Event Organizer Working Group Elections, 2023

The board has extended the nomination window until Tuesday, January 9.

Hello EOWG board,

I would like to nominate myself.

Michael Miles. I am one of the organizers of New England Drupal Camp and lead organizer of the Boston Drupal Meetup group.

Hello,

I would like to self-nominate and contribute to this initiative.

I currently serve as the Treasurer for DrupalSouth helping to organise our ~300 person annual event in Australia and New Zealand. As part of this work, I have helped piece together our first Splash Awards last year which was a huge success, and also help put together the Drupal Leaders Dinner which connects competing agencies and hosts so that we can find opportunities to collaborate and grow Drupal's market share.

I also serve as Chair of the newly-founded DrupalAsia Steering Committee where I'm helping to organise the first Asia-wide Drupal conference since DrupalCon Asia in 2016, which will take place later this year. I also help co-organise a Drupal Meetup in Canberra, Australia which sees a regular in-person attendance of 30 people.

The Drupal community is one of this projects most valuable assets. There are few other spaces in tech that are as focused on inclusivity and accessibility as this community is and I am proud to be able to help organise events for this community.

As a Drupal business owner, I have a interest on contributing to events to ensure they have material that is relevant for non-technical decision makers and to encourage new users and new adoption. In doing so I hope to help foster the next wave of Drupal users, developers, and businesses that will contribute to Drupal and help it grow well into the future.

If I am fortunate enough to serve on the Event Organizers Working Group I would work to help share my experience working on and founding successful community events and helping to support events that have a particular focus on new users and commercial audiences.

Thank you!

Mike and Mike, thank you for volunteering! Nominations are now closed.

Since we have two candidates and one position, we will be holding an election for the position. Details will be shared on Monday, January 15 in this issue, in #event-organizers on Drupal Slack, and via the Event Organizers mailing list. Voting will be open until the end of the week, Friday, January 19 at which point we will announce the results.

The candidate who is not elected will be encouraged to join the EOWG advisory board where they will still have the opportunity to participate in initiatives and contribute to the discussion, but will not have voting rights on the board.

Vote online in the EOWG Election until the end of the week, Friday, January 19.

Based on current nominations, my vote would go to Mike Richo (from Australia).

Current board members are:
- Avi Schwab, President (froboy) - USA
- Leslie Glynn, Vice President (leslieg) - USA
- Sean Walsh, Secretary (seantwalsh) - USA
- John Picozzi (johnpicozzi) - USA
- Matthew Saunders (MatthewS) - USA (Outgoing)
- Bert Boerland (bertboerland) - Netherlands
- Suchi Garg (gargsuchi) - Australia

5 out of 7 members are from the US and that includes the outgoing member, Matthew. I would vote for Mike from Australia over Mike from the US mainly to bring more representation from outside the US to the committee. Otherwise, based on their profiles, both Mikes appear as great additions to the working group committee.

I would also like to highlight the lack of representation from other regions - as an observation and not a complain. Regional representation would often bring language and cultural representation with it. If that's desired, some potential approaches for consideration would be to expand the committee with regional quotas or to encourage active local members in non-represented regions for future nominations.

Wishing all the best for the current and the new members of the committee. For Matthew who is leaving and for Mike from US for his contributions to the local communities.

@pendashteh, thanks very much for your thoughts.

Global representation has been a goal since we started the Event Organizer Working Group. We've tried alternating meeting times 12h different, but we decided to pause that when we still weren't getting increased representation from outside North America. We've also tried to encourage applicants outside of the US with every election and we've had some, but even with async meetings, participation from international folks is still small - maybe due to language barriers, maybe something else?

We'll continue that work with the new members and work on ways to better facilitate global involvement. We've also engaged a few times this year with the Network of European Drupal Associations (NEDA) → and hope to continue that conversation.

I'd encourage you to share more thoughts in #event-organizers on Drupal Slack. We would very much like to expand the conversation.

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Adding credits for all who voted.

Voting has closed and the nominees have been notified. Public notice will be posted once both nominees have had a chance to respond to their notifications.

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This is complete. Thanks to everyone who participated.

Automatically closed - issue fixed for 2 weeks with no activity.