Governance Taskforce Recommendation "Provide Greater Support For In-Person Events"

An opt-in badge sounds much better than #3012327: Governance Taskforce Recommendation "Improve Definitions of Representation, Leadership, and the Expected Higher Standards" -- that issue kind of implies that anyone who leads such a community event might be forced to either shut down the event or endure a lot of training. If it's opt-in and a badge, then organizers of small meetups can choose whether to get fully trained as "leaders" or not.

Maybe there could be a couple of tiers of badges? For instance, every event organizer should probably agree to adhere to the DCOC, but maybe not every event needs to have a fully-certified Event Leader on board? Some events don't need financing and transparency (like local monthly meetups). Etc.

During a conference call of Drupal event organizers (29 attendees) today, an idea of camp organizers to contribute $$$ to a fund to hire someone or some entity to create a Drupal event web site starter kit (not a distribution) that works well out-of-the-box, but something that can also be customized by camp organizers if they desire.

A significant portion of the call was devoted to the various pain points of creating/managing/updating Drupal event web sites.

-mike

I really like the idea of creating a Community Event Working Group.

This feels long overdue, as local events (meetups, camps, etc.) are such a large onramp for the Drupal project.

Local Drupal camps and meetups provide a great opportunity for participants to experience the Drupal community. How many people started their Drupal career by first going to a Drupal camp or meetup and connecting with members of the local community? Let's continue to help grow the Drupal community by working together on this initiative

Community Event Working Group will definitely give a good kick off to local meetup's/Drupal Camps interms of everything.

Supporting local communities is something that can have great returns for the Drupal project. Local groups are instrumental to help on-board new people to the community and invite more people with diverse backgrounds. It also helps people learn more by offering low-cost, high-quality information and training close to where people are, which lowers the barrier to entry and helps retain people. There's also the dialog that happens at these events where great ideas are generated, collaborated on and executed.

Having a governance or group around local communities will help organizers by providing information to help with decision making, provide guidance for local communities for things like executing a code of conduct, and recruiting underrepresented people. Having a venue to discuss how to handle new trends in event organization and management will also help local groups stay relevant in the future as well.

Offering some consistency between camps can be a good thing (Code of conduct, reporting, etc). However, we should also be careful not to over manage local groups. Some of the great things about local groups is their autonomy to adjust to local customs and trends. With the smaller event size and lower risk, groups have the opportunity to experiment with new ideas that may or may not work. The results (good or bad) can be shared with other local communities to help other organizers.

I really appreciate all of the 29 attendees of our first Drupal event organizers conference call, it was AWESOME!!

Over the next week or so, I will provide a more detailed review of the notes on the call, with our next calls to actions.

For those of you who may have missed it, here is a link to my initial blog post,"DrupalCamp Organizers Unite: Is it Time for Camp Organizers to Become an Official Working Group?" "

Seeing the faces of 29 Other Drupal Event Organizers, was one of the most inviting and inspirational experiences that I have had in the Drupal community. I felt like I was a part of something special.

So I will push for making this working group open to all people who organize a Drupal event. That's right, ALL!

Now there will be challenges, such as what is a Drupal event, are there officers and how are they elected, etc.. etc.. Putting on events takes a special type of person so I have no doubt that we can figure out the structure.

I believe this group has the potential to be a major contributor to growing our community and adoption.

This description is quite vague to give opinion about it. Isn't quite late for this after the DA gave fiscal support for camps to 3rd party? I'm quite sceptical about success of this initiative given that there were numerous community summits and their outcomes were forgotten:
- planning sheet of European events - https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1x0zhQnFIb7kb5Ng5qZgZ7BqKCt1DHtey...
- survival guide for organisers - https://docs.google.com/document/d/15stUkZ2GWk31m-DRFyDQLm7RSJdOuEy_s9rH...
- Community summit from Vienna https://docs.google.com/document/d/1T261QKEhRnb2dkPiDauinQ1alJkUgKIVffrE...
Won't it be enough to link these materials somewhere?

Do Drupal organisers need separate Slack? It makes much harder to learn about it, it separates people and gives kinda elitist vibe.

I'm wondering how this groups wants to provide up-to-date help for organisers outside of US e.g. in European countries. Blogpost by kclarkson after the first organisers call shows completely different issues than were discussed at Drupal Europe.

I don't agree with putting $$$ on website starter kit - there are quite some opensourced websites of successful camps, let's recommend those instead of creating something again.

To all,

Here is a recap from our last meeting. Drupal Event Organizers 1st Meeting Recap. Next Meeting Jan 8, 2019

@mirom,

I love your perspective and hope that you will make our next call. While this issue is a lot to unpack :), I think us getting on here and voicing our hesitations is exactly what we are looking for.

We did have some people on the call from Europe. The one thing that was almost a full consensus was the website. But one thing that I did not explain well is that the idea was to fund a project manager to look at all of those other sites, COD and other things that exist and see what it is we need. If some camps can't contribute that is okay but there some camps that would be willing to contribute funds.

As far as all of those other resources I think the issue is that you can't find any of them and when you do it is not very appetizing.

I 100 AGREE with you to be skeptical as previous efforts have not resulted in anything. I think the biggest difference here is that we had 29 people on a call and it was all made up of people who are known to get stuff done. Not saying people before didn't get stuff done, but we are the Organizers and if we decide to move something forward then I believe the chances of success are much higher.

I've opened #3086886: Add Event Organizers Working Group charter based on the discussion here and the work of numerous folks over the past year.

Tagging with a common tag for easier identification.