A Summary Report of Your Drupal User Group

How Long Have You been Meeting

LA Drupal has been meeting regularly since at least April, 2007, and I joined LA Drupal in 2008 and am not too aware of what happened before then. Perhaps one of LA Drupal's other managers can speak to that. I recently merged the Southern California and Los Angeles groups, and the Southern California group was considerably older and possibly had its own events before LA Drupal did.

LA Drupal also has a regular podcast. We publish to iTunes so we have no idea how many listeners we have. The podcast is about happenings in the Los Angeles area but we've also had guests on the show including Sasha Costanza-Chock (from the VozMob project) and Greg Knaddison (author of Cracking Drupal and co-creator of Certified to Rock, among many other things).

Average Attendance

There are currently three large meetups a month (on the Westside, in Pasadena and in Downtown LA) with an attendance of anywhere between 25-50 people. This number has grown to 60-70 in the month or two after DrupalCamp LA, which has been the largest DrupalCamp (in terms of attendance) for three years in a row starting in 2008.

There are also Drupal Cafés (often spontaneous but sometimes topic-based meetups), free trainings (like the Git with D7 event), social gatherings (such as the Drupal After Dark series) and formal working meetings (like the recent ladrupal.org theme sprint) which number anywhere between 5 to 35 people per event.

The Drupal Cafés are similar to the Drupal meetups in other cities that I've been, such as Boston, Denver and Miami. I personally like the Drupal Cafés a lot since they're much more organic and don't have to adhere to an agenda. Some of the Drupal Cafés have been fairly large (between 15-20 people), however, and having a set agenda is always helpful when holding an event with a large group of people.

What kind of Venue do you meet in (donated office space, cafe, pub)

For the large meetups, we almost exclusively meet at a venue that has been donated by a venue sponsor. Our sponsors are usually companies that use or depend on Drupal in their day-to-day business, but in case of the the Santa Monica Public Library in Santa Monica, CA, we tried applying to become part of the library's official program of events. It's good for the group's momentum to have a free and consistent meeting place but we're also always interested to talk with venue sponsors about hosting our meetups and special events. Helping companies that use Drupal become part of the community is part of what we do.

The reason that there is more than one meetup a month is because Los Angeles is really a megalopolis and not everyone can manage a long commute during rush hour just to go to a Drupal meetup. So we have several large meetings a month as well as smaller, irregular meetings that have sprung up in places like Echo Park, Mar Vista, Woodland Hills and Long Beach.

Sample Agenda

The large meetings are more formal (again, having a set agenda is always helpful when holding an event with a large group of people) and they start with socializing with food and drinks provided by a food sponsor. During this time the event organizers are discussing general user group business, working on the agenda, setting up A/V equipment, and so on.

Whenever possible, we have a slideshow playing in the background that shows the presenters' names, upcoming events, links to LA Drupal on Twitter and so on. I'd like to do this more. With a slideshow we can shorten the time spent on announcements considerably, and it's something that attendees can focus on if they arrive early.

At the start of the meeting, there are rapid news and announcements where we talk about local events (including an announcement or recap of the other monthly LA Drupal meetups) as well as Drupal news around the world that we think may be of interest to our attendees. We announce what prizes we have that will be raffled off. During these announcements, anyone with a job announcement is invited to address the crowd and make their announcement. If the job announcement has also been posted to http://groups.drupal.org/la/jobs, we display the job post while the announcement is being made.

We then have a lengthy presentation or two followed by lightning talks. Lightning talks run between 5-10 minutes depending on how much time we have left over after the preceding presentations. These presentations and lightning talks are sometimes arranged in advance by the LA Drupal organizers who reach out to community members. I think this is a big part of what makes LA Drupal tick. There are a lot of people who are planning in advance as well as following up afterward by, for example, uploading videos and photos that were made during the presentations.

There are inevitably problems with someone's laptop or our wireless router and we fill this time by either doing the raffle giveaway or a "community Q&A" (or both). At the end of the meeting, we do the raffle giveaway if we haven't already and then break into a "networking session" where people talk with one another, exchange business cards, ask related and unrelated questions about the presentations, etc. When the meetup is officially over, a medium- to large-sized group (15-20 people) goes to a restaurant afterward for a Drupal After Dark. The restaurant bill has sometimes been comped by a food sponsor like Exaltation of Larks (my company), Oversee or IBM.

At the last couple meetups, we did away with the "networking session" and instead broke into BoFs (birds of a feather groups). The topics for these BoFs have ranged from high performance websites, Features-driven development, PCI compliance and general "getting started" discussions. Based on feedback that we've gotten so far, these BoFs have been so successful that I think we'll be doing this a lot more in the future. Something we've learned already is that each BoF absolutely needs a leader in case there's any chaos or hostility and the discussion is about to go sideways.

How do you do introductions

Typically, at the large meetups we don't have group introductions because of the number of attendees. Of course, we always introduce the organizers, sponsors and presenters.

At the Drupal Cafés, we get together, start talking and then a group organizer catalyzes the start of the meeting by starting the introductions.

• How Long Have You been Meeting: 4 years, monthly in Denver. Boulder started roughly 3 years ago. Colorado Springs roughly 2 years ago. Western Colorado roughly 1 year ago.
• Average Attendance: recently averaging 20 to 30 in Denver/Boulder, maybe 5-10 in Colorado Springs and Western Colorado.
• What kind of Venue do you meet in (donated office space, cafe, pub): a public access channel for Denver, Library and then training company office in Boulder, Library and then military office in the springs, coffee shops in the western meetups.
• Sample Agenda: roughly the same as Seattle.
• How do you do introductions: say your name, your company, relationship to drupal, something you learned recently and might want to teach tonight, something you are stuck on and want to learn.

Our biggest problem is the user group skill level two-hump problem though we solve this by doing lightning talks at all levels and going to a bar afterward. We also try to advertise any newbie topics in the announcement for the meeting to help draw in folks who need a solid reason to come to the meeting.

Hey - looks like nobody from Vancouver has checked in yet... I'm not really a DUG organizer, but have done Camp/Summit/cowork planning over the last couple yrs. Dale may pipe up and add to this if he catches it...

• How Long Have You been Meeting: goodness... g.d.o logs go back as far as April 2006, so I'll say about 4.5 yrs?
• Average Attendance: we get usually between 20-40 depending on topic etc. (the biggest I attended so far had I believe 43)
• What kind of Venue do you meet in (donated office space, cafe, pub): usually donated office space - we moved around a fair bit after Bryght/RainCity closed but seem to be settling in at The Jibe offices from what I can tell.
• Sample Agenda: Intros, Announcements, Lightning Talks, Main Presentation, Questions, Pub.
• How do you do introductions: Everyone takes their turn to say their name, and where they work/what kind of job they do.

There's also a DUG in Surrey (a suburb of Vancouver) and in Victoria (on Vancouver Island).

We've done a couple DrupalCamps, the 2008 one was about 120 people (over 2 days, including a barn-raising for working on a local non-profit's site, who helps homeless do citizen journalism). Didn't do one last year, many of us attended the PNW Summit in Seattle (and a few of us helped a little with the website). Hosted the PNW Summit a couple weeks ago (had about 240 people over 2 days). Have dabbled a bit with doing coworking sessions, which haven't quite caught on, but are a lot of fun. The old standby is the DUG night once a month, but it's very much a presenter in front of an audience, and I'm curious whether we can change it up a bit or get some kind of less formal, more hands-on gatherings going, but I'm too focused on docs these days to put a lot of energy into that, so just tend to spontaneously organize the odd thing. I was away but the Jibe held a cowork recently that I think went well.

Challenges...totally my opinion here, but: keeping things from getting stale, and judging who to cater things to now that the community is fairly large, how to vary the content/levels adequately, making sure new people feel welcome, how to translate local involvement into contributorship in the greater community.

Overall, it's a really good, dedicated group, and I think everyone looks forward to the various events.