Central Texas Nonprofit Drupal Users Group

At the “Birds of a Feather” session on the Central Texas Nonprofit Drupal Users Group at DrupalCamp Austin today we discussed some general purposes for this new group: support each other with technical information, help nonprofits overcome Drupal’s learning curve, and provide information on specific contributed Drupal modules that have value for nonprofits.

We also discussed the fact that there are already several organizations or groups that overlap what we are trying to do, and so it would be good to combine forces. For example, at yesterday’s Austin Non Profit Bar Camp, there was a session on Drupal.
Another shared observation was that “nonprofit” is not a monolithic term, but rather there is a spectrum of nonprofits with a range of size and technical know-how: small non-profits that have to outsource and large nonprofits with IT staff, communications staff, or others with skill sets that are adaptive to Drupal.

We talked more about an event in 2010 that would effectively be a hybrid between DrupalCamp Austin and the Austin Non Profit Bar Camp - a bar camp specifically for nonprofits and Drupal in Austin. We recognized that at such a bar camp there would need to be sessions aimed at nonprofit staff with little or no knowledge about Drupal, as well as higher-level sessions similar to what is at DrupalCamp.

A question was posed as to whether this Nonprofit Drupal Users Group would be mainly for collaboration and a clearinghouse, or whether we would want to go beyond that and actually develop tools or other assets that would be valuable to nonprofits. There seemed to be some interest in moving in the direction of creating “recipes” for nonprofits, a sort of Nonprofit Drupal Cookbook. A person from MAIN, that supports a lot of web sites in Austin is migrating to Drupal, talked about using drush to create an install a package of key modules that nonprofits would find useful.

Finally, we discussed querying the Austin Drupal Users Group to see about having one of the upcoming meet-ups with a nonprofit focus. I asked Lauren, who has been coordinating these at UT’s ACT Lab each month, and she has agreed to put us on the agenda for December.

So the December meet up in Austin, if we want to, would be a combined event with the Austin Drupal Users Group and the Central Texas Nonprofit Users Group.

If anyone wants to be added to the Google group for this contact Stefan Wray.

Stefan you did a great job of pulling this together!!