Posted by trailerparkopera on March 27, 2014 at 6:57pm
I ran into Chris Miller of Trailheadinteractive.com at a recent gig in Great Falls and we were commenting on the lack of interaction among Montana-based Drupalistas. So, in the spirit of self-interested collaboration, is there any interest on organizing a DrupalCamp Montana sometime this year? I'd be willing to do the legwork to acquire a facility here in Helena where we could meet, but is there any interest in getting together as a group?
Comments
Great
That sounds great. I can probably get, at the least, some schwag from Acquia. There aren't a whole lot of us left in Missoula, but I'm sure we can round some folks up.
What can I do to help?
-Scott
Scott Rouse
http://about.me/scott.rouse
Maybe fall/winter?
I'll see if I can get more people to join in the planning. I was thinking that it might be nice to try to do a day and a half session, with half day (maybe a Friday or Monday) dedicated to a public presentation of open source government stuff (open data/code, agile for government, etc), and a day devoted to Drupal stuff.
What do you think?
I like the sound of that.
I like the sound of that. I'm willing to present on something.
Edit: And work on anything else that needs to be done!
What about a web developers conference?
At the first Montana Agile Culture House this weekend, there was a session about a web developers conference for Montana. You might consider partnering with the folks there who had interest in organizing something.
Great idea
This is a great idea. Do you have any contacts at the Montana Agile Culture House who might be interested in collaborating?
Sound like maybe an Agile best-practices track might be useful (Scrum/Kan-Ban; PM tools, etc).
MACH contacts
I'd be interested in a drupalcamp as I manage drupal sites for a couple nonprofits. I passed your info onto one of the session conveners, Dan Bowling, with the IT dept at the UM. I'm hoping you'll work together on this one. I will be passing on the web developer conference planning invitation as a follow on from the MACH1 conference - so if you work with Dan - you should be able to bring in the MACH1 folks that might be interested.
I'm biting my tongue about the agile best-practices track idea. Perhaps I'll provide input about that at another time! Just wish you success in supporting the Montana developer community. Another great place to find interest is the http://meetup.com/montana-programmers community.
Thanks for the contact info
I'll give Dan a call and I joined montana-programmers. We have a small, informal group that occasionally gathers here in Helena, mostly to drink beer, but it's good to see a larger group.
I'd be interested to hear your reaction to agile best practices. We have a mostly love relationship with it, (some hate only where it needs to go over waterfalls and smacks into non-agile procurement practices). But by being agile with Agile, we've found an approach that works for us.
love agile but not how it's usually implemented
I'm a huge fan of agility, and not just for software. I've enjoyed xTreme programming recommendations since I first learned about them in 2000. I'm a certified Scrum Master. I've been to way too many agile conferences, have lots of passion for this topic, and I've also made lots of mistakes. Plan to continue making mistakes, and hopefully learn from them.
Since you asked - the term "best practices" is a bit of a problem for agile. Mary Poppendiek (awesome thinker and presenter, author of Lean Software Development and many other books) really is harsh about "best practices". I've been guilty about this one. I even started a "Software Best Practices" study group at SAP over five years ago before I really understood this.
Poppendiek says there are only good practices in context, and the reason is that most software development is complex or chaotic. Best practices only work for simple problem spaces. And unfortunately, there's a lot of money to be made pushing some of the well packaged agile best practices onto organizations, teams, and developers. Often with not so great results.
I don't want to hijack this thread. Agile for web development would be a great topic at your conference. I'd love to hear more about your experience with agile practices. I wish you could have made it to the Montana Agile Culture House conference last weekend. We had some awesome presenters and session topics about Agile. If you held a meetup about agile in Helena on a night I have free - I would drive up from Missoula for it.
WA straggler...
I'm now living in the Spokane area, which isn't too far from Montana (it looks like Helena is about a 5 hr drive; Missoula is much closer). Anyway, if you organize a camp, I would probably come, schedule permitting.
Sprints, anyone? :)
Drupal programmer - http://poplarware.com
Drupal author - http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920034612.do
Drupal contributor - https://www.drupal.org/u/jhodgdon
Adding sprints, a PM planning board, and organizing mtgs
@jhodgdon: Great idea!
I just setup a Trello board here: https://trello.com/b/WnidLAXZ/montana-drupalcamp-2014 that we can use for planning purposes. (If you haven't used it, we've found Trello to be a great client-facing PM tool. You'll need to create a free Trello account to view the board.
If anyone would like to be an active planner (not necessarily participant), note it here or email me privately with your Trello account username and I'll grant edit permissions.
(FYI: We use Trello Export, Plus for Trello and Trello Card ID Chrome extensions to make it more useful than the out of the box experience). The UI is very similar to Jira's Scrum reports.
I'll give this a week or two, then see who's volunteered and will then setup the first planning meeting (virtual). I'm thinking Google Hangouts but if we go beyond 10 participants, I'll find something else.