Thanks to everyone who attended the Drupal Johannesburg meetup (18 strong!). In particular, thanks to Anton for hosting us at Obsidian, Willem and Laurence from e-Consultant for providing the cooler box full of drinks, and to everyone for being passionate enough about drupal to make the event the success that it was. Special thanks to the canadian high commission who made it possible for Adrian Rossouw to attend.
We need to decide how regularly we want to meet: once a week, once every 2 weeks, once a month, once every 6 weeks, once every 2 months. Is it better to meet on a weekend, or during the week? And, then when the next meetup should be.
I'll set up a poll so we can vote on both these questions.
I'm going to keep the facebook group going, because I like some of the features (strong network effect, and I like the photos), but as not everyone is on facebook, please make the South Africa Drupal groups your primary source of information about this group - please subscribe to email notifications of the group http://groups.drupal.org/og/manage/39 and or the rss feed http://groups.drupal.org/node/39/feed .
While I'm happy to arrange/coordinate events for the time being, I think it's important that this is not driven by just one person - let's all get involved, with suggestions for workshops, demos, dinners, better ways of running the group and managing/distributing the directory of joburg drupalers, direction/focus of the group, offers to help in some of the admin of the group... And anything else that's important to you.
I've put everyone's contact details (and background info) into a google docs spreadsheet, so if you've got a google account you can edit your details there, as things are probably a bit incomplete for some. I have sent out invitations to collaborate on this document, but if you don't receive one, or want an excel or pdf copy, let me know. Also, let me know if you know of a better/easier way of collaborating on this document.
Here follows a summary of the key points of the meetup:
Drupal Johannesburg meetup 2008-02-16
Attendees (18)
Hanke: Flash, design, keen to learn;
Skip(?) (Scheepers): Drupalholic, themer, working on a cool module that uses the GD library create dynamic (text-insertion) graphics, to learn, discover interesting stuff, for fun;
Andrew: PHP guy, doing a big social networking site to do with the UN?, drupal noob, to network and learn;
Shaun: Working in drupal for the last 2 years, to meet interesting people, smart people to bounce ideas off, has a fairly intense programming background!
Willie: Obsidian consultant, uses drupal, created and maintains the module: quota by role;
Guy: suit in geeks clothing or vice versa, in a partnership with Anton, cognasium and telementa(drupal company), networking, share work and to meet people;
Adrian: Drupal user 1337, core developer;
Sara: Drupal newbie, looking for a new career, interested in learning and ideas;
Roger: PHP guy, mac user;
Graeme: Freelancer with a .net background, now getting into drupal, interested in learning and future work;
Diricia: Works at telementa with Anton and Guy and Skip;
Anton: Linux guy since '93, co-founder of obsidian, partner in cognasiuma and telementa, keen to getto know drupal people;
Jeremy: Into design and print, keen to learn drupal, basic knowledge of flash and dreamweaver;
Laurence: From e-consultant where they've built +- 400 drupal sites;
Willem: From e-consultant, core business focused on small sites all run as multisites on a managed hetzner server (do about 30 sites per month), when he started with drupal, he'd never written one line of php code, keen on the social aspect, growth, and to learn from and share with everyone;
Sam: Freelance developer;
Nadine: New to programming;
Charles: Web developer (www.parkroad.co.za), working in web since 2000, got into php about 2002, passionate about drupal, finds he's often got more work than he can manage so looking to find other drupalers to pass work to or hire as consultants, often there are parts of jobs/quotes which are a bit out of his field of experience so would be nice to be able to identify who has what skills and what experience, interested in discussing business models, keen to contribute back into the drupal community and to increase the pool of drupal developers in South Africa, looking to learn from others, share drupal experiences;
Thoughts from Adrian
Communication is important, to find out what's important to each member of the group.
Ideas of what to do at each meetup:
* Showcases - demo of new drupal sites that we're working on;
* Tutorials - for example: if you've just discovered a new module, share how it works and what it does;
* Popular modules - when best to use them, for which purpose;
Upcoming Training
Adrian mentioned a training workshop he will be giving sometime in April (provisional). Training will cover: writing custom modules, which modules should be used for which purpose, reading of module code. May require some basic php skills. Will be a Joburg and Cape Town workshop.
Quick survey of the group
Of 17 people:
Q: Who's made a completed drupal site?
A: 10
Q: Who's made a drupal theme?
A: 6
Q: Who's written a custom module?
A: 7
Q: Who's committed a theme or a module to Drupal?
A: 3
Q: Who's made a patch and contributed back to the project?
A: 3
One goal should be to move up in these areas, so that everyone aims to contribute back to drupal in these ways. Get people involved in the community, make and read patches, write new features, help with documentation etc. Can plot this in a graph, and see how it changes over time.