In the meeting venue poll I saw there was a request from Carlo wanting to "learn something" at each meeting, which gave me a couple of ideas that I thought I'd throw out to be kicked around - or kicked out, as the case may be… :-)
I'm not sure how meetings are handled in other jurisdictions but, mindful of the diversity of attendants we have locally, I wonder whether we might consider running a few "streams" at each meeting to cover the varying interests people have.
As an example, these might aim to cover some of the following:
Community building/getting involved
Information about the Drupal community and how to get involved - perhaps we could cover/utilise the "Drupal Ladder" (drupalladder.org) which has lessons and materials to help people learn about and contribute to Drupal.
Site building and theming
Covering modules, tools and techniques as well as case studies (like Nicks excellent presentation about using Panels a while back) - could also cover related things like CSS pre-processors and other, more "front-end", topics.
Development
Covering more coding related stuff - as well as other things of keen interest to developers, like Cameron's great presentation on test-driven development the other night.
The business of Drupal
Focussing on the things that people working in Drupal need to know - could include things around project management, agile methodologies and tools/techniques, user-centred design - basically all the related things that happen in getting Drupal projects out the door.
Not saying these are necessarily the "right" things to be covering, or that we would always need to cover each stream at a meeting, but thought it might provide a topic for some discussion - and maybe even another poll - like the great one that Sean put together about meeting venue.
I'm not sure whether this is the best forum to discuss this, and I tried to cross-post to meetup.com, however they only accept short posts. Perhaps we could also include it as something to discuss at the next meeting.
Anyway, what do you think?
Cheers
Robert