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Building the Drupal Community around the World: who, why, where and when

jpoesen's picture
Submitted by jpoesen on Tue, 07/22/2008 - 04:44.

Session recording

Attached files

Placement
Session time: 
08/28/2008 - 11:00 - 08/28/2008 - 12:00
Conference booklet summary and bio
Article for conference booklet: 
Executive summary What makes local Drupal communities around the world tick, how do we maintain momentum, how are we organizing our events and how can we increase their awesomeness? Overview We'll explore how people around the world are building the Drupal community on a local, regional, national and international level. Wel'll draw from our experiences in the US, France, Belgium, Hungary, Kuala Lumpur and China, and try to get a sense of the similarities and differences in our approach. Intertwined with the aspect of community organization, is event organization: we'll explore the different kinds of events that are held on a regular basis: local user group meetups, regional DrupalCamps, national DrupalCamps and DrupalCons. We'll discuss their strengths and weaknesses, goals and result and how to start organizing these different types of event from scratch: the hows, the whys, the whos and the whens. You've stood on a soap box, evangelized Drupal and gathered a group of dedicated followers. Excellent! You've started organizing events. Even excellenter. But communities are people too (TM), and one of the burning questions is how to keep your community from losing momentum. How to retain the energy, positive spirit and sense of adventure? How to keep your group of volunteers together and motivated? We invite you to show your battle scars and share your ideas and lessons learned. We'd love to find out from you how your environment, culture, religion or language influences your community and how it can inspire others.
Bios for conference booklet: 
Kristof Van Tomme is a Belgian who set up a Drupal shop in Hungary with his partner Laura Vass. He's helped organize many events of such as Drupalcon Szeged, the first DUG in Hungary and the first Budapest meetup. Kristof teaches a Drupal course at the university of Szeged and has been touring Central Europe to promote Drupal(con) and to get Drupal adopted by the European Biotech sector. Jacob Redding is a professional geek. He uses OSS tools and software whenever/wherever possible and enjoys releasing GPL'ed code back into the community. Right now he specializes in Drupal development, consulting and site optimization. His current focus is on working in and around Beijing and Shanghai. Joeri Poesen is a freelance Drupal developer working out of Brussels, Paris and San-Francisco. He co-founded Belgium's first dedicated Drupal agency (which he since then left) and focuses on evangelizing Drupal, offering training and advising non-profit organzations.

Overview

Local and regional communities are mostly raised and supported by a handful of people or even a single individual, while the Drupalcons are the result of many (not so mythical) man-months of planning, lobbying and teamwork.

We'll use this session to explore how people around the world are building the Drupal community on a local, regional, national and international level. Wel'll take the Parisian/French community as a starting point for our group discussion.

Next, we'll explore the different kinds of community events that are held around the world: their strengths and weaknesses, goals and results. We'll discuss how to start organizing these different types of event from scratch: the hows, the whys, the whos and the whens.

We invite you to show your battle scars and share your ideas and lessons learned. We'd love to find out from you how your environment, culture, religion or language influences your community and how it can inspire others.

Goals

* discuss the process of community building around the world
* learn from other cultural perspectives, and different forms of social interaction
* distill best practices, help avoid common pitfalls
* lower the barrier for new initiatives by demystifying the organizational process

Audience

Developers, testers, end-users, marketeers, analyists, ... anyone who wants to help grow the Drupal community on a local/regional/national/internation level.

References
Kristof talked about a great resource for management resources, you can find them at:
http://manager-tools.com/

z.stolar's picture

Drupal in Israel

Nice idea!

I can share some of our experience in building up the community in Israel.

(see: http://www.linnovate.net/en/Creating-the-Drupal-work-and-business-market... for part of the story)

======================
Zohar Stolar
linnovate.net - community content infrastructures
Children illustration | איורים לילדים

jredding's picture

Wonderful

Thanks for submitting this session, its awesome!

jbi's picture

The Parisian/France has been quite active since Boston

Almost 90 registrations for a drupalcamp http://barcamp.org/DrupalCampParis2Participants Ori Pekelman of AF83 was even able to organise a Test Sprint with Dries and others...

We have a meeting every month. We are planning to organize some sort of special event to build a website for a charity in the course of a Week-End. The website still to come is http://www.drupalngo.com

It will be nice to talk about other local initiatives and get new idea. Especially about local business listing as we stuck in some sort of way.