At our January Joomla User Group meeting, we decided to organize a Joomla Day. We meet in Brattleboro, Vermont, at the Marlboro College Graduate Center. They donate space for our meeting, and they offer a great class on Joomla to graduate and undergraduate students.  As I teach at the Grad Center and run the user group, I asked them if they'd be willing to support a Joomla Day event at a time of mutual convenience. Not only did I get an enthusiastic response, they even volunteered to donate the space for the conference.

Next, I asked the group if this is something we'd want to do, and again, we had a very enthusiastic response.

I was thrilled, but I'm not going to organize the whole thing myself! 

So I immediately asked for help and picked 6 great people to form the organizing committee: Beth Armour, Meg McCarthy, Tamar Schoenfeld, Andy Tarr, Romola Chrysanowski, Samantha Bovat, and me.

Next, I set up a Google Group, locked to the 7 of us, to start a discussion about what we'd need to think about. There are so many details, it's hard to know where to start -- topics, speakers, food, money, type of conference... oh yeah, and there's date and times as well!

While it would be very easy to go crazy and want to do a multi-day event, bring in Joomla newbies and business owners who might want Joomla to drive their sites and Joomla developers alike, this is the kind of "scope creep" we want to avoid for our first event. I exerted veto power -- something I don't want to do often -- and said that we would keep the event to a single day, and we'd focus on the immediate Joomla community in southern Vermont, southwestern New Hampshire, the Northampton/Amherst area of Massachusetts, and maybe we'd reach to the Boston area and Albany, New York.  We aren't sure about catering to total newbies just yet, but we're definitely going to leave out the business community. 

If this event goes well, we'll do a bigger one later, or we'll focus on a different target audience. But for now, we want to focus on a small, successful event and establish ourselves -- and maybe next time, we'll do something bigger.

I set myself up as the liaison to the Grad Center and to the Joomla/Open Source Matters community. As I already work at the Grad Center, and as I'm the user group manager, I'm the logical pick for this as I've already dealt with these groups before. 

I checked the Joomla website for information setting up a Joomla Day, but found very little on the site. I asked in the Joomla User Group manager's mailing list how to start making this an "official" Joomla event. I was told to go to the Joomla Forums and post in the Events area to get things started. Alex wrote me back and got me connected with JoomlaCode and Joomla.org so I could access some Joomla Day materials, and he told me a mentor would be in touch with me shortly to help.

So -- as of today, the 7 of us are discussing what we're going to do in the Google group. We'll have an in-person meeting on February 3 to finalize some big basic details, and then we'll be ready to move on to the next level: recruiting speakers, building our website, and getting other details in place.

This blog is set up to record what we've been doing to get Joomla Day ready, so any other user groups (or anyone else) who might want to do this will know what they're getting into!