 We've put together similar sessions, Ivo and I have put together similar sessions for a few Drupal camps and we had one in Chicago that was a really exciting discussion about sort of somewhere between a community how-to and we focus really heavily on local user groups. The things that's been going on in Europe. Morning Christoph. The thing that's been going on especially in Europe in the last six months to a year is a whole set of new events. So the community is trying on splitting into verticals, into interest groups, having a business day, having a design day, having a government day, so that people who want to work in those areas or who want to find a niche in those areas can really get together and focus on their special situation rather than just talking about everything about Drupal, let's say. So my personal goal for this conversation is to sort of describe where we are and how successful some of these new things have been and I've actually brought more questions than answers because I'd really like to get some insight into how to make this thing grow and work better. So I'd like to introduce my producers, my co-presenters, Christoph Antome. Your company is called Pronovix and the most exciting thing that I think he does is a lot of integration between the Dita information architecture system and Drupal and that's very, very fascinating. This is Ivor Rodovsky from ProPeople. I believe you're the CEO of Belgium, Germany and Austria of ProPeople. Jens Berthofter also works for ProPeople in Copenhagen and there's a very vibrant, very, very active Drupal community in Denmark and Jens has got some really interesting insights into how to engage people at the community level. And not on the program today because the CMS, the conference organizers are using had a problem with the form. This is my friend Lindsay Ogden. She has a Drupal shop called Five Rigs Web and a Drupal startup called Business Catapult and she's very involved in the Drupal community in Colorado where there's also a lot of crossover into education and evangelizing Drupal at the level of schools and colleges to try and get younger people excited about it and into the scene. My name is Jem. I work for Acquia. I am the Community Affairs Manager so this is all stuff that I'm very, very deeply interested in. And Ivor is also Community Manager at ProPeople. He's got two titles up on the government. So Christoph, are you going to kick it off? What we're going to try and do is each talk for a few minutes and if you have a burning question just throw up your hand and we'll get it in there. Otherwise, we're going to try and maybe talk, present 20, 25 minutes and then hopefully it'll be interesting enough that we can have a conversation together. So why organize events? Why organize events? I've been doing Drupal events for quite a while now. My major reason probably was that I wanted to contribute but I'm not a developer. So I always liked building community and getting people together and doing stuff and initiating new stuff, especially initiating new stuff. But I think one of the important things when you want to go and organize an event is think about yourself, like why are you doing this? And if possible, try to find a business reason why you're doing it. Because it's great, altruism is great, but there's nothing as good as altruism combined with some very enlightened self-interest. Because there's going to be tough patches, sometimes it's going to be hard and it's better that then you can tell your associates, yeah, but we're doing this because this is going to get us XYZ. The next slide? Because as I said, some people will just do it for their karma. I think I should really talk with the people that are doing Certified to Rock that they should spend their net a bit broader because there's a couple of obvious gaps in the equation. Like if you do a Drupal user group and you're not really active on Drupal d'Orc, that's not going to show up in your Certified to Rock. So to some extent, yeah. But in general, at least in your local community, it's really important. And I've seen that being involved, organizing things, has helped getting to know more people. It's not going to give you business, don't expect business, not right away. That's not, normally it doesn't work. But it enlarges your network. You get a lot of loose connections with a lot of different people and someday you'll need to hire someone. Or maybe somebody will hear about a certain customer who's looking for Drupal and they'll remember like, oh yeah, you were doing this Dita thing, whatever that was. And like there's somebody who's looking for that. Like maybe you should get in touch. And I think one of the biggest things is, as I said earlier, recruiting people. Finding people that are engaged in the community. Like for us in our company, one of the standard questions we ask on an interview is, so what are you doing for the community? How are you already now involved in something community thing? Because if they're not really community people, they're probably not going to engage with the Drupal community. And then that's going to have less, they're not going to be as efficient. This is also pretty important. I organized Drupal Seek So, the first Drupal Seek So in Brussels. No, I did meet some of the other CEOs from Drupal companies there. And that probably was one of the, well, there was a really good event for that. Because with a small group, you got to know a lot of people that you might have seen on a camp or something, maybe. There was also some people that normally don't show up at camps, but that want to like get in touch with the community. And I'm sure that's this, you know, it helps. It builds your image, it helps you in the future. Also really important for events, once you have them, you can also organize vertical events. Like that's something that they've been doing really well here in London, where they pick like very specific verticals like publishing industry. And then they do a dedicated event for that. Like we did, Evo started that Drupal government days. And, you know, you had a bunch of government people there. And it helps building your visibility. Like I had one person coming to me saying, hey, you were involved in that. Do you want to take part in a bit together? So that kind of stuff can help you build your credibility in a vertical segment. And then on to the new types of events. Evo, you do that one? I've been involved in several types of events. So I think it all started in Copenhagen, where we've been sitting together from all kind of countries, people who organized camps and meetups. And we thought, okay, maybe we should organize something more European. And then it started, I think, with developer days. And we thought, okay, but there's something more we can think of. And so we defined some kind of events that we want to have yearly on a regular base, jumping from country to country. So, yeah. And within one year now we had the developer days in Brussels. It was a coincidence that I've initiated the government days in Brussels, too. But for me it wasn't very important to have people from the European Commission participating. So, yeah. I start probably talking a bit, that's your part. You thought it already. Okay, so that shows the CXO. All right, yeah. The government days we had three. That was cool. And there were more than 350 attendees. It was in Brussels. And it was really important to have local governments, but to have people from the European Commission there and have people from the European Parliament and from different kind of agencies. And, yeah, it was a great experience to discuss within these people. Actually, I think there were more people related to a government, or it was kind of even. And that was a very interesting experience because the discussions were very practical because we could discuss real solutions that they need and that we develop and offer. So this was, yeah, a great opportunity. And it's the same with the developer days and with the other kind of events like the design camp and the business days. Right, so, yeah, we brought some security to look after documentation. Maybe you can say something about the developer days? So, the developer days, that was... So we wanted to do inter-regional events. There was a new thing because before all Drupal camps in Europe, like somebody said, oh, we're going to do a Drupal camp. We've got this team here locally and we're just going to run it. And that's when last year in Copenhagen, we basically started saying, let's coordinate this a bit better and let's get more involved and kind of get some sort of rotating thing going. And one of the first events of that type was the developer days. We had, I think it was 600 people or something. Yeah, something like that. That was together with Fostem. It was Saturday, Sunday, like real hardcore geeks. And as you can see, hack all day. Hack all night, sleep all day. But, yeah, like a lot of companies in Belgium showed up for that because they saw it as a really good recruitment opportunity because you got all these developers coming in and it was a good opportunity to talk with people. I don't know if it really worked that way. That's another question. It might help in general credibility. Yeah, the design days in Berlin, the last ones, there were another design days in Prague, right? Yes. And Boston. All right. So, yeah, not much to say about it. It was a lot of fun. Morton is always good for a lot of fun. And a lot of interesting topics. So, yeah, if you're into design. But one really important point was that now there's about, yeah, Morton changed the name, I think, to Drupal Front End Camp because, yeah, the main discussion was about teaming and how to implement design. So, it wasn't really a good fit. So, yeah, now it's Drupal Front End Camp. Yes. What's your question? So, to repeat the question, how do we compare the people between the different vertical events like design days and government days? And I would say at the design days, we had, there were a few designers. There were a few newbies who were entering Drupal and mostly Drupal geeks. Let's say it like this. And at the government days, we had mostly people on the sea level. And there were a lot of, okay, as CEO and managing, right, and there were, yeah, a lot of people from governments and from the European Commission who were actually managing projects with Drupal. So, yes, it's a big difference. And that's the importance about the verticals because, yeah, I don't see a reason why maybe, yeah. You see, right, right. Specific people that wouldn't attend a Drupal camp. Maybe you should do it. In Colorado, we've done library days. So, it's kind of the same idea as the government days. And so, it's really a bunch of librarians in the room. It's a little more geeky than the general public, but they still aren't understanding necessarily what Drupal can do for them or how to use it. And so, a lot of them want to come in and say, we did these cool things, and here's our developer about what we did. And then other people will come in and ask, do the same thing. They'll ask questions like, well, we have this problem. How did you integrate with this catalog system? So, it's a lot of people, not really very Drupal people, asking how other librarians solve technical problems with a few geeks in the room to help give them some guidance. So, that's really helpful. Yes, and then we had the Drupal business days this year in Helsinki. And, yeah, that was a picture after the CXO, actually. Yeah, that's Robert. So, he's not around. Yeah, that was the CXO. And it was very interesting. Like, we had it in Brussels. We discussed best practices and tools we're using. We exchanged, yeah, how we approach things, how we approach clients, how we can recruit, how we can train better people, and all kind of different aspects of our daily business. And, yeah, we had then several sessions, very interesting sessions, like comparison of SharePoint and Drupal, and Robert Douglas talked about the Drupal ecosystem, and, yeah, mostly sessions that were related to business. And there were people presenting their projects from a business perspective, not from a Drupal shop perspective. And that was interesting, too, the actual clients who implement Drupal to have them talking on an event. Yes, and, yeah, next year, we plan to organize the Drupal business days in Vienna on the 24th and 25th May. Yes, so you're welcome to join us. And, of course, we'll set up soon the website and promote the events. One other thing which is important is there's different approaches to organizing an event. Like, people often, when they think about events, they start thinking, like, oh, I have to charge money, and I have to get money for a venue. And I need a schedule, and I'll have to, like, curate sessions. And it goes on and on. And it's so much work that you don't necessarily can do. And that might be discouraging. But it does not necessarily have to be like that. Like, to Drupal seek so, there was an open space. What does that mean? Like, we got Microsoft to sponsor the venue. So we got the venue for free. They were giving the food. So food's also nothing to worry about. We had one simple website where people could just sign up. It was free. So no money to deal with, no invoices, no, oh, my God, I pay too much, or whatever. That was also not there. We didn't have a program because it was open space. It means an open space technology, frankly, is one of the best formats ever. Because it's... So first of all, you don't have to deal with sessions upfront. You have to set some general expectations so that people come. But once people are there, there's always going to be some common things that they want to talk about around that central topic. And like with seek so days, we did that. And people keep coming back to me saying, that was really good. It was much better than anything where you had fixed sessions set up. Because we could actually talk with each other and share best practices. And I'm sure that this format goes a long way and we could use it across a lot of different places in different niches. Like, I'm now planning a Drupal product camp. Probably it's going to be again, probably it's going to be this fall. I still need to do my footwork and go and talk with the venue. But I'm planning to do it also like that. So because I organize Drupal seek so almost alone. There are some people reviewing some stuff and it's manageable. So you can do a lot if you plan for scalability. Don't try to do crazy stuff. Try to keep it simple. And the simpler the better. You can make really really cool events even on a shoestring budget. Or without a budget. So that's the last important thing that I wanted to give with this. Our experience in New York is that that particular format doesn't match, doesn't not scale well for our primary vertical, which is training. Which is training. So we get lots of people, we get hundreds of people coming to these camps. And the absolute number one feedback that we get besides that the lunch sucked was that it was, there was nothing scheduled. We got there and no one knew what we were going to talk about. No one had sessions. There was no schedule. That is absolutely the number one. So in terms of scaling, I think it depends on which vertical you're dealing with. And it works really well for small groups. But when you all of a sudden you want to, hundreds of people want to sign up because they want to teach me how to Drupal, that particular format does not scale at all. Yeah, this one was for business leaders. Which was funny, because normally you would expect business leaders to want like more structure and you know. But it actually worked really well. And because they could talk frankly. And there were like people like them there that had a lot of experience, that was not really formalized. A lot of ideas, thoughts. But I think if you talk about training, and yeah. I think like an open space is really good if there's no clear understanding of what the best practices are yet. So you're still like everybody's still looking for how to do these things. And there's a lot of complexity. The more complexity the better. Drupal training, like beginner training, is not very complex. It's like, you know, there's a certain number of things you have to learn. And you can do that almost, you know, academic style, right? To some extent. So yeah, yeah. Let's take two minutes at the end of this and yell out all the event formats that we can think of. And anyone who has experience with what's worked or what hasn't worked or what we think might fit together. That's something that I wanted to explore as soon as I heard you say that. So I'll have my notepad and we'll put up notes somewhere. But I'd love to hear really compactly how that might work. Jens, you want to talk about community motivation and participation? Yeah. Okay, so I'll talk about how we motivate people to join or leave actually the local community. I'm not focused on leaving because I want people to join. So I'm the vice chairman of the Danish Football Association and have been involved in all our camps in Denmark and also in the conference in Copenhagen. So for me, it's quite important, actually, we get people involved. It's the biggest problem we have in Copenhagen that there's no people. I mean, we have a camp now in one month. We slide, have a venue we have looked at. We don't have a website. A ticket system should have been up running last week. I forgot to do that. I didn't have time and so on and so on. We have two people right now, more or less. So we figured out that back years ago we had normal meetups where three people were sitting and showing code and examples and three people were listening. That's what we could come up with. It stopped. The same people that was going to present every month. So we stopped having one day, maybe every three months or half year finding a free venue, meet there, maybe some couple of plant sessions, but it was bar camp style. People maybe pay five, seven euro to get in, to get a sandwich. That works fine. That will 100 people, 150 people show up without a lot of work. Just put up on our website that we have this and this specific day. This Saturday we meet at the IC University. People show up. So instead of the meetups we also tried a new thing. We know that all people in the Drupal community are most people like beer somehow. So we have a monthly day actually our stamp cheese which we stole from the German type of free community. So we have the second Thursday every week where we have a meet at a bar. Not for sessions, just to drink beers two, three hours and talk. And actually new people. Also companies in Denmark that work with Drupal, their employees they show up. People that have never been involved in planning stuff before or in the meetups or in our Drupal day events show up. So for me that is a success. But again, it's still only 15 people. And I mean here we are 70 people from Denmark and most of them from Copenhagen. So there are more people that are not showing up. But this is also a question actually. I don't have the answer to but one I think it would be interesting to hear your comments on in the end when we are finished with the slides. And this actually with getting people to commit in the Drupal community and participate it's really important actually for planning a Drupal camp. If you don't have people we cancel our Drupal camp in spring because we didn't have people to commit them to help with the planning it. So in Colorado we have about four regular meetup groups. We have northern and southern we have a western group and we have the Denver Boulder meetup groups which alternates between Denver and Boulder and they each meet monthly. So there's quite a bit of an active community in Colorado. But in the northern group we really only have about an active members and we're trying to figure out I guess I'm kind of getting ahead of myself but we're really trying to figure out how to get how to get more people to come in. How to get more people just into Drupal. How to how do we motivate people who are sitting in their really sitting in their shops. I mean we must have 10 Drupal shops in our town Fort Collins in northern Colorado how do we get them to want to come in to come to the meetup groups and have free pizza and beer I'm usually paying for to be frank you know how I guess I'm asking I think we're all asking this question is we have a room full of people here and I'm curious what other people have done to get people out of their hidey holes and you know the cracks in the wood to come out and do these things and how do we express to them what they're going to get out of it which is more than just pizza and beer it's you know learning a new way to use Drush it's having someone to call on you have two theming projects and 24 hours to do them in you know it's all of those little kind of grungy benefits that we all need as geeks not even talking about the business side of it so I guess we'll get to that more at the end but yeah so in Bulgaria for example we've been doing a lot with universities and I think that's important to get people out of yeah when they start to learn developing to engage them with Drupal so for example we've been having sessions on universities and cooperating with them they've been featuring us on their website putting flyers everywhere when we have events and stuff like this so yeah we kind of try to engage universities and get people from there so right yeah yes the question is how do we engage universities and it's usually not different than how we engage companies we tell them okay we have a conference here we have a meeting here it's about Drupal that's an international used system very well adopted in universities, governments and we have the examples of the Stanford University or this University or this government and they're really interested to hear more about it and then we ask them directly can you support us to engage the students and to get them to learn more about the system and yeah that's how we've done it and it worked so and the other thing was we've used friends who know people at the university professors and so yeah we're trying through different channels to get closer to the university we actually we started or I started before Drupal concept that was I think in 2007 we started the university and to the IT department because I thought you know wouldn't it be fun if we could do like some you know a voluntary course about Drupal at university so I got this appointment with the head of department of engineering software engineering and I do my story as oh that sounds cool I'm here for you part-time and then and so we got into that we started this course one year later he had one of his employees who also who was really interested in Drupal who started giving that together with me and then basically now they have a Drupal team in the university that's doing Drupal projects I think they're like I think six or seven people or something and they're like you know pure Drupal team so there's different ways some universities this is not gonna run it depends a bit on how open they are for external speakers because what I did was like a two-day course pretty intensive like all day like almost all day long and then with a practical thing next to it so that it was not too much work for me either or you know two days and that was it and it worked really well yeah we had for example seven sessions at the Sophie University and later at the camp they they sent people to the training too so because they want to get involved more themselves like in your case I'm actually very impressed by that I live in Germany and I actually know from certain examples in the United States that we've approached universities for different different strategies, different approaches how do you like to we offer our expertise to give I mean fundamentally we're offering real world employable skills for the students now if they'll let us in and we want to come in for free because we want to talk about Drupal and we can't get in there's a lot of turf protection a lot of professors who either think well you know that's all just it's not the world's most beautiful code or they're worried that if their students see someone making a salary working in the web that they'll run away or I know in the United States there are all kinds of certification issues and if you want to talk about any given subject you have to run it past the government board and you have to run it past the bureaucracy and you have to run it past the approval process that can take a couple of years and the proposal about you know Drupal 5 is outdated so I'm really fascinated to hear that there are ways in and I'm interested if you were you using some sort of back door strategy or is there just a different kind of a system in place I think the biggest difference is that these are voluntary courses so they're not part of the core curriculum so they're like 90 students might have to take some voluntary courses in psychology they can choose themselves from all over the university I don't know the exact term but that is a lot easier you just need one professor to say oh that sounds fun let's do it and then they can sponsor it and get it through the other thing you might consider is talking to Microsoft because they have a really good program all the universities and actually they're open for collaboration on that so at least in Europe I know the person who can help you well they've got people actually working on that the other piece that I've been trying to set up in my hometown is working with high school students to so I do it with Drupal Gardens because it's a really easy way to have something running that looks okay to get high school kids building their little homepages and embedding YouTube videos and working with Drupal to get them excited about it so I'm actually trying to come in on a lower level as well yes right yes so just to repeat this for the recording you person in Grace Wetter are saying that it's hard to motivate and get people excited about Drupal when you present them a really super dry technical let's start with the basics click click click click all day without giving them either a vision or a finished product to sort of start with and play with first or to make it fun and interesting so that they can see the point right from the beginning so there's this Lego analogy which seems to be growing in the community and for me it is the difference between maybe being presented with a Lego set that can make 12 different spaceships or you have cause Drupal's Drupal is powerful and flexible so we have this gigantic box of blue Lego bricks and over here we have this gigantic box of gray Lego bricks and if you're smart enough you can you know do anything you want and there's no photo and it's just like five lines of text right oh that's a perfect analogy yes so the perfect Lego set starts with photos on it to inspire you to build something and it's not just a bit of bricks that's fantastic I'm gonna write that down as soon as somebody wants to interrupt me I think this was this my slide originally oh yes and I have one more question about what you were talking about before when we were preparing this session you were talking briefly about people who come in and then their interest sort of peaks and they disappear and you know if the patterns that you'd recognize then I don't know if you have any insights around that but I found it really fascinating well I don't have any solutions to that actually but we see it quite often when we're making the events we have it actually it's not open and everything we have a skype chat with 20 people or something it's been running for since second I think new people are added and some are leaving and we are planning stuff there it's maybe not the best tool but it works fine and we can see that people are now and then popping up and okay I want to help with this and this and this and then it just disappear for two months we had one of our camps and I was going to do a lot of stuff he disappeared, no one could find him even getting in contact with him on his phone, he showed up to the camp okay just go away he did the same with the Drupalcon actually so now he has no part of it anymore but it's the problem we have and in relation to the educational universities we have in Copenhagen actually a success with the IT university there's a dedicated IT university in Copenhagen not like where they write a sampler code and machine code and stuff like that more like you can take a master degree in IT for example if you have another education you can build IT on it and we have four or five or more of the really good developers in Denmark, Drupal developers that have studied there so they had a door in and they have been doing basic Drupal education and training so it's not a part of the education to get on the university but it's something that the students can show up to if they want and we also have actually now we are trying to approach some colleges in Copenhagen where modern decay and some others has been telling them about Drupal add on the question that is on the screen I've been going to a lot of different events like bar camps and media media camps and Linux events and I find it very interesting to engage the people that have related interests on other events to actually connect the dots and involve people from different communities into the Drupal community so I find it kind of interesting to go to these other events too and meet people there and engage them with Drupal okay do we have another? okay so yeah? now I set the level for participation too high so I don't know how many of you were here yesterday not here in this but in the scaling the local communities presentation by Greg and Angie and they were talking that a problem that was seen was the separation so in the early days everyone was in the Pound Drupal IRC and in the forums and people started splitting into newbies and developers core developers and I feel the same thing is happening with the cons because we're all coming to the Drupal and it's fun but oh my god the fun I had in Brussels in the Dev Days it was amazing I mean here half of the things I don't care so I remove in the Dev Days I was like oh my god I have to clone myself and go to all of these at the same time because they were really nice and that's the problem with verticals are we by creating these vertical events separating ourselves into different groups and is there a danger? I think it's natural by the way that's Boris there he was the co-lead of the Dev Days together with somebody but he's not here so splitting off I think it's normal it's like the Drupal community is like a fractal if you look at the Drupal community basically you see that it's really like a fractal you first started growing and started forking well not forking but started branching and it's deep branches grow they branch again they're still connected but it's a natural thing it's every community is like that this is the the nature of networks so I don't think it's a bad thing I think it's actually a good thing because it diversifies our community and it helps in preparing us for shocks in the environment because we get a broader base and we get more diversity if IRC, if FreeNode goes down or they close it down there's going to be other communication channels and we'll be able to reboot I actually take it as a really really good sign that you got so excited at that event because and I think that's actually an essential tool to making the community scalable because a Drupalcon now how many people are here to do deals how many people are here to shake hands how many people are there's all kinds of reasons now if we think back to Drupalcon Brussels where there were 220 people I think that was extremely geeky you know and extremely I mean really amazing and you know I knew the whole Drupal community okay so we can't do that anymore and a vertical event allows you to hook up with your coder buddies and really get into that stuff that you're excited about and the same for the designers and the same for the people who want to convince enterprise business to go with Drupal so that we can all pay our rent with it and I think it's actually a perfect tool to help ourselves stay excited stay connected with what really really interests us and then we still have the global possibilities of the con and the forums and the RSC channels I think that's a way to really leverage the size and maintain a good circle of relevant acquaintances within the community I take that as a really good sign no I can't have a beer with everyone here I got the biggest compliment a month ago when I was in Boston a colleague of mine a colleague of mine said to his wife oh it was Mike Jam's really good at drinking beer I do live in Germany so I'll repeat the question well his question was in a relatively small community like in Greece local meetups are working but what kind of people should go what should who's the audience I think you shouldn't define that I think it should be anybody who wants pizza and beer or whatever it is that's your local delicacy and people who want to learn about what I'm not going to pay for your Greek pizza I'm so sorry it should be anybody who's interested in figuring out how to make an image gallery it should be anybody who's interested in figuring out how to make an online forum to chat with their teenage buddies and we get people anywhere from 16 to 60 at our groups we have a couple of librarians who come we have literally a couple of guys who work at staples an office supply store during the day and I can kind of throw them a quick here make this a very simple view for me at night and I'll pay them 50 bucks and that makes him feel all good like now he's a Drupal freelancer which he is I'm not sure if I'm answering your question but I feel like it's a wide variety and we need to be attracting all of them I actually have an answer for that we have what we call the Fort Collins internet professionals group which is a much bigger group and it's all internet professionals in northern Colorado and it's WordPress developers it's Joomla developers it's cake PHP it's any kind of web development at all and people come and they talk about semantic web and they talk about CSS and everything we have an entrepreneur track and we have a business track so that way I get to talk to people from different kinds of web development professions and that has really helped me bring in other people other developers and that is much broader there's more people and so you're using that social network to bring in other new people absolutely definitely bring a potential client to something like that and maybe I'll lose them but to me the important part is to get them educated about the technologies that are out there what their options are if they want to go with Joomla then they're going to do that and so I think that maybe a place to start in a really small area without enough Drupal traction is to start a whole internet professionals group would be my opinion two or three people each so they're very small the question was about the size of my community so the town I live in Fort Collins is about 120,000 people in about I guess we're about it's it's kind of a lot and then we have another community just to the south of us another one called Greeley that's just to the west of us so I'm going to guess in it's in about a three hour radius of driving everybody comes up to Fort Collins as the main central hub for that so there aren't any big shops up there but a lot of little freelancers and two or three person shops or marketing firms with a Drupal component so he was saying he set up a group of professionals who have a common interest not necessarily in Drupal or its specific technology but they can exchange they are Drupal media professionals right right so a vertically organized Drupal professionals group so I just wanted to add anyone who is here at this session in Chicago I was campaigning very strongly for sustainable meetup practices and the cunning people who organized the cologne meetup have now created a web meetup and it's the Drupal users group that runs it but it's a web meetup and we're getting an incredible incredible traction we're getting all of a sudden we're getting monthly meetups with 80 or 100 people and it really feels like it's a web meetup those are web professionals those are people who want to know about Facebook or you know and no but it's web people anyway so yes last question ah if you are a multiplier for free speech generally I actually think the free pizza is a whole different metaphor because it's also freebies I mean it's like we actually have our northern colorado meetup group we actually have a whole plan set up hopefully this fall it's going to be coming forward is to figure out an ongoing training program probably twice a month to have and as well as drop in base as well so the plan is to have a once a week slot that anybody can drop in at this location at this time there will be professional Drupal people on site to answer questions and help people out with their project etc and then every other week we're going to move forward on building some simple little project whatever that project is and then of course publish the recipe for that um and lost the thread of what you were saying now I was trying to focus where I was going with that was that was the idea that we don't want to just spoon feed them we want to show them how to use IRC we want to show them how to use the forums we want to show them how to how to figure out the learning curve of Drupal and we also want to help weed out some of the some of the chaff because we don't want to just hand hold people along their learning curve if they can't handle that painful Drupal learning curve to some extent we don't necessarily want them here in the community as harsh as that is to say we want people who are going to work hard and want to work to learn that right so um we have to I think that's a delicate balance we have to figure out how to bring them along in the the learning without um bringing in people who really can't hack it with Drupal because it's not easy so I'm still very curious we've only got a couple minutes now um I'm still really curious to learn about event models and what you feel they're appropriate for maybe we can just do that at the table anyone who's got any ideas about that um the last thing I wanted to bring up is basically my personal homework for the next six months okay okay let's let's match that into that yeah so um so I'm in the very privileged position um that Acquia wants me to figure out how to help grow the community and um that as a company uh you know they're willing to invest in that kind of activity um I want to understand so with especially with your your point I actually mean all of this in a much more positive way I don't want to trap people in right but I want people to feel engaged and excited okay but actually what I really need to figure out now for myself um and then hopefully we can turn it into into people into numbers into deals into developers is how do we break out of our out of our very very beautiful echo chamber that we're in like we love this and I see you and I see you and I see you and I see you and then you're my friends and it's great and we are making a living at it but you know we need devs and we need clients and we need people who don't know about Drupal yet people to to to find us and to get excited about it or to you know or to buy our services and and you know we have very charismatic interesting local meetups and we have all these events and I'm looking for a toolset for for for ways to to to to break us out of the box we're in and and and I don't I don't know how to get there yet microphone again in a very unique position that everybody wants to be your partner so you've got a network of companies that are established at local level that not necessarily are involved with communities but they are involved with you could um well coerce them into the fact that they maintain some kind of partnership with you would they would need to prove that they are sponsoring that they're organizing something with local communities that's community partners is nice so yes yes and we're doing these hello Drupal trainings and we're doing certain kinds of free developer trainings to get developers crossing over from other systems I a community partner model with us would be really great um I was wondering to to wrap this up maybe um that's a that is a really great idea it's distinctly political and it's not what I wanted to talk about here so much but but you people who've run their Drupalists bring in government partners or bring in business partners or do can we make them feel like they're part of Drupal and like they're part of the community they're not just getting getting a Drupal lap dance and a website when they come to want to forgive me I mean that just you know they're getting a free pizza and a website and I would like them to come away feeling like I have a partners these all these people have my back and I want to be with them they're working for me now but can we make them feel part of it I've heard this many times actually from these people who've been newly engaged and they were really excited about approach of developing this software and about approach of gathering and exchanging and sharing information so they've been really excited about this and they wanted more of it so I think it works so then we should convince them to give back too right? that's right I think actually to some extent we did that already just by organizing it like it was the Belgian government who was sponsoring most of it so that was and they organized a training at the event so of course you know there will stay well you know it's government so it has a certain style I think the other thing is to there was the problem of volunteers that come and go away the thing you have to be careful with is people that overcommit that's really bad people that say I will do it and then nobody else does it but else the coming and going away is very natural people evolve there's always going to be some people you know they're student now and they have one or two years that they do like crazy and afterwards they have to go away that's normal it's just keep getting more people involved I have a vision of doing the next edition of this session calling it creating Drupal stakeholders events, communities, promotion and thank you I think we really are out of time thank you for coming anyone who has any comments about event tools and styles models I'm very very interested to learn my name is Jam I work at Acquia my email is jam at acquia.com my twitter handle is horn cologne and any of the insights that I've gained out of here I'll maybe I'll put up a link to that I think that we can attach something to the event to the session notes still we'll put up some we'll add some things to the con website we'll make sure that we can keep this discussion going thank you thank you very much everyone