LA Drupal community

In a previous thread, I mentioned my challenge to the Los Angeles Drupal community about ways for all of us to help both presenters & organizers alike avoid the dreaded 'B' word- burnout. I detail ways that we all, as a community, can step it up- which we need to do since word has come down from the LA Drupal Managers that only the Westside meetup is the "official/main" meetup & that they won't be providing official, logistical/managerial support for all of the other local groups that have sprung up in the last year (& are thriving!).
http://groups.drupal.org/node/129924#comment-430889

In case you missed it, Randy Fay (rfay), posted that there will be live training & support sessions for Git. Are you a maintainer that hasn't gotten on the Git bandwagon yet? Are you curious about why Git rocks? Then these live training sessions are for you. Please note that I simply noticed his post & wanted to share w/the LA Drupal community in case others have missed it (the 1st one is next week).
http://groups.drupal.org/node/130014

More good news! They're using Webex for the live stream which means there's the usual support for Windows & Mac but ALSO Linux support & even Solaris!

A number of people are getting together tonight in Pasadena to hear about how they should start using Drupal. This was set up with a senior LA Drupal member and there is a lot of interest from a number of designers and site builders.

I propose we come up with a (or several) reusable DESCRIPTION(s) of Drupal for use in proposals to clients... you know, the people who aren't geeked out on Drupal, and, quite the contrary, have no (expletive) clue what it is, or what it does.... and mainly, WHAT THE BENEFIT(S) IS OF DEVELOPING IN IT IS(ARE).

I feel like descriptive text should distill itself down to about 2 sentences that provide a widely applicable (and perhaps wildly general) concept of why clients should commit to the Drupal platform.

Here's my stab:

I would like to suggest a topic for the westside meeting. HOOKS
This is a really powerful feature, does anyone have experience with hooks that would be willing to talk about what a hook is the features and how to use it?

Every year at DrupalCon (North America) members of LA DRUPAL and our neighboring groups get together for a group photo. We'd like all members attending DrupalCon Chicago to know ahead of time we will meet on first day of the conference Tuesday, Mar. 8th right before lunch (11:00AM) for our annual conference group photo. Like last time we'll meet near the registration booth. Show up and bring your smile.

Would anyone attending the conference like to volunteer to bring their camera?

This is a continuation of the thread posted here: http://groups.drupal.org/node/112639#comment-413704

It discusses whether the managers of the Westside meetup shall control the 'LA Drupal' name or whether other Drupal meetups in LA will be able use it.

Should there be a larger umbrella organization to handle all of the meetups? If so, what should it be called?

In the absence of precedent and tradition to handle cases like this, we have the chance to make history and be an example to other growing user groups in the Drupal community.

this is a further outgrowth of http://groups.drupal.org/node/112639#comment-418719 so that people can throw in their two cent.

my two cent:

At several meetups in December and January, I asked during the opening announcements if there were opinions one way or another about using ads to support the LA Drupal video channel at ladrupal.blip.tv (which we use to post meetup presentations, podcast episodes, etc.).

There weren't any objections and in experiment intended to offset costs and help make LA Drupal self-sustaining, pre-roll and post-roll ads were turned on.

In the last 30 days, LA Drupal has earned less than $5. This is less than the $8 a month that a "Pro" account costs (which is currently paid for by a sponsor *), which I upgraded it to last summer in order to get the necessary machine time to convert some of the longer videos, like the Git with Drupal workshop in June.

This brings us to today and I think it's a good time to check in.

Being a relative Noob, I'm very interested in Drupal best practices. Attending DDCLA was about the best thing for me.

One thing that kept happening was hearing the presenter saying "There's a module for that!" OK, but I didn't write them all down, and there were so many across the sessions I know I missed most of them. What might seem obvious to some are not so for newbies like myself.

Maybe someone's got a nice list of the modules mentioned during DDCLA? Where? Maybe post here?

Thanks!
Jeff