Talking Drupal #379 - The EOWG

Nic L  
Hi this is talking Drupal with the chat about web design and development. Super people with one thing in common. We love Drupal. This is episode 379. The EOWG. Welcome to tackling Drupal. Today we're talking about the Drupal event organizers working group with Avi Schwab obvious, a 14 and a half Drupal years old. In addition to serving as president of the EOWG. He's the lead of midcamp and the technical product consultant at image x where he's on the team supporting 30 plus YMCA organizations. Avi, welcome to the show, and thank you for joining us.

Avi S  
Hey, thanks for having me.

Nic L  
I'm Nic Laflin, founder of Enlightened development and today My co hosts are John Picozzi a Solution Architect at EPAM. Hello, everyone. Also joining us is Lesley Glynn, customer success manager at Redfin solutions. Thank you for joining us for the last four weeks.

Leslie G  
Thanks for having me.

Nic L  
We have one quick update this week. So Drupal 10 is officially out there was a Drupal 10 launch party that I was able to join for about five minutes. Unfortunately, it was off that day. So I was not near a computer. But I did see some of the faces on this show right now on the launch party, tracking boat, whatever is excited about.

John P  
Yeah, so that was awesome. I also wasn't on there for the whole day. Or as much as I would have liked to be I had you know, calls. So I was jumping on and off. But I will say that the organization of it and the content was really great, because it was kind of like small 10 minute digestible pieces. And like when I would jump in, I'd always like grab like a piece of something that I was like, Oh, that's cool. Really got me excited for Drupal. 10. And I think Leslie was actually there. Were you there for most of the day, Leslie.

Leslie G  
Yeah, I was there for like the entire day. So yeah, it was really really good. Very well organized. The presenters all did a really good job the the people that were hosting it, so yeah, I thought it was a big success.

John P  
Yeah, I was great. Got Avi. No,

Avi S  
I have done at the beginning. And then at the end, I ended up doing an impromptu like presentation on some of the work we've been doing for the why, at the end, because they were just like, people were still hanging out. But yeah, it was like 100 150 people on the call, like almost the whole day, which I was super impressed with. It was really cool.

John P  
Yeah, unfortunately, the sessions were not recorded. But you know, I mean, I think that's, I think that's fine. You know, that content will will pop up in other places as Drupal 10 becomes more more prevalent and out there in the in the world.

Nic L  
And we also have a note this week from Nerd Summit. If you're in the New England area, and you're interested in general technology, I hope to see you at Nerd Summit. We used to be the Western Mass DrupalCamp. And a few years ago transitioned to being a little bit broader, and becoming the nerd Summit.

Jen  
Hi, my name is Jen. Are you a nerd? Yep, me too. And I want to make sure you know about nerd Summit, and inclusive community building tech event held each March here in New England. I work in software development, but I'm actually not a developer. And what I really love about nerd Summit is the wide variety of professions and experience levels that are represented. I don't have a formal development education, but I really felt comfortable enough at the summit to give my first ever tech related presentation at the nerd summit a couple years ago and I had a really good experience for the March 23 Nerds summit. The Squad of Volunteers summit organizers have booked the venue which is UMass Amherst, picked out yummy lunch menus and have scheduled two really cool keynotes but we still need more content. Nerds summit content consists of sessions that are presented by nerds just like you. Proposals for sessions are being accepted now through January 15. And first time presenters are definitely welcome. The types of sessions you can propose our talks, panels and group discussions and can be on any number of topics including but not at all limited to WordPress, Drupal, programming, design, project management, hardware maker projects, and so much more. Visit nerd summit.org That's NERDSUM m i t.org. For more information and to sign up for our slack and newsletter, submit your session proposal now and then join us at Nerd summit at UMass Amherst in Amherst, Massachusetts. March 17, through 19th and 2023. Nerds Summit is a great place to share your passions with other nerds. So, come show your passion and share your knowledge. Check us out at Nerd summit.org.

Nic L  
And thank you for that. And now to talk to us about the module of the week we have Martin Anderson-Clutz Senior Solutions Engineer, Aqua maintainer, but number of Drupal modules of his own. Martin, what have you found for us this week.

Martin A  
So this week, we're going to be talking about the previous next API, which provides a performant way to define a sequence of content. That's a module that was originally created back in 2009, by Kay bahi, who's actually one of my early Drupal mentors, the current version is eight point x 2.0, dash alpha three, which supports Drupal eight, nine and 10. And that version was released on November 22, of 2022. So quite recently, it, I would say, over the years, it's probably been semi sporadically maintained, but in terms of open issues, currently has 38 open, but only 11 of which are actually for the current version. And only five of those are bugs, it's in use by over 2300 websites. And the current maintainer looks to be JCn, Ventura, have one ex internet, who is pretty prolific, contrib maintainer in his own right. So the module really works by providing a block that contains previous and next links to let a user kind of navigate within that sequence of content. It has some options in terms of how it will sequence that content, you can sort of define that. But it's also worth noting that the module that we're talking about today is has a machine name of sort of, you know, prove underscore next. And there's actually a similar module that is basically the same machine name, but without the underscore. Probably some significant overlap there, that one is different in the sense that it provides the same kinds of links, but really as a field, that would be on the entity that you want to sequence. I think there's also a fair bit of overlap with some modules that provide, I would say, more manual control over how you would define a sequence of content. So something like, you know, an entity queue or draggable views. But this one, I think, is more focused in terms of, you know, what it's trying to accomplish? And sort of, it seems like it probably does a little bit more out of the box. Now, Nick, I think you had originally nominated this one, why don't you tell us about your experience of using it?

Nic L  
Yeah, it's a, it's a pretty nifty little module as a service that allows you to request with the next one is, so it's really easy to integrate with your theme, if you wanted to do something kind of unique with it. I have a client that has a bunch of different case studies on their site, and they wanted to have a link to the next case study at the bottom of the page. And, you know, I started thinking about, you know, how it would implement that. And you know, of course, you could use the book module, which really seemed like overkill for that use case. Because it wasn't Eric, Google Content literally was just like, next, you could use something like entity Q, but then you have like, where does that live? Like a build something custom. So I decided to just do a quick search found this module. And because it has, you know, it has the ability to restrict it also to individual content types, and no bundles. So you can say, like, yeah, it turns out that we also needed on blogs, you know, the previous index on the blog. So, you know, we can have the blogs indexed and the case studies index separately. And the nice thing about it is that it essentially is just creating a table in the database, that's an index list of what the next entity is. So it's really performing. The only kind of oddity that I found is that when I pull a production database down to my local for some reason, it doesn't work until I receive the content, which I haven't had a chance to dig into. And I don't quite understand why that would happen. Because the node IDs are the same in production, as my local, but it was a small utility module, it took me, you know, maybe 20 minutes to figure out how to integrate the service manually in the theme file. And, you know, once you get the node ID, you can do whatever you normally do to pull fields that you need to build that block. Now, if you just need kind of the out of the box block, you can use that as well. But you know, we had slightly different designs in mind. So we use that instead. But yeah, all in all, great little module, pretty easy to I might be contributing something back to force Drush to to give a Drush command to allow you to kind of reindex because like I said it, if you just have a couple pieces of content, you can go resave them but once you get to like 10 or 15 or even 20 or 1000s You know, it's difficult to go through and resave every single one so I'm looking to contribute that back for the next few weeks.

Martin A  
And that sounds great. I feel like there are probably use cases as well where people don't have actually want to change that updated date, which is going to be a consequence of actually resetting the nodes. So being able to do that via Drush, I think would be a nice addition for sure.

Nic L  
And the service has a separate method for adding, updating or deleting things from the index. And so the Drush command really just needs to call the update method on all the content that's relevant. And I think that goes there just needs to be moved to a Drush address command. So I don't know how it would work for 1000s and 1000s of modules. But I think they I think they do the actual index on cron, so it shouldn't be a problem. Well, thank you, Martin, for bringing us this module. And I will say that the other module, I think is a little bit more restricted. The reason why I mentioned that, too, is because I did when I was trying to raise the issue with the production database being different, I think I created the issue on the wrong one, not realizing it was different that so if you're looking for one of them has an underscore one of them doesn't. One of them has API in the name, one of them doesn't. So the one I'm using has API and the name has the underscore. But feel free to check out the other one if you have different needs as well. So thank you, Martin. And now on to a primary topic. Okay, Avi. So let's, let's start with we did previously talk about the EOWG on episode 222. But you know, it's been a couple of years. I'm curious, Avi, what is the EOWG?

Avi S  
Sure. Yeah. So the state of definition, the event organizer working group, is a Drupal initiative that supports community led teams to grow Drupal through local events. And really what that what that means is, you know, we're a group of event organizers who are trying to help each other, make, make better events and kind of raise the raise the bar and lower the barrier to entry is for new folks.

Nic L  
Yeah, and there's a bunch of different types of events. But I think a lot of this if I'm, correct me if I'm wrong, but I think a lot of this started with people organizing local Drupal camps. But I think it's grown a little bit since then. Right?

Avi S  
Yeah. And so so we there was like a lot of discussion about what an event was when we, when we first formed this, and really, it definitely formed around camps. But the idea was to support anybody doing a volunteer led event. So that's basically everything that's not DrupalCon. So, so can some of its trading days, contribution days meetups, the idea is anything that that you don't have paid staff to organize. We want to help you. We want to help folks, folks get it done.

John P  
So can you give us kind of a brief history of how this initiative and this working group came to be? I mean, it's it's a relatively new initiative and working group, right. So, you know, give our listeners an idea of, of kind of how it formed and how it kind of got started.

Unknown Speaker  
Sure, yeah. The, I need to like write this down at somewhere in like, a more cohesive manner, because I feel like I've always like re re researching our history. The, you know, there before there was an official event organizer working group, we often had had these roundtables at Drupal con and every year, you know, I started organizing midcamp, around 2014. I started with the midcamp. Team around 2014. And, and yeah, so, you know, similar to other discussions that I had when I was in higher ed or whatever, we would kind of like, go off and do our things for most of the year and then come back and like Drupal con would be like, Oh, my gosh, we want to talk about everything in like, two days, three days. So there were a number of roundtables that happened at some point. Rachel Lawson, who was at the Drupal Association, helped organize one I think it was in Nashville in 2018. That that kind of really sparked the idea of making something more formalized. After that Killeen, Clarkson, he wrote a blog post he did is clean thing and got folks together. And it was super. And, and yeah, so we kind of gathered a core group of folks. We were at a charter, we ran it by folks. We got it approved by Dries and the association. And so I think in the summer of 2019 we officially formed the group. And then yeah, you know, 2020 happens and and things have been different since then. But but we're, we're still evolving and figuring out how we can help and what are what our. And our value is in space. Yeah,

John P  
just to give folks insight, right. And the reason I said it's a newer group, right, so it was the board was formed in 2019. Right. And, you know, the charter says that people have two year terms. Right. So Kleem was the first the first president. Right. And you took over from him last last year, if I remember correctly, right. And so in, you know, its its lifetime, we're only really on our second set of board members at this point. Right. And, you know, there have been a few different board members, some of them are still with us in advisory roles, right, and are on the call right now. Many of them are on the call right now. So for those folks that don't know, if you go to the event organizers working group page on drupal.org. Lesley and I are both board members with Avi right now. So there is a large portion of the event organizers Working Group represented right here on this podcast. All right. So

Avi S  
we need like a bunker or something so that we're

Leslie G  
everyone has somebody initiative initiatives that the event organizers working group is currently working on? I know we've had different ones over the years since we first formed, but what are the current ones?

Avi S  
Yeah. So the two big initiatives that are active right now. The first is the drupal.org events page. So that's the page that you see at drupal.org/community/events. And that has been kind of I feel like the flagship initiative, the flagship initiative of the event organizer, working group, yes, of the group. And, and the goal with this was to have a consolidated resource of all of these events across the world. There, there had been a number of services that kind of did that. Over time, that was Dhruva Cal, which still exists. But now directly polls from this data. droop account before was kind of a conglomeration of stuff on groups that drupal.org and other places and users submitted stuff. And that team has been amazing over the years at keeping that resource going. But it was still kind of very disparate data. So the idea what this is, is used to get all of the data about Drupal events into one consolidated location. I think I meant to pull up my math, I did some like back of the envelope math a few years ago, and we were working on this and it was, it was something like 10,000 people a year are involved in these events. It's like, we're looking at the very incomplete data we had. There's a huge amount of this going on in the world. And so being able to leverage the giant amount of community led events to grow Drupal, and to build consistently as a project was was something that we really wanted to do.

Leslie G  
Anyway. Yep. Can I add one real quick thing there? I think one of the themes of the events page on drupal.org Was there wasn't a place on drupal.org for folks that weren't already in the community to find out about events. So this made it front and center so that, that people that were just learning about Drupal, you know, go to drupal.org. And one of the things you can find is all these local events that you can attend, and that's how a lot of people start out in the Drupal community. And that's how they find out about the community and, and stay with it. So I think putting it there was was very important.

Avi S  
One of the Yeah, I mean, one of the things that we've found somebody found early on was when you install WordPress, I don't know if it's still true. But at some point, when you installed WordPress, there was like a little block that you got on that install admin page that was like, Here, a local WordPress thing is going on near you. So as this data evolves, it has an API already, if somebody wanted to put that module out there will be really cool too. So we can even push this push this content further. And that's the goal of this is when you know, if you don't have structured data, you can't do things with it. So the more structured data we have the better we're able to market this stuff.

John P  
So that, you know, that initiative and funny, Leslie and I were kind of CO CO maintaining that initiative or CO leading that initiative. And it started off as I think its original name was like the drupal.org data event database initiative or something like that. It was really oddly, oddly named into what we were trying to do. But, you know, I think Avi raise a great point there that like, getting that data on drupal.org. Having that central place for folks to find event information is super important. Also being able to share that data, right. Is is important for, you know, a bunch of different event related things. But, you know, there are other initiatives, right that the EOWG is working on, one of which is the event platform, we had kleemann. Mark Nan, not too long ago to talk about that. That was in Episode 365. Can you tell us a little bit about that one?

Avi S  
Yeah, definitely. Episode 365 was a good one. The events platform is a, it's basically a recipe distribution, it's kind of evolving, as that idea is evolving in with with Drupal, 10. But the goal is, is to have, you know, to solve the cobblers children have no shoes situation where, you know, in organizing Drupal events, often organizers get stuck on making a website, which is kind of funny. You know, in trying to find the venue and trying to get speakers and trying to do all this stuff. Making your website is just one of those things, that's often been a challenge for events. So trying to build a platform that's reproducible. That's, that's easy to spin up. That's customizable. So that organizers have one fewer thing to worry about. That has been, it's been a really neat initiative to see going on. And so Colleen was working on that, like Herschel was involved. Martin, I think has been involved for a while. And so yeah, it's,

Nic L  
yeah, it's just so you can listen back to that episode for more detail. But one of the things too, is it's also not, of course, not everybody, but a lot of people working on organizing these camps do have building, you know, Drupal site building experience or development experience that does that experience. But one of the things too, is, these sites, even though they're smaller regional events generally have a lot of complexity, you know, you have to have some sort of registration, you have to have some sort of ticket system, you have to have some sort of way to schedule content, like, there's a lot of functionality that goes into that. And a lot of architectural decisions that depending on you know, how you go year to year, have huge impacts. And so taking a lot of that burden, and moving that to kind of a centralized place where people can contribute some of their fixes or needs back to other camps. I mean, that that's a huge responsibility that camp organisers can now rely on. And like I said, if it's maintained by a central place, it makes it much easier to contribute that kind of stuff back. So you know, camp in Florida, you know, if they make a tweak to it, they can contribute that back in mid camp and use it and then No, each camp happens kind of different times of the year to so you can kind of start getting feedback and improvements throughout the year. But we definitely dive in pretty deep into kind of the needs that platform if you're curious as to why it was not just building a Drupal site, putting you up and saying, Hey, here's where the camp is. Here's the schedule, there's a lot that goes into maintaining one of those websites. I will

John P  
say Nick is very familiar with how much goes into that because he's that person for the New England Drupal camp. So he is speaking from a place of experience.

Avi S  
So So is New England drip camp, thinking about using the the video ads platform, sometimes.

John P  
That is a goal for 2020

Nic L  
committed me to it, so it's cool. I'm gonna start looking at it, I think in a couple of months. So we've talked, it's kind of this, the spiel I just gave on websites kind of exist in general for the whole camp, right? Again, if you if you're just somebody who's attended camps, you kind of have a small glimpse into the amount of work that goes into them. And it's not again, it's not just about finding a location, finding people to speak there. You know, there's there's a lot of stuff that goes on that, you know, if you haven't run one you might not think about for example, you have to have insurance. There's a contract with the venue, you have to find out you have to find out Make sure you have food that covers a wide range of dietary needs and allergies. You know, there's there's a ton of stuff that goes into it. Not not even talking about the financial aspect, you know, getting sponsorships or funding. What kind of support does the EOWG look to provide to people running events or thinking about running an event? Throughout the year?

Avi S  
Sure. Yeah, I mean, you you, you really hit the nail on the head. And one of the things, one of the initiatives that we have worked on, kind of before the EO WG was official, and ongoing is documentation around all of that, too. I put the link in the show notes. And I think it'll, it'll go out. But the documentation team worked really hard to put together a ton of notes that we generated over a couple of years on organizing a Drupal camp, it's in the Drupal contributor to get contributor guide. And they're there, dozens and dozens of like, parent pages, with, you know, every single thing going into it. So there's, there's, there's tons and tons of stuff there. And that's kind of the goal of the EO WG is to be an advisory group to get all this information together. So we are Yeah, so we are not. We're not like a local Drupal Association, like some of the ones that exists in Europe, where we're kind of doing promotion and, and, and financial support for those events. But our goal is to facilitate the conversation between event organizers and help in that direction.

Nic L  
So it sounds to me like what and I have a further further clarification question, too. But it sounds to me, like one of the purposes of EowG isn't organizing events themselves. It's providing tools for people to organize those events, and experiment and and the lessons learned. So for example, like, here's the things you might not have thought about, if you're just starting this out. Here's the pitfalls here. Here's the do's and don'ts. And then as best as we can, here's some tools that you can use, like the event platform to not have to spend, you know, the 100 hours, 150 hours or 200 hours it takes to build a website, you can use this as a starting point. And maybe maybe you you just use all of air out of the box in the mail or the bait the theme out of the box, maybe next year you you change that, but you're able to kind of marginally like here's the things you need to know to run the camp or start a camp. We have 15 years of experience running camps around the country around the world. And this is what you need to get started. But it's not like, Hey, we're going to do a camp here. Let's organize that camp. Right?

John P  
Yeah, yeah, it's really like a resource. Right? So like, it's also about connections, too. So like, if if somebody's coming into the event organizer slack and saying, Hey, I need help, you know, recording my camp, right? We're like, oh, well, you can talk to Kevin Kevin knows all about that, like, you know, he's, he's, he's the guy. Or, you know, if you needed help from somebody in the, you know, in the community, like, it's also about connections. So like the, the WG and is, is always there to try to help connect folks to the resources that they need. So, you know, I think that's, you know, the way you put it, Nick is, is really a perfect way of summarizing it.

Nic L  
So, I did have one more question about kind of the support side of things, because you mentioned is not providing financial support. But there there are kind of two sides of financial support. One is, you know, some people might expect the O W. G, will just give money to local camps, which it does not. But there's also the financial support side of things, just like having a bank account to manage the money. And I know that that's something that Ned camp has spent a lot of effort and recently, I think, has a good solution working with the organizers of nerf summit to help maintain manage some of that stuff. But it is, you know, if you're running a camp, you don't want the money going into somebody's just personal account, right? It just makes accountability. It makes taxes it makes a lot of stuff really complicated. But you know, it's a big ask to have somebody set up a bank account to separate like, is there any plan for the EO WG to have some sort of support on that end of the financial game for for campers, is that going to be left up to camp organiser? Organizers?

Avi S  
Yes, I can answer your question. No, there is not a plan to do that. Yeah, no, I mean, you're right. It's it's a really complicated question. It's also different everywhere. You know, doing it in the US is different from doing it in Canada is different from doing it in Europe and anywhere else in the world. And so especially trying to exist as a global support network, there are a lot of different questions around that. Just, you know, specifically in the US, we have a couple kind of of these recipes of these like documentation of how to go about going down these paths. And I think that is the biggest thing that we can, that we can do to support these, because it really is, you know, we're, we're, we're a volunteer Advisory Board, like you said, These things are a lot of work. And there are so midcamp is running with, you know, we basically created our own organization to called the Midwest open source Alliance. There, you got nerd, there are a couple of these around, a lot of folks are going back to open collective to run their finances. And an open collective seems to be growing more and more resources around that as well. So yeah, it's a it's, it's a challenging thing. And like I said, we we are supporting folks in choosing a direction. But but we can't, we don't have the facility to do that I know with outside the US, the local Drupal associations, sometimes act as those fiscal agents. But the Drupal, that the way things work in the US has been different for I think, a variety of reasons. Partly, us is, is the US that were gigantic.

Nic L  
It's also I mean that the Drupal Association did have a program like this for a short amount of time. And they had to end that because, yeah, I mean it. Every country is different, every state can be different. And so I think that the EO WG kind of struck a good balance. They're saying, like, each camp can kind of say, here's how we did it. Right? With a disclaimer, this isn't financial, legal advice, right, you still have to do your own due diligence and make sure that you're complying with local, you know, local requirements, but it can give you the idea, like, Oh, this is the type of person I need to talk to, to make sure that I'm doing this correctly, and make sure that I'm in compliance, but But yeah, it's a monumental task to make sure that you are running a compliant thing across every country in the world. And that state and the country,

John P  
that's actually something that, you know, different board members, different members of the WG can can advise on in different areas, right. So I know I've had camps reach out to me before about working with Kelley, New England, regional developers about fiscal sponsorship, and that then that sort of thing, which is the way that I know that that camp goes, or unknowingly Drupal camp goes, I know design for Drupal. Goes goes with nerd as well. Organizations like Bobby's and Matthew Saunders, who was on the show a couple of weeks ago. With in Colorado, they actually formed their own nonprofit. So the board has resources that they can connect people with to talk through those options and kind of guide them as far as what makes the most sense. You know, I think Colorado made camp had both been happening for for a long, long period of time, right? So they're established camps. It's a little bit I won't say easier for them but they they have they have the history to be able to say, hey, we want to we want to be self sustaining. We want to be financially independent and have these mechanisms in place to be able to support this camp right long term. I think for camp starting out, like you probably want to may want to go with like a, an existing solution, right to to kind of take that burden off of you for a little bit to be able to see if you can get the wheels wheels going, Avi Would you Would you agree with that?

Avi S  
I would absolutely agree. I mean, just just kind of thinking through that as you're talking. It seems like a natural set of steps on this Right now, like, going from zero, starting with something like open collective, is a really great way they've made a platform that's super turnkey, they do you know, all of the kind of fiscal agency, they hold your money, they help with some of the accounting things, I think. And that really can get you really far there. There are some things that you don't get with that. And I haven't dug into open collective yet. But I know for instance, like Google workspace and slack, in order to get those on your own, you have to have an individual EIN, like a tax number, which is something that you only get if you if you are running your own 501 C three, but then once you kind of take that step, you, you have to figure out your accounting, you have to get bank accounts, you have to, you know, you have a whole nother layer of overhead that you're getting.

Nic L  
So it is a large amount of overhead. But it also is one of them. And sometimes people just want to put that kind of stuff off. But you really do need that, you know, running an event like this carries a fair amount of liability, right. So if you know, if somebody gets hurt, or you know, somebody gets sick or something like that at one of your events, so you want to make sure that you have the right structures in place to best protect the event and the attendees and the organizers. So there's a lot of overhead, turning,

John P  
turning this topic back to the topic, you can see, based on that conversation, that financial support is very complicated. And the EO WG would rather advise folks to use the mechanisms that exist as opposed to setting up their own and managing their own own things. So very much very much an advisory advisory board and yeah, at least where, you know, financial support comes comes into it. Right. So some of our listeners may have recently seen the community initiative, the contrib, contrib, events community initiative. Right. And that's different from the EO WG and what what they do? Can you talk a little bit about that AVI and kind of highlight what the differences are there?

Avi S  
Yeah, I mean, I can talk from my side and from from our side, about the yo wg, but I think the the, the events, the contrib events, can mute the control events initiative. Is, is still kind of in the early phases. And it's a really interesting. It's a really interesting group. And so, like, we've said that the EO WG is is kind of gathering existing organizers together, to help each other and to help new organizers. And to be kind of a meta organization, right, we, we help folks do the things we don't do the things. The contrib events initiative, from what I understand is, is taking a much more direct approach and directly facilitating contribution initiatives, from my understanding, I don't want to say too much about it, because I I've only kind of been on periphery, but it seems like they're, they're helping organize, they are starting to some initiatives to help raise funds. And so it's going to be really interesting to see how that evolves. Because I think I think they could play a very complementary role to the EO WG. Yeah. And so we were there. They're very active conversations ongoing, like, you know, probably now as I'm getting pigs.

John P  
So I think one clear distinction there to make is like the event organizers Working Group is a is air quotes official initiative. Right from from with the Drupal Association and whatnot. The contrib events is a community initiative. So it's very much community, a community led initiative. That is, is really, you know, really taking off lately. I know that you've been talking to them quite a bit. Is there anything that you like to add there?

Leslie G  
Now, they're, I think they're very complementary. Again, there's just in their infancy, they're just starting out. I think one thing that's important to note here is that the events page on drupal.org has always in will always have a section for the contribution events contributing is huge to Drupal. It's very important. So the work that that that new initiative is doing is great. but they have been adding the events that they're supporting that they're running to the community events section on drupal.org. So on the events page, so I would recommend that people that are interested in contributing in any way, whether it's a camp having a contrib day or the community events, initiative running a contrib event, you know, we support that by having that presence on the events page. All right. So jumping to another topic is What is the event organizers Working Group have planned for 2023? Which we're almost

Avi S  
Yeah. Now, I think we have we, you know, it's been a weird couple of years, coming out of the pandemic existing as the pandemic evolves, however you want to, you want to state that, but, but yeah, I think as, as people go back to having more in person events, I think it's really, it's gonna be interesting to see how we can continue to evolve what we do. So we do, you know, we were talking in the pre show a little bit, we are going to have an election, I think, in the next few months to, to get new officers involved. You know, so So figuring out refiguring, that out, as we talked about, a big, big thing is going to be kind of figuring out how we fit in with a lot of these other initiatives that are happening. The control events, initiative, promote Drupal has also been doing a ton of work in the past few years. And so we want to continue to build these relationships and keep the ties as you know, Drupal sometimes feels like it's growing out in all these different directions. And so making sure we are, we're keeping tabs on those and continuing the conversations is a big part of that. Another another thing that we have struggled with, I think, since we've kind of formed is that we started with a core group in North America. And we we keep trying to figure out ways to grow the group outside of North America, we have, we've had a couple of folks on the board. And we we, we pretty strongly want to make sure that the board is not just North American folks. But you know, because of time differences. And because of just the structural, the way events are structured in North America and the US versus the rest of the world. I think there there have been some barriers there. Yeah, I mean, the other thing is, we want to do what you want to do, if you're an event organizer, and you want to do something different with your event or with events in general, we want you to be involved because like, if it's just the five of us, trying to try to figure stuff out, we're not going to be very effective.

Leslie G  
Right. And to add to that, there is a board as AVI mentioned, we'll be phoning for new offices there. But there are members of the board. So if you want to, you know, join the board at some point to start coming to the meetings that, you know, maybe you start on the advisory board, find out what what it's about. And then, you know, the board has a couple difference. I think there's some two year and three year positions so that not everybody drops off. I'm sorry, the Yeah, the board. So not everybody drops off at the same time. We have some continuity of board members. But yeah, we definitely would like some global folks involved. I spoke to the local association, they had like a BoF in Prague. There was a lot of people there from the global community. And there was a lot of interest in, you know, folks joining, but that hasn't really happened. So how we do better marketing, how we get those folks involved, any input from anybody listening would be much appreciated, because there are folks in all over the place looking to create start new meetups, start new camps. And, you know, talking to folks in that in their areas is the best thing for them to do. We have resources, but we don't know the dynamics of the individual, you know, places or countries that you're in, so, yeah, any help, that would be great. So last question on this topic, Avi. What do you have planned? For the organizers Working Group in 2023?

Avi S  
What do I have planned for the event organizers working group? As president? No, I mean, I want to give us going you know, I think Um, as we talked about, as John mentioned, at the beginning of the conversation, you know, we're still a relatively new organization. And we're still figuring things out. You know, going through the pandemic and kind of being, I've led both midcamp and the EOWG, through the pandemic. And it's been a weird time. And it's also been kind of exhausting. And so, you know, continuing to build secession plans in both of those organizations, I think I've seen more and more organizations and local businesses, everything, just kind of fall apart and shut down because they don't have succession plans going on. So my, my biggest, my biggest plan is to get out of being in charge so that somebody else could be in charge, and we can keep the ball rolling.

Nic L  
So speaking of getting involved, let's see, you mentioned a couple of ways with the advisory board. But I am curious if somebody wants to get involved not not on the advisory board or on the actual committee or board Board of Directors itself, but just once has started attending meetings, or they're thinking of running a camp locally, and get getting one started. How do they get involved? How do they get this information?

Avi S  
That's a great question, Nick. So we've got lots of information on drupal.org/community/event organizers. And we try to keep that updated with all of the meetings and all of the places you can get in touch with us. Most of us are on Slack all the time. So we have event dash organizers channel in the Drupal slack. That is where we have consolidated a lot of the conversations about event organizing, not just you know stuff about the board. But really that's meant to be the place that's easy, easily accessible for everybody to come and ask us questions. There is a separate event organizer slack that we've kind of moved away from a little bit for our board stuff, but it's still there for people to have conversations. And then we have meetings. So we've we've been experimenting with open meetings on Slack. And so those are the second Tuesday of every month, at noon, eastern US Eastern. And then we also have quarterly in person zoom calls, that if I copy and paste incorrectly, or the second Tuesday of the month, in January, April, July, and October. So again, we're still kind of experimenting with the best way to involve folks. If you have feedback on that, let us know. But all of that is on d dot o slash community slash event dash organizers.

Leslie G  
Right. And for those of you who may not have been on an asynchronous slack meeting before, the idea behind that is, instead of having a zoom call at a certain time that globally, folks aren't able to join because it's the middle of the night for them, for instance, the slack call, we leave them open for at least 24 hours where you can look at the threads and add your input or add your questions or whatever it might be. So the conversation continues for a full day around. So covers everybody around the globe. So that's why we switched to that with hope, with the with the thought that we could get new people involved in and make it more accessible to everybody.

Avi S  
And you're totally welcome to just lurk there too. Like if you just want to read the conversation, it's all in Slack. It's really easy to see.

John P  
So we've talked about board members, there are three board members on the podcast right now. Right? And we've talked about elections coming up in the next year. Right? So if somebody is sitting listening to this, and they're wondering how they get involved to to kind of be nominated or, or be able to become a board member, how does somebody go about doing that?

Avi S  
Sure. I think the best thing for somebody like that to do would be to just start showing up to meetings, you know, either join on Slack or join on one of our calls. And just start talking to us. We were relatively friendly. We're pretty open. We're, you know, we we want folks to come talk to us. But yeah, like if you want to be involved, we would love to have you so get in touch with us in any of the ways that are on the website or on here. And and we'll leave you there is also we have our kind of board seats and then we also have, you know, an arbitrary number of advisory positions on the board. So if you're interested in kind of getting involved in the deeper conversations but but not committing to a seat yet. We can we can kind of loop you into more conversations and keep you a little bit flexible.

John P  
And that's that's actually how I became a board member. So I was on the advisory board for the for the first two years and then was was elevated was pulled in. I don't know what the appropriate term is. But yeah, I was I was added, we'll go with that one to the board in the most recent term. So you know, that's, that's a great way to kind of figure out what's going on and, and maybe get into into a board board seat, if that's something you want to do.

Leslie G  
Very good. Another quick one, Avi of DrupalCon. Pittsburgh is coming up in June. Are there any

John P  
what? Just Kevin?

Leslie G  
Are there any events planned around the event organizers working group that folks could look out for and, you know, become involved with?

Avi S  
Well, I sure hope so. We, we did submit, we the last few years, we've done a panel discussion about events and kind of focused on different topics around events. We submitted that again this year. So hoping that that gets accepted, but we won't here for another few months. Also, every Drupal con, we have BoFs, we have discussions, we try once the sessions are announced to put an email with like a whole list of of Drupal cons stuff related to event organizing. So if you join our email list, which is on the website, we'll have that list out closer to Drupal con, but I'm excited. It's it's the closest it's gonna be pretty close to where I grew up. So looking looking forward to getting back to these coasts, hanging out in Pittsburgh,

John P  
We've We've even talked about I don't know if this is for public release, but I'm going to I'm going to talk about it and we'll see what it looks like we'll see what happens. We've even talked about maybe doing a community event like an event organizers Working Group community event. So if you're listening to this, and you work for an organization that would like to sponsor a community event with the eowg, feel free to reach out to one of the members and we can start that conversation. On shameless self promotion, I'll be shameless self promotion.

Nic L  
It's what it's all about. Is there anything else you'd like to add? For listeners,

Avi S  
speak ego shameless self promotion,

John P  
and amazing segues.

Unknown Speaker  
The midcamp call for speakers and sponsors is open. Mid camp is happening April 26, through 28th 2023. We just opened our call for speakers, and we would love to have you.  Mid camp is always a great place to not as well to prepare our practice your Drupal CON talk if you if you get accepted. Or just to kind of start talking, get get your feet wet in you know, the public speaking realm. So we'd love to have you at midcamp go to midcamp.org for more information. And that's it's gonna be a fun time.

John P  
As I understand it is going to be a warmer mid camp this time around, right?

Avi S  
I mean, theoretically, it's going to be later I cannot tell you whether April in Chicago will or will not be warmer than March in Chicago, but but we're hoping so. So yeah, usually we do mid get the end of March. But since DrupalCon is going to be late this year, we took advantage of time and pushback.

Nic L  
Well, Avi, thank you for joining us. It's always a pleasure to have you on the show.

Avi S  
Yeah, thank you. Thanks for having me.

John P  
Do you have questions or feedback, reach out to talking Drupal on Twitter with the handle talking Drupal or by email with show at talking drupal.com You can connect with our hosts and other listeners on Drupal slack in the talking Drupal channel.

Nic L  
You can promote your Drupal community event on talking to people learn more at talkingdrupal.com/tdpromo and maybe Avi that's something that you can put out on the EO WG that if people want to promote it. This is one of the channels

John P  
totally get the talking Drupal newsletter for show news, upcoming Drupal camps, local meetups and much more. Sign up for the newsletter are talkingdrupal.com/newsletter

Nic L  
Thank you patrons for supporting talking Drupal your support is greatly appreciated. You can learn more about becoming a patron at talking drupal.com and choose become a patron. Well Avi, as we close out the show if our listeners wanted to get in touch with you have any Additional questions. What's the best way to do that?

Avi S  
Sure. I am at AJSchwab on Twitter. I've got a mastodon it's froboy at Mastodon dot online, I believe. Yes, froboy Mastodon dot online and pretty much everywhere else I'm at frobou Drupal slack on all of those places.

Nic L  
And Lizzie thank you again for joining us as guest hosts for the last four weeks if our listeners want to get in touch with you what's the best way to do that?

Leslie G  
Thanks for having me as a guest hosts. You can go LeslieG on drupal.org or pretty much anywhere on the slacks. Man. I just want to quickly just thank Redfin solution for sponsoring or helping sponsor my work my community work, so I appreciate that.

Nic L  
And John, how about you?

John P  
You can find me on all the major social networks including Mastodon at JohnPicozzi, and you can find out about [email protected]

Nic L  
and you can find me pretty much everywhere at nicxvan.

Leslie G  
And if you've enjoyed listening, we've enjoyed talking. Thank you.

Nic L  
See you guys next week.

John P  
Have a good one everyone.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai