waaayy too late to submit anything for DrupalCon, that thing is sold out, packed up, crammed to the gills and nothing else or anyone else is going in. BUT I'd definitely love to meet up either over lunch, dinner, breakfast, in the halls, after the sessions before dinner, or whenever.
-Jacob Redding
-Jacob Redding
I think we can add bofs actually
yeah..that
knaddison blog | Morris Animal Foundation
oh
Well I stand corrected, whoops
-Jacob Redding
Yeah, the way I hear it,
Yeah, the way I hear it, BOF's are totally informal, sign up on the whiteboard and see who shows up, kind of things.
Notes from BoF at DrupalCon
When asked why groups.drupal.org is not used for meetup/camp/Jam/etc. organization these were the following reasons
-Language barriers, for meetups held in a language other than English a separate website is needed
example. drupal.be, drupalchina.org
-mailing lists are needed.
-ability to aggregate other website content onto g.d.o
--ex. post the events on the groups external website then it pulls from the ext. site for display on g.d.o
-How to create a group within a group
---ex: Bayarea group has a subgroup "Berkeley"
---ex: Meetup group has a subgroup named DrupalCamp to help organize the local camp
-zipcode/geocode lookup for the groups
---ability to locate groups thats are closer to you in proximity
-Jacob Redding
Some replies about groups.drupal.org improvements
Thanks Jacob. I'm not sure what I was expecting, but it wasn't these. Great list! Before I reply, I will just say that the very very new og_panels integration is so cool that I think many of these sites become less interesting. Group admins will very soon be able to create new pages for their groups. They can choose custom layout and custom content for each page in the usual Panels2 way. Finally one of those pages can take over he group home page. This is all running on http://groupsbeta.drupal.org so group admins can login there and click on the new Pages tab when viewing a group. Coming within days to groups.drupal.org.
A few thoughts ...
In summary, I'm committed to working on these things so we can service these many of these groups. Larger events like Drupalcamps might be better off with own site. We shall see.
og_subgroups
I agree - folks should state the specific goals for og subgroups/parents.
I think that the og_subgroups module provides most of the functionality people want when they talk about this, though.
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Open Prediction Markets | Drupal Dashboard
knaddison blog | Morris Animal Foundation
Some things I'd like to see
Images support
Ability to limit content to that group (and not have every single miscellaneous job posting listed)
More control over views, such as calendar views
A clear policy on g.d.o front-page content highlighting (seems rather arbitrary now, making g.d.o. home page essentially not relevant to most people)
Branding on all pages in the group, not just on the landing page (breadcrumbs aren't enough for building a community)
Laura
pingVision, LLC (we're hiring)
PINGV | Strategy • Design • Drupal Development
question and my own thoughts
Can you clarify what images support is lacking?
In terms of features, the only thing missing is something like Advanced poll since it offers a better feature set for deciding things like "which weekend works best for the meetup".
There are things that g.d.o can probably never provide as well as a separate site - namely the Branding, visibility of sponsors in the design, and ability to use some sort of a signup+payment system to take payments. I'm starting to feel (in agreement with Boris and others) that when a Camp gets big enough then it probably makes sense for them to make their own site.
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Open Prediction Markets | Drupal Dashboard
knaddison blog | Morris Animal Foundation
Thanks Laura. Could you
Thanks Laura.