The more we grow as a group, the more people who join us, the more disparate ideas there will be for projects and places to invest our collective energies. It is important, to ensure the value of the group and its unity, that we have a commonly agreed-upon set of goals at which to aim, against which to judge projects and ideas whether they serve to forward those goals and make us productive in them or merely to distract and exhaust us. To that end, I propose we draft a statement of purpose. Let’s start thinking through the question together, "What is the purpose of our Drupal group? What do we exist for, and what do we hope to accomplish?" Do we aim, for example, merely to create a place for people with similar interest in Drupal to enjoy each others company? Or, at another extreme, are we trying to increase adoption of Drupal as an enterprise development platform in the Midwest? Lets agree on and rank our priorities together so we can intelligently strategize, set goals for ourselves, and measure our progress.
I think that, broadly speaking, we all want to make Nebraska a better place to do Drupal. What does that mean in particulars? For employers, that probably means more expert Drupalers in the area to contract or hire (and a better means of finding them), a stronger community to which to commit their own employees for training and mutual education, and an outlet for giving back. For Drupal workers, that means more employers looking for Drupal talent and more clients looking for Drupal services; it means a stronger network of Drupal shops and practitioners to work and learn with and pass business between; it means building the kind of regional interest that might attract DrupalCamps, Cons, and seminars and make schools start offering Drupal courses and bookstores and libraries stock Drupal books; it means strengthening the broader Open Source culture so that the same resources become available for the whole range of supporting technologies, such as Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP, and jQuery. For clients and site owners and users it means a healthy local economy of Drupal service providers, including web hosts that understand our needs. Naturally, all of these things tend to the good of the Drupal project and community at large, which returns to the benefit of each of the aforementioned groups.
Now let’s have your thoughts. What’s most important to you in our group? What should our goals be for the next year—or five?
Comments
Couple ideas off-the-cuff
Brilliant! I look forward to the thoughts of the group. I think some of the things you list are the outcome of setting up ways to create and promote community:
1) Here is a thought, and pardon me for thinking like an engineer:
The world of Drupal contains many such groups as ours, reaching for similar (potential) goals. A group of groups. I attended the somewhat similar SF Drupal group regularly and saw what worked there. I am wondering, is there a resource out there to share and promote good ideas/best practices in establishing and running a successful regional Drupal group like ours? Would the community benefit from such a resource, where they could share this content and contribute to it? There may be something out there already and I am just ignorant, sorry if that is the case. Maybe this would be nothing more than a post on d.o. somewhere, or maybe it is so much that it needs its own site?
I would like to see the goals you outline above broken out into a list of potential goals, and let people contribute to the content providing methods for accomplishing them.
Also, there is wonderful content from these groups. But this content is not available to people who do not attend these groups in person.
2) We need more "glue" in the regional ecosystem for Drupal (and other) developers. How? A community-oriented Web site would be great. The site's mission should work hand-in-hand with siliconprairienews, providing more of a directory function. It should be largely UGC and self-maintaining since we are all so busy. (Netbraska.org (and .com) are available, I see!--though maybe we need to not exclude our neighboring states) But by gum, I just can't think of the software that would run such a site.
3) We need to participate in and perhaps host events. This means having an ongoing inventory of upcoming events to discuss at meetings, to think about how we could be part of them. It also means having an inventory of what other groups have done, e.g. BADCamp in the Bay Area, and see how they did it, and whether it would be feasible for us to pull together such a gathering.
4) We need a plan for us and our community to make "the news." This ties in with the ecosystem glue above, because it is the "push" part of the connections that make your goals possible. We could plan something for Drupalcon as a group? We could try to get a story into the local newspaper, siliconprairienews, etc. This ties in with #3, obviously.
Local User Group Organizers Group
There is a Local User Group Organizers group. It could definitely be expanded upon.
Looks like it is worth
Looks like it is worth browsing through that. This looks like it has some insight:
http://www.chicagodrupalcamp.org/sessions/revitalize-local-user-groups
If you don't have 30 mins to watch the presentation, you can click through the slides PDF.
Maybe Next Year
Perhaps we'll get some more feedback on this after the holidays.
Continued on page 2...
As promised, I've broken the above summary into specific items, and I've posted them in a new discussion in which I included the Local User Group Organizers. (Thanks for "thinking like an engineer", Bob.) Please check it out and share your thoughts!