Let's consider a rotating Drupal Meet-up location

We encourage users to post events happening in the community to the community events group on https://www.drupal.org.
seanberto's picture
Posted by seanberto on January 27, 2015 at 8:05pm

In the previous thread about the BrewPal venue, a few of us suggested an interest in the PDX Drupal Users Group considering a rotating venue for the Meet-up. I'm actually unclear on the history of how this venue has been selected. Regardless, OpenSourcery, and now Phase 2, have been very generous in opening their space to the community.

There would be a number of benefits to a rotating venue:

  • The community gets to experience and share creative ideas about how offices/floor plans are setup to support effective teams.
  • Job seekers get to experience the culture of various shops.
  • In addition to seeing the "usual suspects" at the meet-up, developers who have more difficult transportation or scheduling constraints might be able to attend more meet-ups when they happen onsite.
  • Coordination of food and drink becomes easier - as the host could just take responsibility for serving beer and pizza, etc.

I'm curious what other folks think and what the decision-making process is for considering this. Also, what are the criteria used to evaluate potential meet-up venues?

And again, huge shoutout to the folks who have, and continue, to support the community by providing a venue.

-Sean

Comments

As the currently appointed

Posted by jessehs on January 27, 2015 at 11:28pm
jessehs's picture

As the currently appointed meetup organizer this year, I'm open to a rotating venue for meetups.

If anyone's office wants to host a meetup, get in touch with me and I'll put you in the queue. Some requirements:

  • a projector
  • enough chairs (a healthy meetup size has been in the 30-40 range lately)
  • enough space (including a place to put the food)
  • someone to make sure everyone can get in if the building is locked
  • someone to help clean up afterward (I will help too)
  • let it be up for debate, but I think a location within "inner" Portland is a must. We don't want to travel out to Gresham or Beaverton for the Portland meetup...

Sponsoring food and/or beverages is a plus, but not a hard requirement. I'll still be actively looking for sponsors for food, but YourShop++ if you can be a sponsor too.

Since Phase2 is where I work, and we have all of the requirements for the meetup, this will be the fallback location if no shop gets in contact with me to host for the month. (Sooner rather than later, so we can figure out sponsorship details.)

Send me an email at jhofmann-smith@phase2technology.com, using my drupal.org contact form, or get a hold of me in IRC at #drupal-pdx.

Sean, you mentioned Denver

Posted by jhedstrom on January 28, 2015 at 12:21am
jhedstrom's picture

Sean, you mentioned Denver does this, do you know how they keep meetup.com, and other meetup aggregation sites current?

Sounds good

Posted by seanberto on January 28, 2015 at 1:00am
seanberto's picture

@Jesse, that's great!

@Jonathan, not sure. I can do some research. I'm sure it's solvable.