IEEE Computer Society and GBC/ACM

7:00 PM, Thursday, March 17, 2011

IBM Innovation Center, 404 Wyman Street, Waltham, MA

The Secrets of Building and Participating in Global Communities

Dries Buytaert

Attendance at this event is free. We should have plenty of seating capacity for the meeting, but please register anyway at https://www.eventbrite.com/event/1379501125 so we can keep track of how many people to expect.

We all know many successful communities, but how are active communities built? In this session, Drupal founder Dries Buytaert will share his secrets for building a thriving global community with more than 500,000 members worldwide. He'll describe processes essential for community growth and share his experience building the Drupal project. Attendees will learn:

• Lessons community managers can use to foster participation
• Why to focus on coordination, rather than planning
• How bumps in the road can bring communities closer together
• How to ensure your community includes a diverse mix of participants

Dries Buytaert is the original creator and project lead for the Drupal open source web publishing and collaboration platform. Buytaert serves as president of the Drupal Association, a non-profit organization formed to help Drupal flourish. He is also co-founder and chief technology officer of Acquia, a venture-backed software company that offers products and services for Drupal. Dries is also a co-founder of Mollom, a web service that helps you identify content quality and, more importantly, helps you stop website spam. A native of Belgium, Buytaert holds a PhD in computer science and engineering from Ghent University and a Licentiate Computer Science (MsC) from the University of Antwerp. In 2008, Buytaert was elected Young Entrepreneurs of Tech by BusinessWeek as well as MIT TR 35 Young Innovator.

The IBM Innovation Center is located at 404 Wyman Street, Waltham. There is free parking in the garage at the north end of the building. To reach the meeting room, walk out the front of the garage and around to your right to the front door of the building. Directions to the room will be available when you sign in at the front desk.

We will be taking Dries to dinner at the Green Papaya after the talk at about 9pm.

Up-to-date information about this and other talks is available online at https://ewh.ieee.org/r1/boston/computer/. You can sign up to receive updated status information about this talk and informational emails about future talks at https://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/ieee-cs, our self-administered mailing list.

For more information contact Peter Mager (p.mager at computer.org)

Updated: March 15, 2011.