Greater Los Angeles Drupal Event Organizing Guide (DRAFT)

Events happening in the community are now at Drupal community events on www.drupal.org.
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Posted by christefano on March 3, 2013 at 11:04pm
Last updated by pcoleman on Tue, 2013-10-15 20:13

This wiki document provides a how-to and checklist for organizing events for and by the Greater Los Angeles Drupal user group (formerly Downtown Drupal).

Although this wiki document details how things are being done now (i.e. at the time of this writing), the comments below are an excellent place to discuss and suggest how to improve this process, reduce its costs, generalize it for other user groups and make it more effective and / or collaborative.

Table of Contents

Structures of Our Meetups

Example Agenda

   5:30pm
   Happy Hour at Takami

   6:55pm
   Projector and Tables / Chairs Setup
   Start of WebEx Meeting

   7:00pm
   Introductions
   News and Upcoming Events, including:
     • Drupal Sprint Weekend on March 9 & 10, 2013;
     • Mentored Drupal Training on March 15, 2013;
     • Introduction to Drupal Workshop on March 15, 2013;
     • Frontend Drupal Meetup on March 19, 2013;
     • Greater Los Angeles Area Drupal Camp (GLADCamp) on April 26, 27 & 28, 2013;
     • Interesting events listed at http://groups.drupal.org/events
   Users Helping Users (continued)

   8:00pm

   Featured Presentations
   Presentation Title, by Oscar Menjivar
   Lightning Talks
   Raffle Prizes!

   9:00pm
   Wrap-up, Clean-up and Close-up
   Drupal After Dark and more networking

Networking and Setup

It is a good practice to have a printed Agenda, just in case it can not display this on the projector. This can be critical at the beginning.

Having a sign-in list is a good idea. This gives you names, emails for further communications, and an attendance count.

Large meetings are more formal and they start with socializing with food and drinks provided by a food sponsor. During this time the event organizers and volunteers are discussing general user group business, working on the agenda, setting up A/V equipment, and so on.

Whenever possible, have a slideshow playing in the background that shows the presenters' names, upcoming events, links to @GLADrupal on Twitter, and so on. With a slideshow, we shorten the time spent on announcements considerably, and it's something that attendees can focus on if they arrive early. It works best to have the slideshow prepared ahead of time, it can get busy and be hard to get the slideshow together at the start of the meeting.

Act 1: Introductions, News and Announcements

Introductions

At large meetups (more than 10-12 people, use your judgment) when we have featured presentations, we typically don't have individual introductions because of how long it would take to go around the room. Of course, we always introduce the organizers, sponsors and presenters.

At smaller meetups, such as Users Helping Users and Drupal Café get-togethers, or at our general meetups that get rained out and have lower attendance, we still get together and start talking. An event organizer or volunteer catalyzes the beginning of the meeting by starting the introductions.

News and Announcements

At the start of the meeting, there are rapid news and announcements where we talk about local events (including an announcement or recap of the other Drupal events in the area) as well as Drupal news around the world that may be of interest to our attendees.

Announce what prizes we have that will be raffled off. During these announcements, anyone with a job announcement is invited to address the crowd and make their announcement. If the job announcement has also been posted to the Jobs tab at http://groups.drupal.org/node/219129, display the job post while the announcement is being made.

Act 2: Featured Presentations and Lightning Talks

There are inevitably problems with someone's laptop or our wireless router and we fill this time by either doing the raffle giveaway or a "community Q&A" (or both). At the end of the meeting, we do the raffle giveaway if we haven't already and then break into a "networking session" where people talk with one another, exchange business cards, ask related and unrelated questions about the presentations, etc.

Act 3: Breakout Sessions, Raffle Prizes, Networking

Breakout Sessions (BoFs)

We sometimes have breakout sessions, or BoFs (birds of a feather groups). The topics for these breakout sessions have ranged from high performance websites, Features-driven development, PCI compliance and general "getting started with Drupal" discussions.

We recommend that each breakout session has a leader in to help keep discussions from going off-topic or down a rabbit hole.

Raffle Prizes

Raffle prizes at our meetups often include discount codes, magazines, DVDs, books, and free seats to professional Drupal trainings. These are provided by sponsors, volunteers and individuals who have something to offer.

We are always grateful to our sponsors for their continued support. If you have any items you'd like to donate to the raffle, just contact any of the organizers at the meetup or post a suggestion or offer in the comments of the meetup's event announcement.

Drupal After Dark

When the meetup is officially over, a group goes to a restaurant afterward for a Drupal After Dark. It helps to have a Drupal After Dark venue coordinator.

Video Conferences and Recordings

There are 4 major components required for properly including a video conference component for a meetup:

  • Camera and microphone equipment and someone to set it all up;
  • Noise-free venue so that remote attendees have consistent audio quality and can hear the presenters;
  • Video conferencing system such as WebEx, GoTo Meeting or a Google+ Hangout;
  • Conference host and tech to mute people's mics, assign the presenter role, etc.

We also record and publish screencasts of featured presentations. The howto and checklist for our group is detailed in a separate wiki page, Video How-to and Checklist for Greater Los Angeles Drupal.

Other Resources

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Sample Agenda Worksheet.doc21.5 KB
Example Signin.doc37.5 KB