Posted by tommyent on April 17, 2012 at 3:39pm
Do you offer remote access to your Drupal Meetups?
I started a group in hopes of getting Meetups with remote access listed in one place and bringing people from all over the world to your local meetups.
Comments
Great idea! At the moment, I
Great idea! At the moment, I am in a state with almost no Drupal presence. Nearest group 2 hours away (in another state). Been trying to find groups to participate with.
Florida Drupal Orlando often does remote meetups through Google+ Hangouts. (Maybe Ben will chime in with details.)
Florida Drupal Broward County (South Florida) too.
See http://www.meetup.com/Palm-Beach-Drupal/events/25485151/
Be great to have a list with details (when, how to connect)
Chicago wants to try
We would love to invite the virtual community to participate in Chicago. Have a great opportunity to try it out for our next meetup Thursday April 26th 19:00 -5.
Can someone provide advice on how to get started? IRC+Skype/webcam? Google+?
Details @ http://www.meetup.com/drupal-1/events/42227852/
From my experience as a
From my experience as a remote participant, the Google+ Hangout seemed to be a good interface. Allowed for video, for anyone interested in that option, audio, and text. Convenient. (Only reason that I have a Google+ account.) And, not reliant on having software downloaded to local machine.
A note to anyone thinking about offering remote meetup:
If you are meeting at a location that doesn't offer WiFi (really? why?), consider having onsite participant with MiFi host the meeting (assuming they have the bandwidth to spare).
To start a Google+ Hangout,
To start a Google+ Hangout, just go to a URL like https://talkgadget.google.com/hangouts/_/extras/chicago-drupal
Replace the "chicago-drupal" part with the name of the Hangout that you want. You will need a Google+ account, but that's it.
Having a directional mic will probably help. We could have used one at tonight's High Performance Drupal meetup. We heard a few times from remote attendees that our sound wasn't loud enough.
This is handy info. . . .
I just looked into it and Google does mention something about it being an "extra" for a "limited time only." Does anyone know more about it?
Something tells me (from experience with the WNY group) that joining hangouts can be hit-or-miss for unseasoned or even regular Goog+ users. Maybe Google is planning to monetize the solution to this.
Our experience at the
Our experience at the contribute meetups is that for google app users vs. regular google/gmail users, the link won't work without an invite from someone within the g+ hangout. Otherwise, the connections have been solid.
And as Christo mentioned, an excellent room mic (and maybe a HD webcam) make a world of difference for remote participants.
--
mike stewart { twitter: @MediaDoneRight | IRC nick: mike stewart }
Not sure if they plan to
Not sure if they plan to monetize it or phase it out. If you notice in the regular Hangouts now a bunch of these features are included. They also now have apps. I think that it's now just down to screen sharing which I think will just be added to the regular Hangouts.
Remote Meeting Info
Glad to hear that you addressing remote access to meetups. Even though some groups have offered it, I think the dissemination of info on how to connect remotely to the meetups has been sorely lacking. It would be good to have a compiled list of meetups, agenda/topics of discussion or at least a link to it, scheduled meeting time, and details on how to connect remotely.
Great idea... Had a similar
Great idea... Had a similar idea to doing something similar but larger in scope. I wanted to launch a site that host meetups for various open source projects - similar to that of meetup.com but focus on open source. And, offer service where meetup organizers can offer members to join meetups remotely. I've been looking at opensourcemeeting virtual conference (http://code.google.com/p/openmeetings) as a possible solution for this or other tools - preferably open source.
I think a solution like this that can serve other open source projects would benefit open source users at large. I would welcome the possibility to collaborate with anyone who would be interested to team up on this idea.
Evan
Agreed. . . .
We in the Western New York state Drupal User Group have been relying on Google+ hangouts for certain meetings but having a more tailored resource would be preferred. Just accessing Goog+ has been troublesome for some new members. Your envisioned service would really fit the bill, both for virtual and in-person meetups . . . especially if it were integrated with their D.o page for easy access.
I had another idea in keeping with the idea of our Drupal community: Since the Drupal Association is always in need of revenue, why not offer some sort of bonus or preference to DA members?
For example, paid-up members of SMPTE.org (a Drupal site no less!) get in free to their tech webinars versus the fee-paying public.
Maybe the open source scheme would allow those with a valid DA membership to get higher bandwidth, transcripts or something along those lines.
This isn't the first time
This isn't the first time remote meetups have been tried/done. While the Drupal Dojo has undergone several transformations since "they" offered a live screencast series on specific topics each week, "they" used to facilitate virtual meetups way back in 2007. I did #10...
http://groups.drupal.org/node/3202
That can't really be node #3202 on GDO? Back then, everyone using Drupal was invited and commented to the presenter via IRC. With how popular Drupal is now and the size of the community, I think you'd need to focus on specific topics or create cohorts of users at the same level who were available at the same time/timezone. I know there is a groups of community media/public access stations that meet every Friday using Google's hangout.
Interesting ideas.
You can chat in IRC right on
You can chat in IRC right on learndrupal.org:
http://learndrupal.org/chat
We did a FuzeMeeting for
We did a FuzeMeeting for remote attendees last night. I think it worked fairly well. The only real issues were (1) FuzeMeeting coming from my computer was somehow conflicting with my Acquia Dev Desktop so I didn't get to do any lessons (2) the room was so energetic it was really hard to hear the attendees on the phone and visa versa.
The first issue could be easily remedied by not sharing my screen after the initial presentation, the second one is a little harder though. I'd be interested to hear suggestions.
Perhaps a port issue?? Audio
Perhaps a port issue??
Audio is definitely tricky and have yet to see a solution that works 100%.
In Los Angeles, several of
In the Los Angeles area, several of the meetups have been broadcasted using an "ladrupal" hangout on Google+ at http://ex.tl/ZSM
Our attendance hasn't been very high, but that may be because we haven't really marketed our meetups outside of our geographical area. (The only exception is our High Performance Drupal meetup, which is cross-posted to the High Performance group.)
Tomorrow (Saturday, April 21st), we're having a VPS and Virtualmin Installfest here in Los Angeles and we're broadcasting it via the "ladrupal" hangout. Everyone is welcome to join us.
Thanks Chris Unfortunately my
Thanks Chris
Unfortunately my son has a birthday party to attend today. I personally would have loved to attended today's and still may try from my phone but I went ahead and posted links on the Remote Meetups homepage for the next few L.A. ones listed. The group is still pretty small 10 members but I did only start it a few days ago
Count me in as one of the
Count me in as one of the newest members of the group. It was great to see you tonight at the meetup we had at Droplabs.
We didn't record the VPS / Virtualmin workshop that we had two Saturdays ago, but we'll probably do it again. The next workshop will be on SSH and will include tips and tricks with rsync, keys and tunneling, and I plan to broadcast it live via our Google+ Hangout.
Thanks for posting the links to our upcoming meetups! I'll make a point of cross-posting the meetups I'm involved with to the Remote Meetups group. They all have an online component.
FYI, since many of our meetups have an online component to them, I just made a request to have the "Event type" select menu here on groups.drupal.org turned into a multi-select so that we can select both "user group meeting" and "online meeting" instead of one or the other: https://drupal.org/node/954708#comment-5944880
Were planning on trying G+
Were planning on trying G+ hangout at our May Meetup in Jacksonville. We'll see how it pans out.
Kevin Basarab | Mediacurrent
Alas, the 3rd Tuesday is the
Alas, the 3rd Tuesday is the same night as our Downtown meetup in Los Angeles. I won't be able to join you. Please let us know here how it works out.
I recommend getting a directional mic. Anyone on Google+ who is presenting can share their screen, but I think that getting Q&A in the broadcast is really important.
G+
Subscribing. Keep us up-to-date on time and hangout.
Hmmm.. maybe there should be a thread to post all User Group hangouts? Is there such a thing? That way we can all attend each others meetings.
Cheers!
@snovak I started the group
@snovak I started the group in hopes to get all remote available meetups in one location. Anyone posting a meetup would just need to belong to the group then cross post to that group
http://groups.drupal.org/remote-meetups
Joined
Thanks!
One thing that I'm not sure
One thing that I'm not sure if people are aware of is the ability to have more than 10 people does somewhat exist. You are allowed Spectators after 10. You need to hit the Broadcast button to do this