Hi folks, I'm sure you want free stuff. Well, you'll get it. Not only do all attendees get to be on the official beta of the XTND.US Drupal Themer's Kit Pro for Dreamweaver, but there's new offerings for our members. In looking to get more talent to volunteer and speak at our LA Drupal meetings I have outlined the various offerings below.
Presenter Thank You Gifts
Everyone who speaks/presents at an LA Drupal meeting will be entered into a raffle at the end of the year. The more times you speak, the more raffle tickets you'll get. Prize will be valued at $50 or more. And, for everyone who presented they will receive a token of thanks and maybe a digital badge to show they've spoken at LA Drupal (or Drupal Camp LA). When the budget comes in for T-shirts, pins, etc., anyone who is presenting around would time will benefit nicely. ;)
NOTE: Presenters only need to speak for 5-50 minutes, depending on the topic and goal of the presentation. Speakers should present from their own laptops, or schedule to borrow one ahead of time. Topics can be case studies of your Drupal works, example Drupal sites you found and love, Modules you can't live without, a trick or tip... I think you get the point. We're open to even some general PHP and CSS knowledge shared. And, yes, you can speak a bunch of times on different topics, even if they're all just 5 minutes long.
Refer a speaker and get something!
If you deliver a fresh speaker to LA Drupal you'll get something. What it is, I cannot say, but it is cool enough to do your best to help up fill our monthly lineups.
Presentation Template(s) - (for Powerpoint/Keynote/OOo)- If we have or link to presentation template(s) then group admins can point speakers to the template(s) as an aid. No one has to use them, they'd just be neat since some default templates can suck from Office suites.
Template requirements:
* Must contain a title screen/page for the presentation name and the presenter.
* Drupal logo must appear somewhere, even if it's at least on a master page/template.
* Must ship with a page/slide containing our new slogan "I (Drupal) LA." Note, the Drupal logo must be used in this slide.
* Design must not get in the way of expected page elements that will be added over the template, like text and images.
* 1024x768 resolution would be acceptable, 800x600 if people comment here and ask for it.
* They can be designed as Drupal-only, LA Drupal branded, even Souther California (Drupal) branded, Drupal User Group branded, Drupal Community branded, etc.
* Simple is always best.
The presentation templates would be open to the public for download, allowing other Drupal groups to take and use. We will be collecting any templates/links into a community speaker's kit, introducing our group, our guidelines for presenting certain topics, and contact info of group admins for backup.
Do nothing and sit
Sure. You can attend, do nothing, just sit, and you can enjoy our meetings and even win a raffle or two when we hold them for attendees.
Hit me up for more info if you'd like. Please post any comments here.
Comments
We're gonna need more meetings!
Chris ... this is great. I always love to see the extra incentives you give us all to participate even more than we do. For anyone who's a little timid about presenting, I'd give you a little nudge of encouragement. It'll benefit you more than you imagine. Especially in the open source community it helps tremendously to be involved as much as possible. Express your opinions, talk with others, use IRC, post in the forums and groups.drupal.org, ... talk at Drupal LA meetups. You'll soon see it begin to pay off. When I first started working in Drupal, all of this was still pretty foreign to me and I found learning drupal much more difficult. If you're short on business, it'll also help bring more work in or perhaps just more interesting work than what you've been doing.
We're already filling up the meeting with volunteers willing to do presentations, and are beginning to have some scheduling conflicts. At this rate we'll need more than one meetup per month. Very happy to see this group thriving so much ... and all this growth and activity has happened in the course of just 4-5 months!
Google Docs for presentations?
A note about presentations. I saw Bevan Rudge of CivicActions give a great Theming presentation at DrupalCon. He used GoogleDocs to host and run the presentation. The great thing is that the presentation can be made publicly visible, so everyone who went to the meeting can refer back to it for notes, and people who miss the presentation have something to look at. There's also the option to have a chat alongside the presentation which is great for the audience to submit questions as the presentation is going on. I haven't played around with that yet, but the possibilities seem pretty cool. See Bevan's presenation https://docs.google.com/Present?docid=drmcbw4_82cf9pk2fr - great theming tips!!!
Obviously you will want to use whatever tools you are comfortable with for creating your presentation, but consider using Google Docs or importing into it for all the benefits it provides.
So let's schedule them
@MikeyLikesIt: What scheduling conflicts?
We need more people to volunteer and choose a month to present. We currently meet on the last Tuesday of each month, so it's not hard to see what day that will be and choose a month then notify us what topic you'd like to do on that upcoming date.
Meeting more once a month won't work if we can't keep the current schedule full. I like having at least 2 months of meetings posted, let's shoot for 3!
June: I have WorkHabit speaking at our upcoming [June] meeting that I'll post info on later.
Chris Charlton, Author & Drupal Community Leader, Enterprise Level Consultant
I teach you how to build Drupal Themes http://tinyurl.com/theme-drupal and provide add-on software at http://xtnd.us
Great ideas!
I love the ideas, folks. Personally, I've had trouble making the meetings so Mikey's ideas re: having presentations available on google docs is great. Also, the feature where you can ask questions alongside as you go would really be great. Looking forward to actually making my first meeting in June & meeting the rest of the folks. :)
Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever.- Mahatma Ghandi