DUG Meeting Format

Some valid points for sure. Thanks for bringing them up. So here's my admin perspective:

It's all a matter of having enough worthwhile content a few days in advance. Too often we find ourselves scrambling for stuff during the last three days before the meeting. So I'll reiterate my call for active participation: Let Andrew or me know if you think you have something even remotely useful to present and we'll slot it in. It's ultimately your group - make it work for you. That includes running the group.

That said, Neal has offered to talk about some advanced D7 entity API or field API stuff next time. He might put up a poll to help him target the needs of the group.
I have a Drupal Koolaid presentation ready, targeting noobs and intermediates, but will be happy to cede the slot to anyone.

As you rightly stated, Kathy's talk was a great example how one can target all audiences. I refuse to believe it is all that hard except for really technical topics, but it does take some careful thought. At any rate, the effort of targeting all experience levels gives you know-how and confidence you can reuse every day in your professional and private lives.

Back to scheduling: With the Sept meeting (mostly) taking shape that still leaves Oct and the following months to be programmed. Let's get those ideas going! Structure will follow from the content.

Another possible activity in addition to doing reverse tear-downs is to do "build-ups," where someone would take a fresh Drupal install and actually create some sort of functional website at the meeting. This would be sort of like a tutorial in how to create X kind of site using Drupal. For people coming to their first meeting without much prior Drupal experience, they might not follow it, but they would get to see how you can build some sophisticated functionality with Drupal very quickly, starting from scratch. Obviously, it would have to be focused on stuff that could be put together without writing much code, because there wouldn't be enough time to hand-code a theme or write a module. The presenter would have to work quickly, and the computer running Drupal would have to be decently powerful, but I think sites at the level of complexity of the examples in Using Drupal would fit easily within the time constraints. In a lot of cases, just installing and setting up a module would do most of the work, like the recipes module someone mentioned last night. So, in part, it would be more or less just a demo of some interesting module that people might not have come across.

Do you suppose the San Diego Drupal community is big enough to have an additional monthly meeting? Rather than calling them beginner and advanced, one could be aimed at module developers and the other at site designers. So beginners could attend the developer meetings if they are interested. I'm still a relative beginner, but I am more interested in module development than anything else.

I'm new to SD but not Drupal, Drupalcon, Drupalcamps or DUGS.

There is certainly a lot of interest in any community among newer people to learn Drupal. Fortunately there are already a ton of resources available for new people.

There is a burgeoning industry built around Drupal training. There is an ever growing library of books. There are paid and free video and article tutorials. For someone serious about learning Drupal the group as it works now isn't a particularly valuable resource compared to what is available and easily accessible.

I'd argue that directing people new to Drupal to read "Using Drupal", to watch the Lullabot and or Lynda videos and to attend a paid training session would be much more beneficial than 6 months of attending Drupal sessions. A new person who is serious about learning this tech can consume all of that within a month!

Because the meetups are monthly, catering to the very newest Drupalistas effectively means having the same meetup every month, 12 months a year. It's conceivable that someone could adopt Drupal the day after a meetup, take the advice above and find any meetups at the current level of experience below their needs before they can attend their first meetup.

Because of that (and because I want the SD DUG to be one that I look forward to attending) I think the focus of conversation would be better suited if it no longer focused on basic Drupal sitebuilding tasks.

Let me make a list of what I would like to get out of a DUG:

Most importantly, I want to get a sense of what tools and trends are popular in the community. Drupal is an ecosystem. It evolves extremely fast. At some point we all decided to adopt or not adopt panels. At some point CCK became a replacement for flexinode. At some point people adopted features, context, spaces and strongarm. The next generation of tools are being planned and built right now. I would like attendance in this user group at least ensures you are aware of these changes as they are happening.

Right now there are critical conversations in the community revolving around config management. The meeting on Wed would have been a great time to have some face to face discussions and possibly some good ideas may have come from that.

I would like the group actively encourage contributions in all forms. That's not going to happen when the people in the SD area who contribute to the community don't even come.

I want to see other people's work. I'm always interested in seeing the cool stuff other people are building.

I want to listen to smart people talk about Web technology. Here at work during a casual work conversation I learned more about ETags in a few minutes than I had known before. This happens by being around people who live and breath web.

These things will all just happen if the DUG gets attended by developers.

As for the noobs? Well if the user group attracts good developers, they'll find that for them it's a resource of friendly experts who they can learn from, get pointed in the right direction to solve problems that would take them days/hours and maybe hire or collaborate with. That would make the group a heck of a lot more valuable for noobs than it is now.

My first DUG meeting as a newcomer to Drupal was the July meeting in SD. It was way over my head much of the time but I didn't mind. I listened and picked up what I could like 'delete the change log after installation' and 'panels add a ton of markup' and I came back with a few topics to look into like 'what the heck are hooks?'

After the meeting I talked with Andrew a bit and he assured me that I didn't have to be a hard core developer to be able to find a place in the Drupal community. I can start out with site building and add development skills as I go. It was a big help to hear that; I didn't have to go home thinking I had bitten off more than I could chew.

I don't believe that we need to have Drupal 101 topics in order to attract newcomers. As a newcomer I'm not at the DUG meeting to learn about Drupal. Dustin is right. I can learn that from a book, videos, or a training session. I'm there to meet people and to become a part of the community. If I'm made to feel welcome and am able to get to know people so that when I do have a question there will be someone that I am comfortable turning to, I'm good. I met some people at DrupalCampLA last week and got to see some familiar faces when I walked into a training class yesterday. It was really cool.

Go ahead and talk about module building and APIs and stuff that might make my head spin. Even if I never write any of those myself, I'll be using them at some point so the knowledge that I do manage to pick up won't be wasted. And if I grow to love Drupal as much as you hard core developers seem to, then I'll be in the right place no matter what the topic is.

It would be great if we could continue the conversation here. The next meetup is almost a month away so if we only discuss changes once a month at the meetup any change would take place very slowly.

I'm not saying not to talk about it at the meetup, but it would be great if we all could come up with a bunch of ideas on formats and how this group could look and evaluate the pros and cons of them here, giving us time to think about them. Then by the time the meetup rolls around we would have a lot better idea as to what formats would be better and get additional input in case we overlooked something.

I really like Dustin's post and his ideas for the group and Dru brings up a great point about how to better schedule speakers and topics for the meetups.

Does anyone have any ideas on how this could take place?

What are the pros & cons of managing that in a forum post on our group site?
Do we need to setup another site that we can use to manage sessions? Would we use COD for this, similar to how most drupal camp sites are run?

It's great that we have lots of exciting new ideas for topics and speakers right now, but what we really need is a structured process for determine what content should make it into each meeting. I'd love to see this process be as democratic and organic as possible, so if we can come up with a way to vote for what we want to hear, and come up with a good way to pick speakers, I'm all for it.

I really think the best way for us to lend structure to the content for our meetups is with a well built website. LA has already started work on this and there's a sprint being planned soon to work on the code for the site that powers the LA meetups. I think that it would be great to make this into a distribution like say, COD for example. Regular small meetups require a very different information model than a large scale event site like COD is generally used for, but many of the same principals apply. If we can make a nice and well packaged distribution for DUGs and other meetups, a lot of other groups could make use of it, which nets us some digital karma.

Building such a distribution would be quite an undertaking all in all, but the first steps start with us coming together and deciding what our process should be for deciding what we want to hear, and who can talk about it, which is exactly what we need right now.

I think we will learn a lot about what we want our meetings to be as we collaborate on building a website to run the meetup. I've been holding on to http://drupalsd.com for this very purpose for quite some time now. Let's join forces with LA and build a cool meetup planning distribution to put there. What do you think?

I was toying with the idea of starting a "drupalpedia" website patterned after wikipedia. That way anyone could make a page on anything they want related to drupal. I am in the midst working on a module that uses ctools exports, and the available documentation for this is pretty poor. Having done the work of figuring it out from the sparse info floating about, I could now create my own drupalpedia entry on what I have discovered. Maybe SD DUG could be the maintainers of drupalpedia.