Hey guys,
I have been terribly quiet of late here; But also notice the GDo page is quiet in general too. My guess is that it's silly season for everyone and that work's just keeping everyone nicely busy.
Event location is in the event link, please RSVP (which is important) but also attend (which is even more important, so if you forget to RSVP, still attend ;-)
This isn't the general Drupal meet-up which is in the same location, and if you attended that meet-up, you would have skilled up already this year in things like Sass, Angular, Services, Chef, Vagrant, PhoneGap and several dozen more items. Those meet-ups happen 1st Wednesday of every month and they are very valuable for any Drupal developer or business person to attend. Only one so far this year of all the ones I attended had the old commercial vibe to it, it's more of a general learning, skills transfer and exploration meet-ups now.
This meeting is the Drupal Association South Africa meeting. We had and still have a lot of nitty-gritty administrative stuff to get out of the way before we're able to serve any purpose to the community that will be move visible and useful. It's very important to make sure we do the beginning stuff right, to ensure we're structured correctly both legally and in such a way that the community (you guys) can simply vote us out so that the DASA is a community owned organization. Also so that if it ever does get commercially hijacked like our Drupal.co.za and Drupal.org domains, it will simply lose all relevance as quickly as possible.
We may have a constitution fully signed this week; Two signatures were lacking last week. Once we do, it's off to the bank to get an account.
But we are also coming to a place where we have to start looking at what we can do for the community. That is you. We have some excellent ideas already and we'll put them in the agenda to discuss, but we also need both input and we need people interested in affecting change and growth for all of the Drupal community in South Africa. If you're keen, please pop in for the meetings.
If you're online only and time is constrained, think quickly of what you would like to see DASA do for you. There's some limitations, like that it is for the South African Drupal community (primarily, does not have to be exclusive). So, for example, if you are a business owner that need several Drupal websites maintained. You may ask for a Drupal service providers directory. We then have to figure out a way to create one that would not unduly advantage one Drupal shop over another in SA. This one's been discussed already and we're thinking along the lines of the usual links to the Drupal Association membership page, links to a future DASA membership page and perhaps a page that lists site-owner reviews of their Drupal websites.
Our technical Drupal meetings are doing great in SA, but we need more. From the bits I pick up around the Durban meetings, they're making some serious headway. Cape Town, I've heard less about of late... are you guys doing well there? Johannesburg may even split into two meetings as attendance is so high that seating may become a problem. That's awesome! But we also need to start looking at business oriented meetings. Specifically targeted at site owners and potential future Drupal site owners. Also then bringing new Drupal shops into being and helping existing ones grow.
The growth in demand is astounding. I keep having to match new clients with other Drupal providers in the community as we're just simply full up with work. We're being quite selective now to try to take on only new work that is more challenging and have aspects to them that focus on new technology. A few months ago, that was still a rare thing, now, we match more work with other developers than we do ourselves and it's set to become several times more. Problem is, everyone else seem to be full up with work load too. We need DASA to be able to handle such sharing too as I'm sure there's other Drupal shops in the same boat as us.
Please take a moment and think of ways that DASA can help you as a designer, site-owner, potential Drupal site-owner, developer, newbie, old-hand, rockstar, entrepreneur, student, tecnophobe, tehnophile, kid, grandpa (I'm soon to be one, 6month from now) or just... you!