Intro, plus a few thoughts and questions

Thanks, Steve, for taking the lead on starting this group.

It was a great relief to me to find such a wide-ranging and enthusiastic group of drupal users, developers and hosts at the NTEN happy hour-- especially since neither Drupal, CMS, not even websites were mentioned as topics for the gathering. Meeting you and the others bolstered my belief that a users group here in the Twin Cities would be beneficial. Let's use this Drupal Group to discuss how best to start and maintain one.

For starters, let me briefly introduce my interest in Drupal/this group (perhaps more personal, longer profiles can be part of another section of this group?):

My name is Barry Madore. I work at Intermedia Arts (http://www.intermediaarts.org), a 30+ years-old community-arts nonprofit organization located in the LynLake neighborhood of Minneapolis. Officially, I'm the graphic designer (print) and webmaster (hate the term). My all-consuming mission is leading an initiative to digitize all aspects of the organization's work from exhibition to community outreach. I've landed on Drupal as the tool we'll be exploring to open up our web presence to become as total a collaborative mechanism as we can muster.

Maybe a subtopic on this group is why any/all of us came to Drupal in the first place, but this story is already too long so, let me summarize by saying that implementing our organizational website in Drupal scares the living daylights out of me. I'm not a programmer and will never play one on tv.

What I'd really like is to have a community of local Drupal users (or those interested in Drupal) to bounce ideas, share failures/successes, trade expertise, extend learning and development-- be a "community of practice." I guess what I'm really saying is, no one should go this road alone. Let's be a support system for each other whatever angle we're approaching this from (user, developer, organizer, option researcher, whatever...).

I'm willing to offer Intermedia as a host for regular meetings. We're in the process of outfitting a teaching media lab complete with workstations, a storage server and a Linux app server. This lab will be a great place for user group meetings and, potentially I hope, topic-based and Drupal and CMS workshops.

Let's talk about who's out there and how to start a community that will benefit all using and thinking about Drupal here in the Twin Cities.

Sorry to be so longwinded.

barry madore
barry@intermediaarts.org
612-874-2818 (work)