I've been organizing the Johannesburg Drupal user group meetups and came across this excellent posting which touches on group leadership, saying "First, do not try to do it alone".
I wanted to find out from other user group organizers how they approached/implemented group leadership? From what I've read, it seems that a lot of groups are organized by one single person, which doesn't feel sustainable to me. Are there groups out there who have more than 1 person involved in organizing/planning for the group (like a committee)? If so, what roles does each person have, and what are the different responsibilities that get delegated to each person?
We're having a meetup soon to try and get more people involved in our group, so will feedback to this group on what we ended up doing.
Comments
Depends
Great link! And good question.
In my group I have Aaron [aka dudenhofer] pizza who will often pickup up the pizza and bring it to the meetup. On many occasions I will get super busy and he will coordinate the date with the facility and post the event on the GDO page. He is definitely NOT an assistant. In every word he's a co-leader.
Personally I don't see how any one could lead a group without a strong co-leader.
My group is 18 months old. When it was about 8 months old I made a wiki post with various duties and asked for people to place their name next to the tasks they wanted to help with. I made the list long so that people would have many options. On the list were things like: Post our new meetups on craiglist, submit new meetups to local print media that are free, record meetups, place notices of upcoming meetups on billboards at coffeeshops and bookstores, bring a 2-Liter to the meetup, etc... It was a long list.
After 2 weeks I got two names on the list. I closed the wiki because it looked embarrassing. Many of the items on the list simply are not being done right now. I am not sure what I am going to do about that quite yet.
I don't believe I will be trying that wiki-page again until we have a much larger group. We have about 7 ppl who will show up to a meetup. If you look at the 8 or more meetings we have had this year you will see about 18+ different people, but only 1/3 of them will show up at the same time. Once we have solid dozen ppl at every meetup, I might try to see who would be willing to take on some administrative duty.
What does any one else do?
Early on I made concerted
Early on I made concerted effort to get as many people involved in the organizing as possible and I think it's really paid off. I basically just pass out jobs to other people and don't do too much myself. "Hey can you coordinate with the venue and post the meetup on d.o", "can you order pizza", "can you bring plates and cups"...
This is after all a community, and one of the best ways to build community is to get people involved and give them a sense of ownership.
It's also important to remove the "single points of failure". If I all of a sudden disappear, I like to think that the group could continue on.
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Dave Hansen-Lange
Web Developer
Advomatic LLC
East Asia Office
Hong Kong
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Dave Hansen-Lange
Director of Technical Strategy, Advomatic.com
Pronouns: he/him/his
follow-up...
Charlie,
Thanks for the props on the blog post...I appreciate it.
In terms of how to structure your Drupal user group, I think the ultimate key is setting expectations. As Dave Hansen-Lange said, find out upfront how much time each person has to volunteer and divide and conquer responsibilites as much as possible. Next, you need to all be forthcoming on what it is your hoping to gain out of the meetups. Is it for networking, educating yourself more about Drupal, or something more informal like just getting together and talking shop?
Here is the biggest challenge (for me) - in an all-volunteer group it's difficult to force accountability. We usually try to schedule a brief meeting before our normal user group session and each person will give updates on what they were suppose to follow-up on. This kind of peer-to-peer interaction has been the most effective for us - no one wants to be the person who did not do what they committed to. We tried setting up a group wiki, and it has not been real effective - I think people have viewed it as one more thing they have to keep up with. Finally, as I mentioned in the post, levearage the heck out of meetup.com - that should be your first priority.
Good luck,
Dave
Mediacurrent