Notes from DrupalCon BoF Event coordinator session

On Tuesday March 4th during the North American DrupalCon 2008 in Boston, Mass. a BoF session was held on event organization (meetups, camps, jams, etc.). The group included people from Berkeley California (USA), Los Angeles California (USA), Wisconsin (USA), Belgium, Hungary, and China (me ;) )

The following are the notes from that session which are organized in no particular order and may or may not be of use to anyone. I attempted to jot down the answers to many of the questions asked to the group as well as to compile other useful ideas tossed around during the session. I apologize that it is not presented in a more formal format but you are welcome to clean it up.

How do you handle multiple skill levels (newbies, rockstars)?
Belgium: when a session is proposed they state what the minimum requirements are before the meetup occurs and each meetup strive to be inclusive. If one meetup has heavy requirements the second might have very little

Wisconsin: 1 hour of hard core and 1 hour of newbie stuff. The first hour is spent talking about what everyone is working on and what they are doing. Organically the group divides into groups based on what people are working on and their levels

Hungary: One method tried was to hand out badges at the meetups. The badges have icons on them to indicate level of Drupal skill level as well as what they are (coder, designer, themer, etc.)

LA: Attempt to do a single intro sessions and then break into various groups. Make strives to encourage other people to speak even to the point of "requiring" people to speak. Attempting to get the wallflowers off the wall.

consensus: you need the advanced people to answer the questions in the beginning. A meetup needs experts in it to help the newbies but you have to also give the advanced users a reason to attend.

Who is organizing the meetups?
Belgium: one person
Hungary: one person but a mailing list is setup to help push others to help out
LA: one person but he gets each every presenter to help find a different presenter (i.e. delegates to those in the group)

How do you handle growth?
LA: if the participants see that there is some organization/structure to the meeting that are more apt to participant as they don't have to think about it.

Hungary: 30 minutes of a presentation and then an hour of networking thus if the presenter is boring you can hang around and then start talking with people.

NYC: Splitting the group to handle the growth by putting newbies with newbies + a few advanced, advanced + advanced.

Berkeley: feels like they are losing people on both ends. Advanced people fall off due to boredom and newbies fall off due to being too technical.

Language
Hungary: currently the meetups are held in Hungarian but it does prevent people from closer countries
China: Hold the meetps in Chinese but having trouble connecting the English speaking community
Belgium: Dutch, French & German speakers but the meetups are held in Dutch and are having troubles finding the others.

Multi-lingual forums don't work

Topics?
Drupal, jQuery, CSS basics, Views, Ajax, Adobe flex.
LA: When jobs are posted into the group the organizer hits up the job poster to send someone to group to speak.

** Where do you find your pool of presenters/attendees?**
Other related groups (php user groups, Internet based groups, barcamps)
build a relationship with other organizers by emailing them, or co-opting with them.

Groups.drupal.org or not?

-Good for a small size but can't scale up.
-A must for advertising
-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 has a group "Berkeley"
---ex: Meetup group has an internal DrupalCamp group to organize
-zipcode/geocode lookup for the groups
---ability to locate groups thats are closer to you in proximity

Belgium: Language was the main driver to creating a separate website

LA: aggregates the g.d.o events to their own website

Location (where do you guys meet?)
LA: First started with presentations in a restaurant and found that people eating and trying to meet at the same time was distracting. Moved to a presentation room at a local university and the meetup went much more smooth due to less distractions and a more formal structure.
Hungary: Found that if the room was arranged in a standard presentation style (chairs in rows) then people were encouraged to walk around and meet each other. A structure presentation style led people to belief that is more about training and less about connection/communicating. Meet in a bar. Picked one location to host every meetup (consistency)
NYC: Meetup is held at various locations but in general a common recurring location has worked out the best. Generally the offices of Drupal shops

Workflow (How do the meetups flow?)
NYC: topics are posted/suggested on the site, people vote/comment and attendees pick during the first 5 minutes of the meetup. The presenter starts the meeting for the first 15 to 30 minutes and then its open up for discussions. Organically small groups are prevented

Berkeley: Starts off with names, intro (work, how long using Drupal).

NYC: A standard format can not be enforced. If you have a standard structure and people were not allowed to present due to not being schedule then the participants felt left out.

LA: intros are done in the beginning. If >10 no intros are not done.
Belgium:

All: You need a task master to ensure that people don't talk forever and monopolize the floor.

Code Sprints, Code Jams; do you do these?
LA: in short people really want to get together to meet with other developers but they haven't found the correct format
Wisconsin: attempting to copy the "Super Happy Dev house" day but haven't done it yet. Expect a 4+ hour day of coding joy
Berkeley: attempting a code sprint sort of gathering and although it was semi-successful it wasn't highly successful. People showed up and had no idea how to get started and it took longer to get everyone ready to start coding than the actual coding was.
NYC: hack-a-thons: Problems encouraging people to participate. Problems with getting people up to speed to code together, a lot of time is spent teaching people how to work together in a code sprint collaborative environment

Laptops at the meetups?
Belgium: Ask people to not bring their laptops. presentation, etc.
NYC: bring their laptops
Berkeley: bring their laptops
China: no laptops at all
Hungary: a few laptops but you're in a bar so generally people leave them in their bag
LA: 1/3 of the people bring laptops. Sometimes used, sometimes not.
Wisconsin: 50/50. WiFi has a key, if you present then you get the key and when you return the next time you have Internet (incentive to speak)

Presentation length
LA: longest 1 1/2 hours an hour (20
Wisconsin: 1 hour of presentation (20-30)
Berkely: 45 minutes (30,40)
Hungary: 30 minutes requested usually 45-1 (20-30)
Belgium: 1.5 to 2 hours of presentation (20-30)
NYC: sometimes 2 hours and often 30 minutes (25-30)

Length of meeting
LA: ~2 hours
Wisconsin: ~ 2hours 1 coworking
Berkely: ~ 1.5
Hungary: ~2hours +
Belgium: 3 hours total
NYC: 2 hours

Cost of group
LA: free
Wisconsin: free
Berkely: free
Hungary: free
Belgium: 10-20 Euros to attend with proceeds donated to Association. The fee creates an expectation and people become involved
NYC: free
China: 15-18RMB due to an inability to find free venues (restaurant/cafe charges)

marketing
cross posts with PHP meetup
upcoming.org, eventful,

Badge tags (at meetups or camps?)
-Mainly used at camps although sometimes used at meetups.
-Badge tags are extremely helpful to identify those that are news and those that are hiring.
Used radio buttons
Used big text and star buttons next to icons/text that indicate what the user (a) does and (b) is interested in

When do you meet?
Belgium: done in evening 6 to 10 but not every mont
Hungary: done on Thursday evenings 6pm to 8pm
Bay area: tried to organize in the evening but found most people want to meet between 12:00-1:30 in the afternoon.
LA: Tuesday evenings. polled users and avoided weekends and major traffic times.

12-22 on average, 20-50% newcomers

Tips, Tricks
The organizer needs an assistant: Frees up the time of the main presenter to keep focus on keeping things on task. The assistant helps with items like power, wifi access, food, water, location of the bathrooms, etc.

Interesting items that others are doing
Breakfast with Drupal:
- It is common for those in the Biotech industry within Germany to meet up for Breakfast

P.M. An addition from the Netherlands. (March 5th)
On "How get an idea of knowledge, opinions, wishes, etc from subscribers for a upcoming event"
At the Drupaljam meeting in the Netherlands, I was suggested by Yoeri Poesen from Belgium to use webform-module. Webform-module was implemented for a upcoming event on May 24th & 25th. This webform-module is great! It delivers me a nice overview of e.g. skills of attendees from first subscribers.