DrupalCon Amsterdam 2014: Local users groups organization

Community summit

The aim of the discussion was to talk about how the different local groups are organized and what kind of problems do they find and document all of this so it can be used by potential group organizers.

The attendees of the discussion have different backgrounds, from their location having people from Spain, Czech Republic, Austria, Greece, Brazil, Germany, Scotland, Slovakia, Sweden, Holland, England and France, to their experience organizing groups, having people who has been involved in a group for years to people who wanted to start one.

We divided the discussion in all the areas that we think that affect to the organization of a local group, being this areas marketing and promotion, local group websites, reducing burnout and attracting organizers, collaboration, business presence in the group, different types of events, topics and speakers, funding and logistics.

Decisions made and next steps

On Friday, during the sprints, part of the attendees of the Community Summit discussion meet again to plan the next steps and organize us to be able to start working on it.

The tasks where we want to begin are focused on two different areas. The first one is the documentation that can be used for the group organizers or new organizers and the second one is a list of all the different groups, with contact details, location information (country, region, city...).

We don't know when or where will be this information available. The documentation probably will be on drupal.org or on groups.drupal.org. The list of groups, ideally should be easily available at groups.drupal.org, but to speed it up, probably we will start with a new website. We will try to stay in contact with the Drupal Association in order to find the best place for all of this.

How to get involved

There is an IRC channel to talk about local groups organization: #drupal-groups

There is also a group on groups.drupal.org: https://groups.drupal.org/local-user-group-organizers

We have created a mailing list for internal communication of the working group and group organizers: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!members/drupal-groups-organizers

We have created a sandbox project where we can track the progress of the different tasks and anyone can get involved: https://www.drupal.org/sandbox/david_hernandez/2351391

Thanks!

Thank you to all the people who got involved: Iro and Kostas from Greece, Montaña from Spain, Teun from Netherlands and Spain, Radim from Czech Republic, Leo from Brazil, Robert from UK and all the others that I don't remember their names. My thanks also to the Drupal Association for organizing the Community Summit and give us the chance to work on this.

More information soon. Stay tuned!