php-groups.com |  Post Question |  Search |  About |  Groups |  Contact |
 Register |  Login
|
New in This Group
PHP Groups wiki now on wiki.php.net6/3/2009 7:21:25 PM
PHPBenelux5/12/2009 7:43:58 PM
European PHP TestFest video feeds4/28/2009 7:06:07 PM
European PHP TestFest4/28/2009 3:17:09 PM
Community Leadership Summit July 18/19 2009 San Jose4/17/2009 3:57:03 PM
Portland, OR US: Open Source Conference3/29/2009 6:46:28 PM
ZendCon Panel:Attendance & Avoidance10/9/2008 2:18:44 AM
Mouseketeer Roll Call9/10/2008 3:50:37 PM
Hi from Belgium9/10/2008 7:41:50 AM
Hello from Portland, OR, US9/9/2008 11:35:06 PM
Mouseketeer Roll Call 
Reply
| Group: ug.admins |
 Subscribe
|
Posted:9/10/2008 3:50:37 PM | Replies:0 | Views:24 | Items(0) |
|
Hi, List!
I'm interested in learning a little more about the various groups that are represented on this list, so if you'd like, please elaborate a little about your orgs! DallasPHP - Dallas, TX US (originated as the Dallas PHP/MySQL User Group) My name is Tim Stiles, Co-Organizer of DallasPHP (along with Jason Ragsdale) DallasPHP has been meeting in one form or another for almost 7 years. (Jason and I have been members for around 5 years) We have one official presentation a month (the second tuesday night of each month), and an informal Q & A session on the following Saturday morning. No dues or meeting fees. (Our meeting space is graciously provided by the Dallas/Richardson offices of Yahoo!). We are not a certified non- profit. Official Website: http://DallasPHP.org , legacy site at http:// php.meetup.com/30/ Normal meeting attendance is around 35, jumping up to 55 or more on good topics. Announcement list reaches almost 600. Focus is primarily on Professional Practices and Skills. (The Q&A leans more towards learning PHP and basic skills) Community support: Highly localized job board, and direct coordination with local PHP employers (We also organized a local mass certification test for the first Zend Certification. 28 local ZFEs in one day!). Goals: We'd like to organize a mentoring program for new developers and an internship route for local businesses, as well as a PHP workshop event once or twice a year. Ultimately, we want a PHP conference in Dallas. Thanks! Tim Stiles, Co-Organizer, DallasPHP WatchMaker, Icomex.com |
monk...@dallasphp.org (Tim Stiles) 9/10/2008 3:50:37 PM |
|
On 9/10/08 11:50 AM, Tim Stiles wrote:
> I'm interested in learning a little more about the various groups that > are represented on this list, so if you'd like, please elaborate a > little about your orgs! Thanks, Tim! Atlanta PHP - Atlanta, GA US My name is Ben Ramsey, Co-Organizer of Atlanta PHP with Chris Spruck and Kevin Roberts. Atlanta PHP has been meeting on a monthly basis consistently since March 2005, though we launched the group a year before in March 2004. Historically, there was a PHP Atlanta user group dating back to 1997, but we have no affiliation with that early incarnation. (See mention of Atlanta here: http://chiphpug.php.net/mpug.htm) We have one official presentation each month (the first Thursday of the month), and we've tried a few other things like a 15-minute mini-presentation on a recurring topic (a different IDE each month, etc.). We also tried doing a separate meet-up just for coffee each month, but that fizzled out. We have no dues or meeting fees. We also do not provide any refreshment at our meetings, though we do go out for dinner/drinks after each meeting. Kevin Roberts (co-organizer mentioned above) works for the Consulate General of Canada in Atlanta, and they graciously allow us to use their space to hold our meetings. We are not a certified non-profit, though we have considered incorporating in the past and may do so in the future, but only if we ever have the need to collect donations from sponsors, etc. In addition to our official website at AtlantaPHP.org, we also use Meetup.com, Facebook, Twitter, and IRC: http://php.meetup.com/336/ http://www.new.facebook.com/group.php?gid=4207251077 http://twitter.com/atlantaphp irc://irc.freenode.com/atlphp We had originally used Meetup, and when they started charging for use, we dropped it, but a year later we found that many, many people were looking for a PHP user group in Atlanta through Meetup, and some were even starting their own Meetups in the area, so we decided to pay for the service and set up a presence there to make it easier for people to find us. Normal attendance is around 20, jumping up to nearly 40 on good topics. Our main announcement list reaches 168, but this number is skewed since we have various communication streams (too many) with little cross-over between them: Mailman list, FUDForum, Meetup.com, Facebook, Twitter, and website. So, we probably reach a little more; I would estimate at about 300. We don't have a general focus, but most of our recent topics have been on Enterprise and advanced development, and we've received some requests to see more topics on more of the beginner-to-intermediate level. Community support: we have a job board that we limit to postings for jobs only in the Southeast US. We would like to do much more with local employers, etc., but finding those who want to be involved has been difficult. Goals: I would like to see us put on PHP workshops at least twice a year. Like Tim mentioned, some kind of mentoring program would be nice. I also want to get local companies more involved and host some kind of PHP (or general open source) job expo (possibly coordinated with the other local open source user groups). I have lots of other ideas, but I'll cut this short for now. -- Ben Ramsey http://benramsey.com/ |
ram...@php.net (Ben Ramsey) 9/10/2008 5:01:10 PM |
|
Hi Tim
As said before, I'm Felix De Vliegher, and I'm Co-organizer (together with Michelangelo van Dam) for the Belgian PHP user group and community, called PHPBelgium. We're pretty new and started in april/ may this year but organized 2 meetups since and we're planning a bigger event within a few months. Our first meeting was nothing much, with about 6 attendees. Not really a surprise if you notify everyone about 4 days earlier there's a meeting :-) We learned from our mistakes and announced the second meeting about a good month before the meeting date, and things were better: about 35 people showed up, which was pretty much above our expectations. We even managed to give away a free ticket to ZendCon, so that surprised everyone quite a lot :-) We're planning to continue this in a two-monthly schedule because so far the feedback has been great. We're not asking for fees (yet) but pretty much pay every cost ourselves. For the bigger event, we're obviously looking for sponsors to take away the financial load. Our focus is primarily on professional and enterpise development, as we get asked about this quite a lot. There are plans to also organize a workshop day, we're open for everything. You can find us here: twitter: http://twitter.com/phpbelgium web: http://www.phpbelgium.be irc: #php_bnl on irc.freenode.net Kind regards, Felix Op 10-sep-08, om 17:50 heeft Tim Stiles het volgende geschreven: > Hi, List! > > I'm interested in learning a little more about the various groups > that are represented on this list, so if you'd like, please > elaborate a little about your orgs! > > > DallasPHP - Dallas, TX US (originated as the Dallas PHP/MySQL User > Group) > > My name is Tim Stiles, Co-Organizer of DallasPHP (along with Jason > Ragsdale) > > DallasPHP has been meeting in one form or another for almost 7 > years. (Jason and I have been members for around 5 years) > > We have one official presentation a month (the second tuesday night > of each month), and an informal Q & A session on the following > Saturday morning. > > No dues or meeting fees. (Our meeting space is graciously provided > by the Dallas/Richardson offices of Yahoo!). We are not a certified > non-profit. > > Official Website: http://DallasPHP.org , legacy site at http://php.meetup.com/30/ > > Normal meeting attendance is around 35, jumping up to 55 or more on > good topics. Announcement list reaches almost 600. > > Focus is primarily on Professional Practices and Skills. (The Q&A > leans more towards learning PHP and basic skills) > > Community support: Highly localized job board, and direct > coordination with local PHP employers (We also organized a local > mass certification test for the first Zend Certification. 28 local > ZFEs in one day!). > > Goals: We'd like to organize a mentoring program for new developers > and an internship route for local businesses, as well as a PHP > workshop event once or twice a year. Ultimately, we want a PHP > conference in Dallas. > > > Thanks! > > Tim Stiles, > Co-Organizer, DallasPHP > WatchMaker, Icomex.com > > > > > -- > Usergroup Coordination Mailing List (http://ug.php.net) > To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php > |
felix.devlieg...@gmail.com (Felix De Vliegher) 9/10/2008 9:57:42 PM |
|
On Sep 10, 2008, at 12:01 PM, Ben Ramsey wrote:
> Community support: ... We would like to do much more with local > employers, etc., but finding those who want to be involved has been > difficult. This is an area where we've been pretty successful, but it took some experimentation. Fact A: PHP has historically been a freelance market. Fact B: Freelance markets are generally reputation driven. ("Hey, do you know any good developers?") Fact C: Word-of-mouth hiring is practically invisible to those outside the process. The end result is that PHP in Dallas was an underground job market. No one advertised, they wanted recommendations. No companies knew how many talented PHP developers were in the area, and no PHP developers knew which companies would hire PHP developers. Another side effect of the reputation driven market is that talented developers are relentlessly contacted by headhunters and recruiters, an experience which many of them really despise. From the day I started handling the web sites for DallasPHP, I was contacted constantly by local companies, each and every one asking me to throw them the best and brightest (who quickly made it very clear that, being fully employed, they would much rather not be bothered). There was also the issue that, meeting the membership for approximately two hours a month, I simply could not reliably judge a member's experience or skill. If I made recommendations, I could only do so for the very few members I knew personally, which would simply not be fair to the rest of the membership. In the end, supporting the reputation market would ultimately manage to annoy every member we had, and being a voluntary org, that would be "A bad thing." So I decided to force the game above-ground. RULE NUMBER ONE is to NEVER provide contact information for your members to anyone. Even other members. Relay messages if there's a reason, but don't hand out email addresses or phone numbers. As for jobs, the only fair way to distribute job opportunities to our members was to deliver them to all members at the same time. No favorites. The only way to not annoy those that didn't want to be bothered by the announcements was to make it strictly Opt In. So we set up our Job Board, and every single hiring opportunity that comes along goes to the board for all members to see, and respond if they see fit. We deliberately restrict the board to work that local developers can do, and we accent jobs from companies that have direct ties to North Texas. This was not originally popular with the companies. They all wanted the cream of the crop. So I wrote a speech/form letter for them whenever they complained. It described (in great detail) how many times a month I was contacted by companies asking for me to point good people out, and why I couldn't, in good conscience, do so. Then it spelled out our reasoning: As long as hiring PHP developers remained a word-of-mouth exercise, no one would have an accurate picture of the job market. By posting job openings, we could prove to moderately skilled PHP developers that there were good jobs with salaries and benefits out there for EXCEPTIONALLY skilled PHP developers. The Job Board became our Carrot to entice developers to learn the skills DallasPHP planned to teach. It had the added benefit of reassuring companies that were nervous about jumping into PHP because they weren't certain it was viable. When they saw how many other companies were relying on PHP, they often felt better about the viability of the language. In short, our agreement with the local companies is that we attempt to create PHP developers with the enterprise level development skills they need (or would greatly benefit from), and that they can use our Job Board as the means to contact any members who are looking for work. We also welcome employers to attend our meetings, introduce themselves, get to know our members, and see what we are teaching at the same time. The opportunity we offer them to see the developers interact is a tradeoff that compensates nicely for the fact that we can't pre-filter job applicants for them. In a slightly controversial move, we make the same offer to recruiters and headhunters, professions many PHP developers view as little more than pond scum. Fortunately, human nature plays to our advantage: The dishonest, disreputable ones rarely go through the bother of showing up. Most show up once. A few have turned out to be great partners, finding jobs for more than a half-dozen members. I can also say that if you need monetary sponsors for an event, recruiting agencies are often the first ones willing to put down cash. All you MUST do is restrict their access to make it as unobtrusive as possible. PROTECT YOUR MEMBERS. Let recruiters introduce themselves and distribute paperwork, if they have it. Also, you probably want to mark any job postings submitted by recruiters - as opposed to those provided by employers themselves. Summary: Companies want skilled developers. Recruiters just want access to them. As a User Group, you can provide both. Ultimately, they'll love you for it. But they have to understand what you're doing. Tim Stiles, Co-Organizer, DallasPHP WatchMaker, Icomex.com |
monk...@dallasphp.org (Tim Stiles) 9/11/2008 4:21:57 AM |
Newest Articles
note 97095 added to soapclient.soapclient4/1/2010 5:58:19 AM
note 97094 added to function.sqlite-changes4/1/2010 5:06:46 AM
note 97093 added to function.sqlite-changes4/1/2010 5:06:21 AM
note 97092 added to ref.xmlrpc4/1/2010 4:52:18 AM
note 97091 added to function.var-export4/1/2010 3:32:03 AM