Lenz Grimmer's blog

I had a nice chat with Kieran from Acquia at DrupalCon last week - we discussed how people running local Drupal user groups could expand their outreach into other communities, in particular into the MySQL User Groups. Scott Mattoon captured our conversation on video, which is now available on blip.tv:

Click To Play

The gist of what we talked about: if you are organizing a local Drupal User Group Meetup, check out http://mysql.meetup.com to find out if there is a local MySQL user group nearby. Chances are high that there is! And if not, you may find at least people in the area that would be interested in meeting about this subject. We also maintain list of user groups on the MySQL Forge Wiki. Consider extending your invitation for your next meetup to these folks as well! It's very likely that someone would be interested to learn more about Drupal. The same applies to other user groups, e.g. from the PHP community.

I personally run a MySQL User Group here in Hamburg, and I usually extend my invitations to a number of channels and mailinglists, including the local PHP, Perl and Linux User Groups. Every once in a while, a new member from these communities shows up.

So this thing works the other way around, too: if you are the organizer of a MySQL Meetup, have you thought about looking at http://groups.drupal.org/ yet? Maybe you will find a Drupal User Group in your very own town that you could invite to learn more about MySQL and exchange contacts? If you are looking for more tips on how to run and expand your User Group, I've created a page with useful hints about this topic on the MySQL Forge Wiki. Your feedback and additions are very welcome!