Do you plan meet-ups, camps, sprints, or trainings for your local community?  The Drupal Association is creating a new Community Organizer Newsletter, so be sure to sign up on your Drupal.org profile. Read on to find out more!

This past January, I celebrated my one-year anniversary of employment at the Drupal Association. I came to the Association from a community management background, working with multiple stakeholders in a distributed community; the role as Community Outreach Coordinator itself appealed to me because I knew the Association serves a strong, active, and connected community. I thought that the community aspect of my job would be nothing I hadn’t encountered before, as I knew I’d be working with very similar community models.  What I did not know at the time was the astonishing amount of effort that our volunteers put in to better their local communities and therefore enhance a global community.

Over the past year, I’ve been fortunate enough to visit several camps, attend and participate in planning DrupalCons, sit in on Community Summits, and have countless interactions with volunteers from around the world.  One thing that has resonated with me as I started to connect to volunteers globally is that many community organizers often ask similar questions about other communities and volunteers.  What are others doing for camps? What are others doing for hosting a sprint? Do others struggle to get people to meetups? How do we engage new leadership? Does the Drupal Association have resources to support our local community groups and user groups?

The frequency with which I have encountered these questions got me thinking: how do we highlight the efforts of our volunteers and share best practices with everyone.  After all, we’re open source, and sharing is how we do things. We’re a do-ocracy! After a lot of thought, I realized that the best way to accomplish this task will have to be collaborative. 

I’ll be working with our talented staff at the Association and volunteers to create a quarterly Drupal Community Organizers Newsletter full of tips, tricks, and news for anyone who runs, organizes, or wants to help grow their local community. The best part is that this newsletter will be mostly curated content from you all, our organizers! Who better to help others than our troops in the trenches? I’ll be including blogs, upcoming camps and sprints, best practices, highlights from communities, volunteer recognition and more information. 

I anticipate that we will release the first issue in the beginning of April, at the start of this year’s Second Quarter. As part of this effort, I need your help. Would you like to receive the newsletter? Sign up HERE , and contact me HERE if you have content (or know of content) that would be great to share with our community organizers. Know other community organizers? Spread the word and get them on the list! Let’s work together to share and support each other in our global Drupal Community.