Drupalcon Denver: Kicking Butt... Nicely

Putting on a 5-day North American user conference of between 3,000 and 4,000 attendees is a huge endevor. The details are overwhelming. The amount of work is intimidating. Now, imagine that most of your labor consists of volunteers. This is Drupalcon.

I remember a church leader saying that he was happy if anything happened, even if the project was done was completely wrong. At least something was happening. Kind of depressing, huh?

I don't care how strong your local Drupal community is, putting on something like Drupalcon potentially pits volunteering against paying your bills, spending time with your family and anything else you might like to do. Now, imagine taking on a leadership role in this volunteer organization. Next, imagine that you're falling behind and not meeting your deadlines. 

If everyone was working for the same organization and being paid to do this, a project manager would kick some butt and get the project back on track. Kicking butt is still necessary for Drupalcon Denver, but it needs to be done subtly... So people will thank you for kicking their butt.

Our Denver group is fairly self-enforcing. We've had times when a volunteer steps in to help, sometimes to be the enforcer and sometimes to effectively take over. Most times, I've found that bringing a problem up to our group will encourage the appropriate person to step up. Since we have worked on Drupalcamp Colorado in the past, the group can feel that they can be honest with one another. "I just don't have time to do this right now." "I completely disagree with this approach." "We need to do it this way in any case."

The group culture of the volunteers who are putting on Drupalcon Denver is very positive. Onboarding of new volunteers is vitally important. If new volunteers don't follow through, it could effectively change the culture of the group and, at worst, bring the house of cards down on us.

Personally, I've enjoyed not only reaching out to new volunteers, but giving them the thumbnail tour of what we've done, who does what and what we need of them. Lately, I found that new volunteers expect that there is more structure than there really is. It shocks and scares them. I simply explain that we need them to create the structure.

If it seems that my energy is low here, I guess it is. Last night, we had our regular, monthly SCUG (Southern Colorado Drupal User Group) meeting. I had a Skype meeting at 7:30 am Skype meeting for Drupalcon planning. I spent a couple of hours gathering information and preparing an agenda for our weekly Drupalcon track chair meeting. I spent another hunk of time documenting the results of our track chair meeting. And I have a client meeting at 7 pm tonight.

I am so happy to contibuting to put on Drupalcon Denver, but I'll be glad when it's over, too. I'm in the same boat as all the other volunteers.

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