Premise: Outside of DrupalCons and camps, g.d.o user group meetups happen to be fully qualified, regular events maybe worth dosing a bit more followup coverage.
In general, published meeting reviews are not just handy for their own attendees to have but also benefit everyone connected via the web. Where to post the coverage is up to each group; this post is only a thinking-out-loud prototype to offer background and then some specific details on a meetup that just took place.
The idea is to create value in the form of recurring posts that can be both retrospective (a time capsule, as it were, recapping a local meetup) and prospective (a possible pattern to help clue-in upstart groups or those reinventing themselves).
We are all familiar with the Drupal community’s emphasis on being inclusive http://buytaert.net/fostering-inclusivity-and-diversity. So are monthly local meetings—to any experience level and, ideally, location. Bear in mind that meetups take place not just in the flesh but occasionally online, too: http://goo.gl/RGHSmh
Attendance at different user group meetups around the circuit can vary from immense to downright modest. Getting specific, ours would fall more into the latter bunch: somewhat minute for the population served (over 2.5MM), with the disclaimer that we do meet in a small rural city halfway between our two major metro areas (Buffalo and Rochester).
The name of our section reflects this wide geographical span: Western New York State Drupal User Group (WNYDUG) https://groups.drupal.org/western-new-york.
Author heyrocker brings up rural disparity and its effect on participation in his just-released October 29, 2014 article, “Stay for the community” http://goo.gl/mtIGEQ.
Our membership tally is on its way up, though, with steps underway to expand reach and involvement. This is above and beyond a step we took a few years back when we went ahead and added an online meeting to our monthly schedule. Ever since, we have promoted it in parallel and kept each hangout open to the entire Drupal universe.
We held our monthly in-person meeting in Batavia on Wednesday, October 29, 2014. The venue was our usual public setting of Coffee Culture® Café & Eatery, plenty accessible and suitable across age groups.
In order of arrival, we had regulars jpw1116, darlai and Eidolon Night, plus new attendees kmoll and DCanfield. We went through a round of introductions and brought everyone up to speed on the rough plan for our upcoming three months of meetups.
Next was the topic of the evening, Drupal security, with a vital update on events and remedies that emerged over the past two weeks. This is the chronology we published to the comments section of our g.d.o meeting post https://groups.drupal.org/node/447143#comment-1068588, to be able to share and discuss in detail:
October 15, 2014 - 08:45
SA-CORE-2014-005 - Drupal core - SQL injection
https://www.drupal.org/SA-CORE-2014-005October 15, 2014 - 11:54
FAQ on SA-CORE-2014-005
https://www.drupal.org/drupalsa05FAQOctober 16, 2014 -
The Drupal Security Team (on Modules Unraveled Podcast 122)
https://modulesunraveled.com/podcast/122-drupal-security-team-greg-knadd...October 20, 2014 - 1453 +1300
This is not a drill: Update Drupal 7 NOW
http://drupal.geek.nz/blog/not-drill-update-drupal-7-nowOctober 22, 2014 - 13:30:00 -0500
How to Restore Your Hacked Site
https://modulesunraveled.com/blog/how-restore-your-hacked-siteOctober 22, 2014 - 15:09 +1300
Your Drupal website has a backdoor
http://drupal.geek.nz/blog/your-drupal-websites-backdoorOctober 29, 2014 - 10:20
Your Drupal site got hacked. Now what?
https://www.drupal.org/node/2365547October 29, 2014 - 10:39
Drupal Core - Highly Critical - Public Service announcement - PSA-2014-003
https://www.drupal.org/PSA-2014-003
Fortunately, we understood the nuances of the recent “backdoor” threat and had a handle on talking over the alternative options to mitigate or else roll back a compromised site. It was a case of the present company maybe not being the ones who needed this discussion. . . .
The non-agenda stage of the meeting dwelled on the notion that re-engineering our annual custom of holding a camp or a mini-camp https://groups.drupal.org/node/303613. What if that energy instead went directly into a sprint? The plan would be to tackle a needed initiative, e.g., the Media module, and coordinate an event around it. Bringing in all skill levels to help tackle non-coding, including testing and documentation, would differentiate it from standard sprints and open the door to untapped educational potential.
On the topic of monthly promotion, other g.d.o local meetup groups may have better methods in place but ours still uses "brute force" to pitch our two meetings across a hodgepodge of sites. Of course, we default to our own g.d.o page https://groups.drupal.org/western-new-york but also use Google+ https://plus.google.com/109901306889534106439/posts, a Facebook group https://www.facebook.com/groups/111821745507258/ and page https://www.facebook.com/Wnydug, Twitter https://twitter.com/WNYDUG, LinkedIn http://www.linkedin.com/groups/Western-New-York-Drupal-User-2943046 and the local tech event site NextPlex http://nextplex.com/buffalo-ny/groups/western-new-york-drupal-user-group-wnydug.
Meetup.com turned out being a wash due to their fluky radius of promotion from major city centers. Our in-person meeting location left us in a deadzone that was never promoted for either city. We do maintain our own custom site, hosted courtesy of Pantheon and authored by WebOzy, at http://wnydug.org/ . The plan is to exploit more of its targeted appeal and utility over time.
We also revisited the issue of boosting local participation by "spidering" to find unfamiliar Drupal sites in the area. We know that some major medical and educational institutions nearby have made the switch to Drupal but without a comprehensive list of installs among other major users in our geographical area, it's difficult to plan a recruitment effort. No one present seemed to be aware of any package that would return these hits but we will keep on it.
Wrapping up, we went back and addressed some more of our future meetup issues. The unfortunate timing of our final-Wednesday-of-the-month in-person meetings in November and December this year places them on “Thanksgiving Eve” and New Year's Eve, respectively. The consensus was to forfeit those dates in lieu of our big January meetup featuring special guest Chris Luckhardt presenting on D8. Meantime, our second-Wednesday-of-the-month online meetings will pick up the slack.