The Chicago Drupal community has a long and colorful history. It is one of the most vibrant around the country, and possibly the world. We have been long time attendees and members of the Chicago Drupal Meetup Group.
We see a need in the Chicago community for an advanced Drupal meetup. Somewhere we can get together and talk about solving the hard problems developers face - empty() vs isset(), cron or rules scheduler, apache vs nginx. In addition we wanted to help ramp people up to contribute to Drupal core using the Drupal Ladder program. Finally, we wanted people to have access to a broad range of Drupal related content.
- Support a growing and diverse Drupal community in Chicago
- Focus on advanced topics for Drupal architecture, development, and DevOps
- Help developers extending Drupal into application and product building
- Help coordinate local sprints and hackathons for larger contributions
- Help contribute to open data initiatives within Chicago
- Help support local groups for other open source communitities
Our primary goals:
Although the CADUG is geared towards advanced Drupalists, we enourage those from all areas to attend and learn with us. Our goal is to compliment existing meetups and create an open community among local professionals working with Drupal as their vocation.
We meet on the Last Tuesday of every month.
Our Inagural Meetup will be Tuesday, July 31st, 2012 at 7pm
For more info, join us on Meetup.com! Chicago Advanced Drupal User Group
Comments
Advanced Drupal User Group clarification (and apology!)
First, I want to thoroughly apologize for any misunderstandings that have risen about the creation of this meetup group. The sole purpose of creating it is to further grow, enhance and benefit the Chicago Drupal Community. In hindsight, I feel that I should have probably posted an open discussion about the need that I observed in the community; the need for an advanced level Drupal meetup. I would have loved to get even more input from the community instead of the few of us who took initiative to fill [what we observed as] a gap.
Matthew Lechleider [Slurpee] (and others involved) have put in an enormous amount of effort into building a strong Chicago Drupal community and have worked extremely hard in order to maintain a consistent user group with high quality meetups. CADUG's intentions are to grow this wonderful community that already has strong roots. We have not designed CADUG to replace any existing Drupal Community events in Chicago, only supplement them. While CADUG is open to everyone in the community, it is meant to be an outlet for advanced level Drupal developers who work with code, core, and the community on a daily basis. Our end goal is to help improve and grow the Chicago Drupal Community, not fragment it.
It is very important for us to be as inclusive and transparent as possible. If anyone reading this wants to get involved with organizing or with presentations/lightning talks/open discussions, you are more than welcome to join us.
I (and the organizers of CADUG) thank Matt for taking the initiative several years ago to build the Drupal Community here in Chicago. I enjoy going to CDMUG and I look forward to still being an active attendee and presenter.
-Erik
ThatGuy@ErikBaldwin.com
ThatGuy@CLoudNYNEDesign.com
http://www.ErikBaldwin.com
http://www.CLoudNYNEDesign.com
@CLoudNYNE on Twitter
currently in Portland, OR
One vote yea
I sent Erik a note of encouragement and also wanted to share some thoughts with everyone else, as someone who is not currently active with the CDMUG:
I don’t know what kind of effect the formation of a new advanced group will have on the standard group. My guess is that as a whole it will make the Chicago Drupal community stronger. It will certainly strengthen the global Drupal community as we’ve been seeing plenty of support for advanced topics across-the-board at all sorts of events, especially the DrupalCons.
I can speak however about the impact that an advanced group would have on advanced developers. Chicago, is blessed with a wealth of senior Drupal minds, many of whom I understand participate with CDMUG regularly, but perhaps as many or more that have not become regulars. I personally am pretty busy as it is and don’t get much out of the topics discussed at the CDMUG and DrupalCamp level. I appreciate the CDMUG and support its existence, but it simply isn’t for me.
Why not CDMUG?
Let’s take me as a use case:
As the normal course of life goes, my work duties demand that I regularly offer training and help to my peers and particularly my junior developers, and I spend many additional hours a month evangelizing Drupal to businesses and delivering training. So my knowledge-down hours are pretty much used-up already, and I contribute plenty to the Drupal cause without participating at the local meet-up group.
And what about knowledge-up? Drupal and the web in general are huge. I have plenty to learn and appreciate opportunities to be schooled by fellow senior developers in all matters Drupal and beyond. Learning at my level, however, is not central to the CDMUG’s mission.
Bottom Line
Perhaps the CDMUG can incorporate more advanced topics here and there to attract more seniors. But the reality is that I struggle to participate at the CDMUG level, whereas I’m very excited to follow the CADUG progress. I’m looking forward to topics that will challenge and excite more advanced developers, and I’m very much looking forward to learning from the Chicago senior developers, as well as to see the formation of a richer community by drawing out some of the people that have not been participating at the CDMUG level.
Plus, if an advanced group is to begin in any city, it makes perfect sense that it would be Chicago.
Great idea
Great idea. We have been talking about this in our local community for many years. We ran into the same issue with new users being lost at our normal meetups which is why we started having a secondary free training each month. I'm very excited to see additional organic growth. Example, the Fox Valley group is thriving, Drupal Co-Working are fun, Chicagoland Drupal Library group is picking up momentum, and so forth. What other groups can we start? More groups in the suburbs? In LA they have been doing monthly "Drupal Development" meetups in which they review a chapter of the book each month. Another community has an entire Drupal group dedicated to e-commerce. Sky's the limit, how far we can grow?
However, I must ask the question: Why start a secondary meetup.com group? Our overall community wants everyone to participate at drupal.org. Meetup.com was a simply secondary place to post events such as twitter.
*Why start a group with 0 members when a group with 1000+ already exists? I would have been more than happy to provide access to post advanced events on our meetup.com page
*Why confuse users with various meetup.com groups or user databases?
*Why pay an extra $20/month for meetup.com? I've already invested about $1500 in meetup.com fees.
Either way...I'm glad to see this growth. Feel free to move forward as planned or combine resources. It's really up to you. However, I would love to communicate a bit more on these subjects as I'm currently planning an exit strategy from our local community over the next 6-12 months. My hope is that our community can thrive for many years without myself.
Growing Drupal in Chicago
I'd like to thank Matthew (Slurpee) for all the work he's done with CDMUG and the Chicago Drupal community as a whole. I fully understand why someone who has been doing this for 7 years would need to move away from such an active role.
I don't know the specifics of Meetup.com or how other cities with multiple groups handle this. The group was registered by MrMaksimize and is maintained by BLadwin and myself. Maybe we can set up a donation thing to help pay for meetup.com fees for CADUG?
Looking forward to the first CADUG next week and excited that there are more Drupal meetups to attend each month in Chicago!
I just learned about this new
I just learned about this new DUG last weekend, and I'm very excited about it! The Chicago community has long had an unmet need for more advanced Drupal content, and I'm glad to see that someone is finally doing something about it. My hope is that this group will not just tackle advanced technical topics, but also offer content relating to advanced Drupal topics relating to community, business etc.
Palantir would be more than happy to offer its support to this group, as well as a venue for meetings. Our current space can accomodate a couple dozen people for meetups/sprints/etc., but we are planning to move this fall into a new office with a dedicated meeting space that can accomodate 50-75 or more.
This is a very busy week for me, but I am hoping to make tomorrow's meeting. This is an awesome development for our community!
Awesome!
Really glad to see the Palantiri are on board!
This month's location is definitely going to be at-capacity very quickly. We'd very much like to see the meetup happen in different locations about town -but always on the last Tuesday of the month to keep consistency for CADUG meetings.
One goal is to cover advanced content on multiple tracks- this all banks on who shows up and what they bring to the table. I would personally love to see and hear about advanced community organizing/business topics etc.
Tech topics will be plentiful - but there is definite room for discussion on any number of issues that don't necessarily relate directly to writing code.
Meeting notes
http://groups.drupal.org/node/245863