 Welcome to the after lunch session. Yay. Don't fall asleep. What? Don't fall asleep on us. Don't fall asleep. We were thinking about having nap time because we're like, yeah, everyone's going to be tired. Turn down the lights. Have a nice theme for moments. But we'll go ahead and have a presentation instead. So this is our panel, Making Drupal Meetups in Events Rock. And we are now going to introduce ourselves. I'm Karen Cascio, tech girl geek. And I'm not liking hearing myself talk right now. On IRC, Facebook, pretty much everywhere, Twitter. And this is the rest of my panel. I'm Ash Striden. I'm Ash Striden pretty much everywhere on the internet. I live in Madison, Wisconsin. I'm mostly a conference and like larger event organizer. I helped with Drupal Con Chicago. I did the Midwest Developer Summit last year and Drupal Camp, Wisconsin. I'm Scott Reinen. I'm from Denver. And I organize one of the three meetups in Denver. And I also help maintain groups at Drupal.org. So that exposes me to a lot of what the other people around the world are doing. Hello. I'm Mike Inelo. I'm one of the organizers of the Florida Drupal Users Group. And we're kind of unique where we're a pretty big state. And we have a lot of individual meetups in different geographic areas of the state. But we also tend to act as one giant group as well, which has its challenges. I'm Eric Baldwin at Cloud9 on Twitter, blad one everywhere else. Thanks to this guy, I misspelling my name. I'm originally from Florida. We pioneered the Florida Drupal Group in 2008. Since then, my business partner in the crowd and I have decided to travel around the world to different Drupal communities. So my home is basically just Earth at this point until Mars can have breathable air. And Wi-Fi, because that's so important. But I'm just a digital nomad, so Drupal is my life. My life is Drupal. I'm actually also from Denver. And I coordinate Drupal ladder meetups. I forgot that part of the details. So we will start talking. So why is it super important to talk about this? Who was doing it? Oh, you are. Because it is very important to talk about this. Drupal is the community that makes it up. What? So, okay. I'm stopping nervous right here. The Drupal community, what's the biggest saying in Drupal? Come for the code, stay for the community. The community is what, and you ask anybody, why are they here? It's awesome code. But the community rocks. What makes the community, it's not just Drupalcons. If we only got together once a year, once every two times, now we're looking at three to four times a year. Drupalcons, this community would not be strong. The strength behind the community is all the code that's going behind the community. It's all the meetups that are happening around the world for people to collaborate and talk. And how many communities can you, I have a problem with my work. Let me talk to all my competitors and see how they're doing the same work. This is our community. And we like to get together and we like to talk about it and we like to sometimes have beers or sodas or whatever. And we want to talk about how can you make meetups in your area stronger and by virtue of that, making your community stronger and our whole community as a whole stronger. Just to add a little to that. The community is also, I think come for the code state, for the community is in many cases a little backwards. I think a lot of people, the first interaction they have with Drupal is with the community. So it's our first chance to show people how awesome Drupal is by showing them how awesome the community is. Also, quick housekeeping notes. We've got to say, we will have question answers and we want to hear from you guys how you're doing things, but we're going to hold those to the end. So we're going to talk first and then we're going to move forward. So just to stay on this for one second, just how a church for most religions, it's not the building that's the church, it's the community, the people that make it up without the community here. The strength of the community directly correlates to the strength of the events that you have. So if you have a strong community, you're going to have strong events and your strong events are going to empower your community to go out and build itself. So that's what we're going to try to help you do today. So hopefully many of you or most of you in the room went to our survey and took our survey and we gathered information about Drupal as a whole, the Drupal community as a whole, and how meet-ups are working for them with our survey. I'll talk about this. So we designed the survey to be super fast. I think it's six or seven questions total. Some of the numbers up there, we designed it so it didn't have to be answered by organizers. We wanted anybody to go and check it out. Turns out we had 45% of the people were organizers and as we go through each topic today, there's kind of a data point from that as well. The reason we wanted to do it is because we wanted to be coming from a place of fact saying we know this, but how can we make this better? I think the survey is still open right now, is that right? So after this talk, if you haven't taken it, we definitely encourage you to just give us some more data and we'll keep this going. We're going to have information for you guys so that people can reference back to this ongoing. So local communities, as I was saying, are the larger community. Who's talking to us? I'd love to figure out the next slide. So one of the things that's really important to me as an organizer is that we're making sure that we're including all the people in the community. Many events and meetups have a harder time attracting diverse people, especially because we tend to know people that are like us. So if we're going to other meetups and talking about the fact that we do Drupal and you should come to this meetup, it tends to be bringing in a lot of people that are like us. And a sign of a really healthy community is one that actually reflects the larger community. So if you live in an area that has a very large Hispanic population, you should expect that the percentage of Hispanic folks that are coming to your meetup will be about the same percentage. And if that's not the case, then you need to figure out ways to reach out to that community and figure out how to be more inclusive. I think that this is probably the most diverse Drupal con that I've ever seen over the past three or four years. I've been very happy to see the amount of diverse, the amount of visible diversity that we have. So I know that we're doing a much better job of reaching out to a lot of different communities to bring a lot of different kinds of people in. But it's something that we need to focus on a lot more when it comes to our local communities as well. So we asked on the survey how diverse the meetup is, people's meetups are. And I was really surprised by these results actually that a lot of people felt that their meetups reflected the population as a whole. Right, this is relative to your local geographic area. Correct. We actually got one data point this morning about Drupal con that it's 18% women this year, which is higher than it has been in the past. I think I'll have a whole percentage. Yeah. That's you. That's me. Yeah, that's you. Again. Again, neon. Putting on a panel, you wouldn't have to talk. It's up to get us started. We'll roll. So attracting attendees, how do you get attendees to your meetups? There's a lot of different ways. We've gone through stats. We found out people are using, it seems like primarily meetup.com. Most people know. Go to the next slide. The notes are on this slide. Oh. groups.drupal.org is obviously over primarily. I thought I actually remember the other way around it. And meetup.com is coming in second. And then we actually had one place that's actually doing print ads, which was kind of amazing to me. I didn't know anyone actually used print anymore. Then we've got mail lists, social media, and other. I know in Denver we mostly do meetup.com and GDO. And then many of us try to tweet in Facebook it to try to keep the words going. I thought this was kind of surprising that meetup had such a high percentage. I mean, this is something that we actually don't do yet in Florida. But since I've seen these results a few weeks ago, it's definitely something we're going to be starting. But the other one was social media. It's easy for individuals to tweet that in meetups happening. One thing that we do do in Florida is I actually use Hootsuite, which has a bunch of kind of cool capability. Two of them being that you can post to multiple social media sites at once, as well as schedule tweets and posts in advance. So whenever I schedule a meetup in my local area, I post it on GDO and then I go right into Hootsuite and I plan out three or four tweets for the next couple of weeks leading up to the meetup that will automatically go to Twitter, Facebook, Google+, and there's somewhere else linked in. Hootsuite, like an owl and an office park, how about that? Yeah, and the other important thing to remember is that your audience doesn't all reside on GDO. People who are new to this community don't necessarily know that GDO exists. There are a lot of people that go to meetup.com and they'll say, I just want a technology meetup. I want to meet other technologists that are in my area. And you'll get actually a lot of new members that way. And they might only ever come once or twice just because they come and realize it's not necessarily for them, but it's important to give people kind of the opportunity to come and see if this is a community that they would be interested in, if Drupal is something that they would be interested in. So I would really recommend putting the word out in as many different places as possible. Ask people, especially because our community is so dominated by one specific demographic, white straight men, ask people in your community that come to your meetups that don't fit in that group to also do things like retweet that. Because we tend to know people that are more like us, you can actually reach a much larger, more diverse audience by having as many people participate in spreading that message as possible. One thing to add about meetup and other tech events, people go to meetup and search for HTML5. One of the things you can do as a community organizer or a meetup organizer for Drupal is go to these other events for other technologies, introduce yourself and say, hey, yeah, we utilize this in our CMS and our community, so why don't you come check out our event, see how you can get involved and help out. Meetup kind of does that really well, interaction between groups. Another way of looking at it is when you want to market your event, you can market basically to two large groups of people. People already in the community who you want to tell that, hey, there's a meetup and they're kind of, they'll come regardless. They'll see the bat signal. And then people outside of the Drupal community who are Drupal curious, you know, or people who might be interested in... Did you just clean that? No, I've heard that, I didn't make that up, so don't give me credit for that. No, but people who might be looking for a new content management system or people are really into HTML and CSS or one of these parallel technologies that revolves around the web. These are people who we want to invite to our community. I'm a big believer that, you know, I love our local community right now and seeing all the familiar faces, but I like seeing fresh faces because they bring fresh ideas and new energy and that's the lifeblood of any community. It's like when you talk about an organization or even a company, you know, investors always want to see growth. You always want to see growth, you know. So it's the same thing with the community. You always want to be growing your community in some way. Yeah, I mean, I got into Drupal seven or eight years ago because somebody presented it at a bar camp. So, I mean, it doesn't necessarily even have to be a meet-up. It can be pretty much anywhere that you can find people that would be interested in technology. Right, and our keynote speakers at Drupal-Cons are usually from other technologies that aren't Drupal-centric, but they tie into what we do. Jonathan Snook, yesterday, his presentation. I mean, I'm not sure he does Drupal specifically. I'm sure he leverages it, but, you know, to have someone that's a pioneer in another technology that's utilized in our community is very empowering and it draws more people. Okay, okay. One quick one, okay. I also have one quick thing. One thing we've done a few times and probably should do more often is just ask the people who are coming to the meet-up where they're finding out about it. And often we have surprising answers. And if there's new people who are finding out about it somewhere that you didn't even know... You might have publicity channels you're not even aware of with other people taking your meet-up announcements and posting them somewhere else, and if that's bringing in new people, that's something to do more of in the first step in figuring that out is asking people how they found out about the meeting. So real quick, so both Hootsuite and meetup.com, they're fee-based. So meetup.com is $72 for six months. Hootsuite is about $10 a month. Either of those costs can be offset by asking a sponsor, finding a sponsor and basically in exchange for them paying for that, say on your main meet-up page, say thanks to Insert Company here for sponsoring our meetup.com account. It doesn't have to be some huge thing and I think you'll find that if you have a local Drupal shop and you ask them for $144 a year for a meetup.com account in exchange for thanking them, I don't know any shop that's going to say no to that. So ask, ask for the money and you'll probably most likely get it. Multiple. So is there anything you want to say about not discouraging attendance? So the question that Eric asked in case you didn't hear was is there anything that you want to do for not discouraging attendance? And I think one of the biggest things is making sure that everybody feels included, it's the first time you've ever been to a meet-up, it's the first time you've ever been in the community, it feels very isolating if you're there by yourself. So make sure that you're going out of your way to make them feel included. Walk up to them, say I'm the organizer for this meet-up, how did you find us, what kinds of things are you interested in. Make them feel like you want them there and make sure that they feel comfortable. One of the things that I've been including in all of the events and meetings that I run is making sure that I include a code of conduct, making sure that people understand with that what a code of conduct means, making sure that they understand that as a speaker they're also expected to follow the code of conduct. And also it really helps establish trust with the people that are in the community, especially if you're talking about people who are very marginalized in the community. So if your community is dominated by men and you have one woman that attends, it's very important for that person to feel safe and that if there is a problem they'll be taken seriously. I'm going to add to that, and this is kind of a pet peeve. I'm glad Eric reminded me about this. You want to be really careful about if you have your meet-up at a restaurant or bar to make sure that you're not, I don't want to say advertising, but you want to make sure that even if it's at a bar the focus of the meet-up is not drinking. I know that with our meet-up we've gotten high school kids to attend to our meet-up. And ours happens to be above a pizza place. Technically it's a bar, but it's a pizza place with a bar above. But we go out of our way not to talk about beer or drinking and any of the promotion of it. And to make sure that even though it's at a place called Ryan's Pub, the focus is Drupal and I have to be 21 the focus is Drupal and everybody's welcome. We have to move on. I know, this is a hard one because it's so much to say. Yeah, for the whole entire presentation. You are cut off. Organizing meet-ups and events and we're going to each go through what we do for our events even though we've kind of high level talked about it. And this is also what we want to hear from you guys today. We want to hear if you have a unique thing that you're doing at your location we'd love to hear about it because somebody else might be like that's the thing that's going to draw people together. I want to do that. So we certainly do not have the corner on this market. There's so many ideas out there that we probably haven't even considered. So these are whoops. So we ask people the different types of events that they do in very general terms. Yeah, we are. Sorry. I moved ahead too fast. I thought that was the same thing. So the ones that I do, I go to the Denver and the Boulder meet-ups and I do presentations there and attend. So I don't go to the Denver one as much because it's just on the day I have my kids but Scott will talk to that. But I go to the Boulder one and I also run Drupal Ladder meet-ups. If you haven't heard of Drupal Ladder there's people talking about it. There's a boff later this afternoon about it. It's kind of we're trying to get more people to contribute to core. So it's one of the initiatives out there trying to attract people and teach them how to contribute to core. So we have on the third Thursday of every month we have one in Boulder and one in Denver and we do Drupal Ladder meet-ups. And it teaches you really just even how to set up your environment so you could start committing and climb the ladder to doing patches. That's what I do. Do me a last because it'll build off because I mostly do conferences. I do. Well, we'll show you later is I think the most common type of meet-up mostly and that's just presentation base. We ask people to talk about what they're doing with Drupal or talk about what they talk about something Drupal related. It's really open-ended but pretty much anything anyone's excited about talking about they just get up and tell everyone else about it. And that pretty much always leads into questions and discussions but we mostly start with presentations. We've we also the scheduling of our meet-up Karen mentioned that the Denver meet-up happens on Tuesday and that it's whatever Tuesday happens to be right before Thanksgiving. So in November we tend to have very low attendance and we take that opportunity to do something very different. Every November we do Drupal games which is like we've done a variety of things but it's kind of a jokey competitive Drupal thing. We've done like you get three random modules make something cool out of them and we've also done like what is it the one with the letters on the thing. We've done like Wheel of Fortune with modules and just people guess anything that's a little fun and different gets people there who might not make it right before Thanksgiving. I'm totally seeing a Drupal Olympics logo with six Drupal heads that is my idea unlike the Drupal Curious I'd like credit for that one. So I'm going to talk about newer meet-ups because I'm guessing that a lot of you are interested in either starting a meet-up or have a community. The one thing that I recommend for that and that I've seen work in the past is keep the presentation short and always, always, always every month or every time you have a meet-up have some type of beginner presentation. Even if it's just covering best practices with taxonomy or best practices with content types the only way you're going to attract new people is if you are presenting or giving them information that they can use and a lot of people who are new to Drupal who are kind of feeling their way around they don't have the confidence to know that I'm actually using this content type correctly. So by doing a half-hour very introductory just very best practices you're going to encourage newbies to attend and encourage them to keep attending. So when we started the Florida Drupal user group we had a very mixed skill set where we had like 10, 11 of us all the way from beginner to people who've been using Drupal for three years at that point. So we staggered the meet-ups so that six months of the year every other month we'd have a two-hour meet-up which focused on presentations and kind of introduced new skill sets and new modules to the attendees and the other meet-ups across the month were four hours long and we'd have two presentations at the beginning that kind of do the normal and then we'd go through like a QA or Q&A where if you have a question or if you're a beginner and you've hit a road block come in pose your questions to the group and we'll all put our heads together and figure out a solution for you. It seemed to work really well because a lot of those attendees they were driving from great distances away hour and a half, two hours to get to that meet-up so they took it upon themselves after a few months to create a meet-up in their area but to talk more about what I do for meet-ups and things now I think Emma, you went to her session she made correlation to three different colors of people red, yellow and green what were the green people are very creative always throwing out new ideas yellows are filtering ideas and evaluating ideas and red are stop talking let's make a decision so I kind of fall into the yellow category where one of the goals of moving around to all the different Drupal communities is not just be involved but to make sure that people in that community feel like Drupal is theirs in that city and that they feel like they're part of it and they're empowered to do things on their own if a meet-up group needs more advanced topics finding the people that are willing to take over and try and make a new meet-up or something that's going to work along with what's already happening in their curriculum that's kind of what I like to do make sure that everyone's being served and that no one's complaining and not showing up we want to kind of evangelize and that's what it boils down to I'm a Drupal evangelist so one other before I go back to Ash one other kind of meet-up that we didn't actually discuss here that sometimes we do sometimes in Denver but more in Boulder we'll do like Q&A almost kind of have a discussion and lots of how would you do and it's literally either not necessarily lightning talks but here are the issues in the community right now how do you do XYZ and we'll have a whole meet-up just literally answering questions but you can't really do that every month because when out of people really want to come to hear an organized event but those are nice to throw in there sometimes too so how many people here have organized a Drupal camp before how many people want to organize a Drupal camp? okay alright so one of the most important things that you need to have in place before you start thinking about organizing a Drupal camp is making sure you actually have a really good community there as it is because you do not want to be the sole organizer of anything like I have been the sole organizer of pretty large events and it's very stressful and if you already have a job it takes a lot of work making sure that your community locally is already pretty well established that there are a lot of people that are already involved that are interested and you've kind of taken the opportunity maybe you're sick at night and you have somebody else that steps up to be the organizer keep in mind who those people are because those will be great people that will be able to help you out organizing something like a Drupal camp and the other thing unfortunately is making sure you have more than enough people to organize because you'll find that probably like 60% will say that they'll organize but they'll fall off the face of the planet they'll show up to the events but you won't hear from them so making sure that you have your checklists in place and the nice thing about Drupal camps is all you really have to do is make sure you have a space to do it in and making sure that you're reaching people you really don't need anything else people are going to come with the ideas they're going to be the ones that are setting up presentations and they'll be telling their friends so making sure that you're reaching a larger community is something where people are interested in coming but really just setting up a space for them to give these presentations is all you're doing but yeah making sure that a lot of people are involved and making sure that your community is well established so that there are enough people to help you is really important So moving forward to where I tried to move earlier event types so you've heard what we do and so this is what the community came back with what they're doing that's where I got confused we're getting mixed more than presentations which is interesting because I really thought that most meetups would be presentation wise but we've got some that are just social literally here's a meetup we're going to meet once every month and we're just going to have beers and conversations or sodas you don't have to drink and sit around and chat and it could be Drupal it could you know how our conversations go it could end up somewhere else but it's the community staying bonding and presentation and then there's others which I don't know I guess Drupal Latter was kind of an other so study groups so presentations questions Q&As and some social so like our number one we have presentations Q&A and then we go off to a restaurant and have another couple of hours of socializing and drink so yeah it continues scheduled what an hour and a half two hours five hours it's not required that's not a requirement the first part of the hour and a half a lot of people leave yeah we so we do make a point to like have the formal meeting and then have a distinct break before the like social time so that people feel free to come to just one of those and don't have to do both because it's a long night also our social is not at a bar bar it's at a restaurant with a bar so they have been people to bring their children and we actually do the opposite where we actually we never start our meetup start at 6.30 posted our presentations never start till 7 because we want people to show up and if they're saying hi and talking the last thing we want to do is stop people from networking so we generally run two hour meetups first half hours just people arriving and talking and saying hey what's up what are you working on a couple of half hour presentations sometimes they go long sometimes they don't and then the final half hour which usually devolves into Q&A or just more networking so I guess my point is don't rush a meetup you know even though it's scheduled for 7pm you know let the presenter start at 7.20 and if people are talking don't stop them from talking that's the point of the meetup okay you ready so this is like the rest of the information so making meetups and advanced rock so we all like to rock and we rock really hard so we're gonna make sure that even after lunch even after lunch so we're gonna make sure that you guys know how to do it too you know one of the things we always like to do whether there's new people in the room or not at a meetup is go around the room kind of introduce yourself you know tell us who you are how new are you to Drupal what have you done what brought you here what are you interested in presenting in the future etc etc you know then we kind of have standups for job opportunities from people in the local community because if a newbie or even an advanced user that wants to change their scenery you know there's job opportunities everywhere for Drupal I don't think there's gonna be a scarcity anytime soon either you know then we'll have our sessions we'll do our after session thing and then you know it's all socializing the networking that I really think and you guys feel free to correct me if I'm wrong but a social event after every meetup is a really good idea and you should always have one because it's the networking and the meeting and the rubbing of elbows and the loosening of the sodas or your beverage that you choose to drink you know that that facilitates all the connections that you're gonna make and strengthen your community with so that's pretty much you know a standard rocking meetup did I miss anything so one other thing, one other point is scheduling try to I find that consistency seems to make the best so every third Thursday or every what's the number, every second when Tuesday? Thursday or second anyway I know what it is, it's on my calendar every month I know at the same place, same time they'll be a meetup I don't know what the presentations are gonna be I don't know who's gonna be there but it's on my schedule so it's on the things to do so I can schedule around it if you well we'll have one this month we won't have one next month we might do it on a Monday, we might do it on a Wednesday we might have it at a bar, we might have it at someone's office people need to have stuff on their schedule if you want attendees you want to get that numbers up keep consistency consistency is very important especially when you've got other meetups that are Drupal meetups in the same month from in other areas you don't want to conflict, you want to you know and also how soon do you want to schedule you should probably schedule, I would say at least two weeks at least two weeks but if you can have it consistently every month on the calendar then you'll have to worry about it it's there so Karen can you advance to the next slide hold on a second so the more time that whatever your event or meeting takes the more early you should be scheduling so if you're talking about just a meetup I would do it I like to have it we announce when the next one is at the meetup so people know a month in advance whenever it is if it's something like a camp I try to let people know at least four months in advance this is something that people are going to have to give their entire Saturday for maybe they have to make sure that they're not going to be working or that they have somebody watch their kids and especially if it's something like it's during the summer a lot of camps are held during the summer a lot of people are traveling around vacation during that time so getting that put on their schedule as soon as possible is really important one more point so I've had slightly different experience than Ash I've found that a month ahead of time is so early that people put it on their calendar and then totally forget about it and I've kind of moved around a little bit but settled on what Karen said two weeks out seems to be the right amount of time to like people can plan ahead for it but don't forget about it I think that's probably a little different in every local community what the right amount of time is but definitely telling people like telling people it's happening ahead of time is really important I've seen meetups that are like we're having a meetup tonight and that makes it really difficult for a lot of people to get there so I'm going to disagree with everybody here and say that plan out your meetups as early as you can we're not talking the key is not when you plan and announce it you want to market it a week or two out but for us, especially for people starting new meetups especially plan them out as far in advance as you can and get them on meetup.com or GDO so that people who maybe just visit their groups.drupal.org page once a month will arrive there and see that there's a meetup either in three weeks or one day depending on one day they get there as early as possible and then everything that you guys are talking about with timing has to do with sending on email newsletters or posting tweets so basically we do that it's too late, you said you don't it's consistency but when we start talking about it we announce it whatever great team so one of the things that we had asked in the survey was the point of view of the attendee or the organizer how many people do you think that are empowered in that group to take over or start their own thing if you are absent by chance the result seemed that there's one or two people always in charge from what people have told us and then a very small number of people I think most meetups it's safe to say are between 20 and 30 people right zero is not an answer zero wasn't right wasn't I like that it's a lopsided peace sign last one turn of thought it's okay so I think it's important to kind of gauge that at every meetup how many regulars are showing up those are the people that are probably paying attention and want to be involved the same person showing up over and over asking questions being involved odds are you probably should hand them the reins at some point say hey why don't you make the agenda or schedule for the next meetup market it and we'll help you out and step back giving them an opportunity to present is also a really good thing to do because then they'll get up in front of everyone and realize it's not that hard to talk in front of people the point too people who've never presented before have to be the absolute the perfect expert and once they realize that you actually will become much more of an expert once you have to present because you have to know the product I've gotten some people it's taken some real arm twisting just tell us what you know don't worry the community will correct you and they learn that it's actually not that scary especially it's a good way to learn to present and the other thing is that's fine the other thing is that a lot of people especially if they haven't presented before assume that everybody already knows the things that they know so a really great thing to do is like we keep a google doc of things that people want to learn about and so we have this list and then if something appears in the list and somebody else says oh I want to learn that too they'll put a little hash mark next to it so we can see that you know some people want to learn about views and we'll ask people who haven't spoken before like do you know about views could you do like a views 101 and giving people the opportunity to say oh I just assumed that everybody knew about views but yeah I've been using views for five years and that's something that both gives them the idea and empowers them and makes them feel like they have something that's worth presenting another point on the same thing another reason to get more people involved in organizing is that if things go well you'll probably want to have multiple meetups eventually if you you'll end up with more people than you can fit in a room at a time and the people who help organize the first ones are good people to start another one overflow is a good problem to have so we need to move on guys so now how do you get one started how do we start a meetup I've got an area where there is no meetups I want to start a meetup what do you do I actually have a bunch of experience with this because what we tend to do in the Florida community is every year in our big Drupal camp we call out an area of Florida that doesn't have a meetup and shame them into having a meetup this actually works particularly well for us he's not lying but actually the way we do it is we identify people in the particular geographic area and this year actually it's Tallahassee which is the capital of Florida geography lesson for all of us and you know we've kind of developed a recipe that just works and it involves all of the marketing things that we've talked about but the key I think is you announce that first meetup at least a month in advance so again you have the people who casually might stumble upon it to see it and to tell their friends if you try and like say meetup next Tuesday you're gonna have probably three or four people so have plenty of lead time and then the number one goal at that first meetup and this is the part you have to write down because this is the part that actually works is you go around to each person and say what are you presenting and then what are you presenting and you literally plan out the next four, five, six meetups right there and you pick a day, a consistent day so that everybody knows the next six months worth of meetups the exact date, the exact time hopefully you're lucky enough to have a location that you can secure that far in advance as well as the topic and then you post that you post it on GDO you post it on meetup.com you post it everywhere and you know at that point when people show up and well show up online and see these meetups they can see not only what's happened in the past but they can say these guys are organized they have a plan moving forward and it's been a magic bullet for us to get meetups off the ground there's nothing else to say no, no, not yet there's still more I have one other thing that we do as well another thing that we do is we encourage local meetups to interact with each other as the larger community acts interacts so in other words, we have on IRC a pound Drupal, Florida and I don't know about you guys but when I go into pound Drupal or pound Drupal support it's a bit overwhelming so we encourage local groups to start interacting with each other using the same tools and mechanism that the larger community interacts as a way to get everybody comfortable with those methods we encourage people to go into pound Drupal, Florida and talk to people who they met at the meetup last night then to go into pound Drupal and try and ride the giant wave of text that's flying by them so we encourage IRC we encourage GDO discussions and we actually try and discourage email because in the larger Drupal community most communication happens on D.o or IRC so the more comfortable you can make or your local community using those tools the quicker they're going to grow into full-fledged Drupal community members so we're pledging to just add one to add one thing to that siloing conversations between your groups in regional areas is very bad because one the left hand doesn't know what the right hand does vice versa if you can get the interaction between your regional groups that community is going to be more powerful because then they've networked with each other they know how each other communicate okay so great stuff one thing, one chart we did was how frequently do you meet and we were talking about consistency you see that most respondents said they meet once a month we had a few that were more than once a month some of them less than once a month and much less were other some of them said hey let's have a meet up and they do or once a year or something like that and we found people want to meet once a year is not enough Drupal that's called the camp tips and advice I think we're going to go around Robin we're going to go around Robin start from there tips and advice that you haven't already given that I haven't already given tips and advice so I see one person in the crowd already doing it right exactly it's also the more you can do to pioneer and make other people feel accepted is really going to help because then they're going to feel ownership in that community and if your attendees feel the ownership then they're going to want to make a change or they're going to want to be a substantial difference in that community so give your attendees some love make them feel welcome I'm going to break the rule and I will repeat but it's all about consistency and getting giving notice getting the events out there and giving people time to find them organically I'm going to bring up a topic we've touched on a few times but haven't really fleshed out and that's food and drinks food and drinks are good and complicated so I guess my tip is have them and have a variety so that everyone has something you don't want people showing up and not being able to consume the thing that everyone else is consuming so that takes some complicated planning and it's hard to do but try that was almost really dangerous so for me the most important thing is definitely making sure that everybody feels comfortable if you notice that someone stopped attending your meetings shoot them an email and just say we haven't seen you in a long time if there's anything that we can do to change the way that we're doing things let us know making sure that you're checking in with your attendees to making sure that you're holding the meet up or the event in a place that's safe for them to get to it's easy for them to get to a lot of public transportation make sure that it's off public transportation so it's very easy for people to get to some people with children can't attend easily during the week maybe every now and again hold something that's on the weekend I definitely like to try and hold things in safe places so I don't want attendees walking alone in the dark in not super safe neighborhoods all of those things can make people be a lot more willing to travel especially if you live in a large city like Chicago has a couple of Drupal meetups I think Chicago was a gigantic city the traffic is terrible there are a lot of things that would discourage you from attending a meeting in a very large city like that so make it as easy as possible for as many people to participate accessibility I echo all of that definitely the again being felt welcome I remember one of my first meetups I went to and I really was brand new to Drupal the guys in the community I had no idea who he was just some guy named Greggles I don't know comes up to me and he's like oh it's so good to see you the next time he came over and gave me stickers and I'm like somebody actually recognized that I came back and it was like these people might be somebody I want to hang out with well here we are five years later I haven't gone anywhere and kind of active in the community a little bit so now so actually now we want to open this up to you we want to hear what you have to say I'm going to move to the next slide and it's basically has links of things resources and where you can get more information and how to give us a survey we want to hear what you liked about us when you go to the I don't know if you've noticed this but when you go to the sessions when you're logged in you have to be logged in in blue and italics it says serve give us your feedback or something it's my eyes missed it so I'm just bring it to your point to your but I'm going to put that up and I want to hear from you yeah and there is a mic in the middle of the room it's super convenient I know to just yell from your seat but I'm hard of hearing so if you don't mind using the mic that would be awesome and while a lot of this was about meetups all of us have a lot of experience with camps as well and other types of events so don't re-encourage those questions that's our session and the ongoing discussion there's actually a google doc right now we might make a wiki I don't know what we're going to do with it but if you have things you want to know things you want to tell everybody else it's open to the public to edit that the I'm going to have resources there and you can edit and add stuff okay I don't know who coordinated this forum or who did the survey but you rock so that out of the way my name is John Weixner I'm JPW 1116 and I'm with the western new york and it's not western new york city it's western new york state where we call it pop and very simply we don't have a huge user group so I'm going to give you two little nuggets to take home and maybe incorporate as policy which I would really love first one we have instituted what I sort of came up with as a mini camp which means it's less than one day it started at 11 a.m. we had the first one last month 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. same kind of topic same kind of break for lunch everyone stays in the same room but allowed people from up to two hours in and they loved it it was at a aspen like ski resort south of buffalo so we got people from Toronto Southern Ontario Cleveland Ithaca New York and they loved it just driving in so it was a little bit different from your typical urban meeting it was way out in the hilly country everyone loved it and it was captive because keeping people in the room at lunch is all better than having people dissociate and then some may come back some may not it's one day or less is a format that I would like to see as an option among regular camps and it sounds really easy to organize yeah it's not that easy but it's just smaller it only takes a couple people and maybe a sponsor and thanks to build a module they donated some items that we were able to auction off to make our budget okay second point is there any way of coordinating in various g.d.o. groups to have an external liaison because I know that the groups are supposed to be for their own region or for their own group of regions but say I'm going to Vegas I tried to find a meetup person contact it was really difficult or even in Chicago or when I went to New York City sometimes I have captive time when I'm going there and it would be great if one person were designated as the out of town or like welcome committee like a hostel so that you could have a spontaneous meetup if you're going to be in town and know the names of the people or the bars were places where they would hang out that would be useful I run into that a lot because we travel around all the different cities usually on the g.d.o. page there is an organizer section on the right above the events block and it will list the group organizers so for Florida I think we've got three or four of the miniature regional organizers listed for the entire state and the entire group Chicago I believe it's the same way someone from Fox Valley a couple people from Chicago so there you can usually use the contact form to get in touch with them and say hey I'm coming into town actually I did that is Jason Yin here there he is I actually changed my flights we were here for a week in Portland because we moved here I changed my flights because they were having a meetup the day after I had scheduled to leave so and I wouldn't have known that unless I had reached out and talked to him maybe we could have a form like a standardized form on g.d.o. to say hey I am visiting you just fill out the form and then it goes to whoever and I'll hunt down the person so that's my other suggestion thank you I had one erased once when I did that because it said it was off topic on almost any group on groups.druble.org you can join and just announce an event and then it will happen because you made it happen you don't even have to you don't have to live there you can just say hey let's all have an event someone came into my town my name is Eric I'm St. Louis, Missouri I got a couple quick questions I was late so if you could cover this I'm sorry but what external tools do you guys use to like communicate and advertise the meetups and kind of garner membership so what our survey said survey says is most people use g.d.o. the second most used is meetup.com and then once they're posted start tweeting and facebooking and just talking about it that's primarily what we do what we do as a community not us up here that's what the survey said second question do you guys have experience with sponsorship so getting sponsors for food and other things like that yes so the easiest people to go to are people that you know so the better networks you are the more likely you are to get stuff I go to a lot of different meetups that aren't related to Drupal at all just so I can get to meet people Google will always give you money Yahoo! Microsoft will always give you money so if you can't get money out of if you don't have I don't know if there are any in St. Louis Drupal shops if there aren't I'm not sure but if there aren't there are other companies that would be more than willing if you know they can put their logo on something or you know like I've had Yahoo give me 500 bucks sometimes I'll just reach out to them explain what we're doing explain what kind of event it is and the kind of people that will show up what their knowledge level is the kinds of things that they do mention that they're professionals and whatever that they do and people are pretty willing to give you stuff otherwise speaking to things like local coffee shops and you know pizza places a lot of them are willing if not to give you stuff completely for free to give you a really huge discount there's just about to say there's actually a lot of people in line and we've got five minutes left the five of us will be out in the hall after hey guys thanks for the session my name is Andreas and I'm an organizer for Pittsburgh Meetups and I have two questions but I only asked one do you guys recommend having individual websites for each of the Pittsburgh or Michigan Meetup or whatever it is you should use I recommend groups.drupal.org so just use that no not just that use that and meetup.com and whatever else you can't and if there's anything you want to do that you can't do on groups.drupal.org open an issue and because we've seen websites for camps oh yeah it makes perfect sense for a camp because they have multimedia typically either presentation slides or videos I know Chicago the regular Drupal Meetup group there they were recording sessions and taking video at some point so they post all of those to their own site because GDO doesn't do that but it's strictly complimentary you shouldn't segment your community so that if they're looking for it where they think it should be and it's somewhere else it's just going to confuse people also advertise if you're doing a camp advertise the crap out of it on GDO for Drupal Camp Wisconsin we hit up Minneapolis Iowa the Illinois groups Indiana Ohio anywhere we thought that people would drive in from but be respectful when you do it oh yeah don't be a jerk I try not to be a jerk don't be a jerk it's just a rule of thumb don't be a jerk hi I'm David I'm from Pittsburgh as well do you know this guy back there? yes actually totally started a meetup we're trying so we did have a meetup with a presentation on a really technical topic and in the interest of including people perhaps without the technical depth of the more experienced Drupalers we attempted to have a buff room separate from the main sort of presentation solicited ideas from the community on GDO ahead of time and when they arrived at the meetup and it just didn't work but I liked your idea about always having scaled down beginner session at each meetup and just interested in any other ideas you have on I'm a big believer in don't segment your meetups until you absolutely have to keep everybody in one group and that's why I'm the flag carrier in Florida for saying every event in Florida should be posted on GDO slash Florida especially when you're starting out with that core group of people getting to know each other really really well and segmenting people out into either a buff or having let's do a theme day that's all well and good but you need to keep everybody together until you have enough momentum or you run out of space so do you have everybody in the same room for a brief beginner session no no we do a beginner session and then we do something else okay thanks hey my name is Andrew I'm from San Diego I got a lot of ideas about everything you said because we've been doing meetups for a while clearly we don't have enough time to talk about any of that stuff but do you know if there's a buffer I know the buff schedule is completely full is there one for anything like this does anyone know there's a hallway buff immediately after this perfect I'll be there we should probably I'm Jennifer I'm from Bellingham, Washington we're about an hour away from Vancouver we're also about an hour away from Seattle so we started our own meetup a little bit more than a year ago and we have pretty good attendance now we started one thing which I think has been really great and it does split the group up but Max Bransmo who's in our group too is leading some people in the Drupal Ladder so that people can get more comfortable with the idea of contributing I definitely recommend that it's really given some people who were really new of real feeling of empowerment like oh wow I can just jump in and get involved which is awesome but I have a question about paying for food and drinks if you're not meeting in a place that has that kind of thing and you can't get sponsorship does anybody like ask for fee from people coming I don't want to do that but I also it's very expensive for me personally because I'm just footing the bell I can tell you where you can get some money but you didn't hear it from me I know a guy so the Drupal Association has this thing called community cultivation grants awesome and if you go to Drupal association.drupal.org slash grants all the information is there I'll just say that one of the people up here is on the committee but the goal of these grants is to or the mission is to grow the Drupal community awesome so if you can convince the committee that what you're doing is going to bring more people from outside Drupal into Drupal these people will give you money also ask for donations have a fish bowl and say you know pizza is being provided for free please pitch in a couple bucks if you can that's a good way to do it one of the beautiful things in Chicago we always had libations at the meetups and there would be a libation sponsor so someone would chime in the day before a couple hours before the meetup saying hey I'm bringing the drinks so don't worry about it it sounds like you're in a rural area though right not really rural but it's a pretty small it's like 100,000 people are there local Drupal shops? we're meeting at one of them so we're at two I want to cut you off but there's one more behind me should I just ask outside no you should ask my name is Liz I'm from Baltimore we sponsor the Baltimore Drupal meetup and it's great but sometimes we we don't have wall to wall people it's really hard to get people to present and it seems to help when there are presenters to get more people to come so I'm wondering if you have any suggestions for that don't make it an option they've all presented already just point at someone and say what do you want to present about don't say do you want to present because everyone thinks they're not prepared to present but everyone can present so just make them do it okay thank you alright thank you anyway the session please