A challenge to the Los Angeles Drupal community!

Posted by Techivist on March 10, 2011 at 5:04am

In a previous thread, I mentioned my challenge to the Los Angeles Drupal community about ways for all of us to help both presenters & organizers alike avoid the dreaded 'B' word- burnout. I detail ways that we all, as a community, can step it up- which we need to do since word has come down from the LA Drupal Managers that only the Westside meetup is the "official/main" meetup & that they won't be providing official, logistical/managerial support for all of the other local groups that have sprung up in the last year (& are thriving!).
http://groups.drupal.org/node/129924#comment-430889

I'm starting this thread in hopes that others in the community agree & will follow suit. I'll get it started.

Presentation: Intro to SimpleTest
Audience: Beginner
Slated: May 2011
Location: DTLA (Downtown Los Angeles) Drupal
Presenter: Miguel Hernandez
Bio: http://migshouse.com/about
Length: Lightning (5mins.)

Being the type who not only points out problems but also likes to provide solutions to those problems, I've got a challenge for the Los Angeles Drupal community: Offer to present a lightning talk!

Contrary to popular belief, you don't have to be a Drupal Ninja to give a presentation. You could be new to Drupal & share your thoughts on the difficulties you're having getting started, where Drupal could improve, how the documentation is good but could be better. There are MANY topics where I'd prefer to hear from a Drupal Newbie. Especially since it's fresh in their/your mind. Take some notes during your experience. I guarantee you'll have at least 5mins of content to share. Take it on as a challenge for overcoming shyness & improve your public speaking skills. There's a lot of things YOU can gain from sharing 5mins. with your fellow Drupaleros. So my challenge is to challenge yourself to give a lightning talk in the next couple of months.

For those who are already presenting this month, I encourage you to post here as a way to illustrate that this is already happening. If there's a presentation that you like in this thread, please use the arrows on the right to vote it up.

The gauntlet has been thrown...

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*If you're a fellow user group organizer, please feel free to take this idea, tweak it & run with it. It's about the open collaboration of ideas & ways to maintain a healthy, organic Drupal User Group ecosystem.

Comments

This is a well considered and

Posted by christefano on March 10, 2011 at 9:48am

This is a well considered and welcome idea. Thanks, Miguel! We're all in this together and your heart is obviously in the right place, so don't worry so much about running your ideas by the LA Drupal managers.

Thanks!

Posted by Techivist on March 11, 2011 at 3:24am

Thank you, Christefano. I just figured I should mention that part (I've now removed it). ;)

Miguel Hernandez - www.migshouse.com
Founder & CEO - The OpenMindz Group
Writer- Linux Journal & TechZulu

Volunteer for Lightning Talk

Posted by pcher1bw on March 10, 2011 at 1:13pm

I'd like to do a lightning talk on software design. It needs some thought on how it will fit into drupal, so it won't be ready until April main meetup or May.

The subject is based on the fact that I haven't seen a lot of software design work done for drupal, it all seems to be hacking. As an experienced software engineer coming into drupal, if I could have found design diagrams and documentation for the drupal core and the modules, I could have gotten a lot farther a lot faster than I did. I did not find design diagrams on drupal.org or in any of the books I read, except for maybe webchick's book which has a high level diagram in the first chapter.

Using standard software engineering techniques will lead to more robust modules with fewer bugs, especially if the designs are reviewed by others.

Any Thoughts?

Paul Chernick
CEO
Chernick Consulting
(310) 569-2517

I personally would be very

Posted by bestrank on March 10, 2011 at 3:18pm

I personally would be very interested in listening in, I think that would be a great topic to discuss especially for the more technical crowd. Not so tech-focused people might get a bit lost though... if the concepts are discussed at a pretty high level it might be worth it for everyone.

Same issues

Posted by Andrew13 on March 10, 2011 at 8:44pm

As a current software developer I found similar issues in developing for drupal. I'm quite new to drupal, so, like you, it would take time for me to develop a talk on the topic. However, if you need a sounding board for your lightning talk let me know.

If I were like lightning, I wouldn't need no sneakers

Posted by chellman on March 10, 2011 at 8:02pm

I'd like to start doing some lightning talks, and maybe some longer ones later. My biggest problem is coming up with an idea for something to talk about. I like helping people solve problems and giving presentations, and I've been using Drupal for quite a few years, but choosing a topic is a little harder. If there's a stack of ideas that people want to hear about, I'd like to see it and maybe pick a thing or two to talk about.

Meantime, I'm planning to do a lightning talk on Features at the downtown meetup next week.

Thunderbolt struck on Features

Posted by pcher1bw on March 11, 2011 at 2:53am

I'm definitely interested in listening about features.

The poor guy in Hong Kong is correct, this doesn't need to go any farther than Southern California.

Paul Chernick
CEO
Chernick Consulting
(310) 569-2517

I won't be able to go to the

Posted by luthien on March 10, 2011 at 8:31pm

I won't be able to go to the meeting in LA but I would like to propose some ideas for talks. I find very interesting the subject about software design. As a software engineer myself, I used my experience to design our web site in Drupal; but not from the point of view of designing modules but applying the software design principles to the process of planning and developing the web site. Our site has unique needs as it connects with external applications. We used "tw" module to expose the external DB to Views, but now that Drupal 7 is out and we need to consider migrating to the new version, this is a problem as there are not modules to do it in the latest version. My question is: should I create a custom module to expose the external DB fields to Views? here is when having someone who has done that will be great. I don't know how many users needs this functionality but it is very interesting for a Talk as it shows how flexible is Drupal. Maybe for a future talk. Features is a good topic as well.

A High Level Archetecture View

Posted by crablouis on March 10, 2011 at 11:10pm

It's looking like I am going to be up north on the next LA meeting date. Whether it's at some future meeting, or elsewhere and when, I'd really like a flash talk on the basic architecture of Drupal (D7 in particular..). I'm talking about a circles and arrows explanation of how it all hooks together (pun intended). Yes, I should know already. But, I dont. And a flash from someone with the bird's eye view would be much appreciated. ...

This'd be cool. More

Posted by wizonesolutions on March 10, 2011 at 11:21pm

This'd be cool. More lightning talks! I'll give some...but I'm already presenting at DTLA.

If for some reason I make it to the main meetup, I'd like to do one on "how to install Drupal 8" :)

WizOne Solutions - https://wizone.solutions - Drupal module development, theme implementation, and more
FillPDF Service - https://fillpdf.io - Hosted solution for FillPDF

Please unsubscribe this post

Posted by dalin on March 11, 2011 at 12:09am

Please unsubscribe this post from all non-LA groups. No need to be spamming the inboxes of hundreds (or maybe thousands?) of people that live around the world and nowhere near LA.

Thanks.

Dave Hansen-Lange
Director of Technical Strategy, Advomatic.com
Pronouns: he/him/his

Hi Dave

Posted by Techivist on March 11, 2011 at 3:18am

I could've done a better job of titling this thread something like "Organic & sustainable ways to create healthy user group ecosystems." I included 2 groups without physical proximity to SoCal that I thought would benefit from this discussion. Sure, the challenge is LA/SoCal-specific but I expected this would turn into more of a discussion on presentation topics, ways to attract & keep presenters and how to avoid organizer/presenter burnout.

My apologies if you, or anyone else for that matter, thought this was spammy for it wasn't my intent, in the least. My goal was the simple sharing of ideas with others to ensure Drupal keeps rockin' on a local, grass-roots level & to really try and alleviate the burnout factor that plagues leaders/organizers/presenters who manage any large group of people, i.e. user groups.

Miguel Hernandez - www.migshouse.com
Founder & CEO - The OpenMindz Group
Writer- Linux Journal & TechZulu

What Meeting Topics Should We Cover? (reprise)

Posted by Chris Charlton on March 25, 2011 at 3:36am

In early 2008 I posted a group wiki page for members to post and vote for the topics we'd cover at our meetups: http://groups.drupal.org/node/9220

Please post topics you'd like to see!!! To VOTE for an existing topic, add a + sign at the end of the topic line. Let's get the wiki updated for 2011. (Please do not request Drupal 8 anything, that's too far away)

(I think we've covered the basics for CCK, Views, Panels, and Theme building - and our DrupalCamp LA videos have recordings for many of those topics)

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

Dynamic web forms

Posted by borg8472 on March 25, 2011 at 4:21pm

I would love a discussion on the best way to create dynamic web forms.

How to set up an effective email notification system

Posted by Benno Sebastian on March 25, 2011 at 6:16am

Here is a topic I like to learn more about. Email notification system to communicate with registered users and unregistered users. I understand that groups.drupal.org is managed by the organic group module. If someone has experience of how to deal with groups of people that are just regular people. Keeping them in the loop of whats going on with a particular subject they are interested in but not too spammi to turn them off. Allow them to voice their opinion but not to turn it into an email war. Event registration and notification.
For example I have no idea how I became a member of the the group San Diego DUG. I don't even know what DUG stands for. Also the guy from Hong Kong requested to be removed from the LA group. How does that happen? I am just talking of the top of my head here.

Anyways A talk on email communication with clients or members of an organization and how to manage that in an effective way. That's something I like to learn more about.
Thanks See you on Tuesday

Count me in! (When I'm in

Posted by laura s on March 25, 2011 at 10:48pm

Count me in! (When I'm in town, anyway.)

_{Laura Scott
PINGV | Strategy • Design • Drupal Development}