Hosting meetups, camps, and virtual classes: building the community that builds Drupal

Drupal has a fantastic tradition of involving newcomers, from all sorts of backgrounds, in the project. From IRC help and banter to mentored/sponsored projects to a vibrant local meetup scene, "the community" this helps build is a major reason people stay with Drupal and how it keeps getting more awesomer.

None of this happens by itself, however, and we can always use more. There's a session on how to contribute to Drupal; in comparison, this session will cover just one way to contribute to Drupal: helping more people contribute to Drupal.

We will have a panel presentation followed by a brainstorming session and discussion. We'll be sharing a lot of what's going on and what's working, and how to get involved in Dojo et. al., but the goal is for everyone to share what they're doing and what's working, and to figure out how we can keep building the community that makes super-Drupalers out of ordinary human beings.

Agenda:

• Why and how to host Drupal meetups and help build community with camps!
  • You can host your own user group. It's easy!
  • How to contribute to camps.
• How to help build the community online
  • Existing infrastructure: IRC, E-mail, Forums, Groups, Documentation...
  • Infrastructure that needs to be: Report on the State of the Dojo (and Kata). To make this report have as much good news as possible, get involved now! There is a lot of work being done on and and building on the Open Media Project to revive this great service, and we will be reporting on this at this session.
  • How to manage a volunteer project that benefits drupal

Presenters:

• Stella Power
• Susan MacPhee
• Amye Scavarda
• Kathleen Murtaugh (ceardach)
• Benjamin Melançon (an agaric)

Resources:

• Drupal Event Organizing
• Local User Group Organizers group
• Drupal Dojo group
• Drupal Kata group
• Open Learning and Collaboration Portal group

Originally titled: In Drupal, the Community Builds You
NOTE: The most up-to-date version of this proposal is this wiki page, contribute to it there and changes will be reflected here.