Posted by robbt on January 21, 2021 at 3:58pm
Hey everybody I have recently gotten back into Drupal and got a email from Meetup that they were going to delete the CODUG meetup group if someone didn't sign up to be an "organizer".
I'm not sure this is necessary or if there is any interest. But I thought I'd just post here and see if anyone is still around. I hardly use groups.drupal.org so I suspect this post will not go anywhere but I'd also be able to host virtual meet-ups if people were interested in Drupal still and found it valuable.
Comments
I got a similar email
I got a similar email recently but I'm not really in a position to be an organizer since I got started in Drupal after most of the stuff in central Ohio seemed to stop happening. But I would love to help things get going again if possible.
It's definitely possible. It
It's definitely possible. It is like 25$ a month for something that is similar to what we could do through here. But I do suspect that we might get more awareness of events if we utilized meetup and there might be people on there that aren't on here.
So the first question is should we pay a 3rd party company to use their service ? I can probably pay for 1 month which is 12$ and then we could announce that we are leaving Meetup or we could continue to use it. I think that Meetup at least for now quit their plans of charging per attendee at meetups and are sticking to charging organizers a lumpsum.
I hosted some of the first meetups with vwX and then others such as Brian294 kind of picked up the torch and ran with it for a while but this was over a decade ago.
There was even a DrupalCamp Ohio for a while which was rad but I personally quit focusing on Drupal and only in the last 6 months have gotten into it.
I'd be happy to do a very brief overview of Drupal 9. And I could talk about my experiences migrating a Drupal 7 site to it. But basically that's what I would be able to offer without doing a bit of research etc.
Nearby Regional Groups
I'm one of the organizers of the Northeastern Ohio group and it's a similar situation here. I took over the meetup account in response to that shutdown notice a few years ago and we revived in-person meetups for a while. It was still difficult for me to organize them because I'm in Youngstown and most of the membership was based in Cleveland (about an hour away), but we had some good sessions.
The Western NY group has a regular virtual meetup (running long before everything was virtual) that I usually attend -- it's held quarterly, on the second Wednesday. We just met last week, the next will be April 14. It's usually informal, just open discussion, but always open for a specific topic or presenter.
I can say groups.drupal.org is not ideal for getting the message out. I always used Meetup for communication with the NEO group, but that's largely because there was already an established membership. And secondarily, social media (mostly Twitter). Anything with a more robust set of communications tools is probably beneficial over g.d.o. I don't think there's a lot of users present here anymore. A lot of people use Slack now and I think there's an Ohio channel there (although it's been a while since I checked in there).
The Pittsburgh group is also pretty much defunct. I'm exactly halfway between Cle and Pgh, so I interacted with both. I think there's still interest in Drupal and collaborating about it in our broader region, but the remaining users are pretty spread out geographically. I've thought before that it might be beneficial to reorganize into a regional group and pool our efforts, move towards more virtual than in-person events.
If you did something virtually on d9 or migrating, I'd be interested in attending.
They got me
I ponied up a few bucks to keep the Meetup alive. Hate to see it die. I would def like to get an actual, physical meetup organized. More to follow using Meetup's tools, stay tuned. ;-)
Hey. Yeah I'd probably be
Hey. Yeah I'd probably be able to do something for February. Thanks for paying for the meetup. Let me know if you'd like me to be an organizer.
Ohio State Campus group
We have a Drupal Users Group at Ohio State University.
I'm happy to include anyone in the meetings we have.
Ours are usually the third Thursday of the month from 3:30-5. We have a range of topics that I think would be applicable to people using Drupal. Once in a while something is campus specific but that is pretty rare.
Our meetings have gone virtual so I can share our Zoom link once we have them scheduled.
Announce on Meetup?
I've "taken over" Central Ohio Drupal Users Group on Meetup. If you want I can invite everyone from there. Thoughts?
Campus Meetups
Sounds good. Once I have details for our Feb 25 meeting then I will send on a Zoom link.
thanks!
Inviting people on here to
Inviting people on here to the virtual meeting for the OSU Drupal group would be appreciated along with the topic/discussion.