Home » Atlanta PHP Community » Organizational Topics » Atlanta PHP Officers and Duties
| Atlanta PHP Officers and Duties [message #40] |
Sun, 11 June 2006 14:16  |
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 ramsey
Messages: 239
Registered: March 2006
Location: Canton, GA |
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Since I see a great need to grow our user group in both its relationship to local businesses and developers, I feel there is a need for more of a business approach to our organization. I don't think we've needed this for the last year as we were merely a small core group of developers and "hobbyists." However, now we have a great opportunity for growth, and I would like us to take advantage of it.
Thus, I'm proposing the following officer roles. Please comment on them and let me know what you think. I'm not sure how we'll go about choosing those who will fill these roles right now, but if you would like to make a suggestion (nomination) for a role, please feel free to voice that here.
PRESIDENT
Manages communications, sponsors, and media relations. Maintains relationships with other national and international PHP user groups. Liason to external PHP developer community.
DIRECTOR OF COMMUNITY RELATIONS
Liason to Southeastern developer community. Contacts local developers to discover their needs in the PHP community and invite them to participate. Maintains relationships with other Southeastern PHP user groups.
DIRECTOR OF BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT
Liason to the Southeastern business community. Contacts local businesses to discover their needs in the PHP community; finds out how businesses are using PHP and promotes the use of PHP to those businesses considering it or not yet using it. Maintains relationships with the local business community and invites the business community to participate in Atlanta PHP.
DIRECTOR OF EDUCATION
Develops a plan for Atlanta PHP's educational efforts. Manages the schedule and agenda of monthly meetings. Maintains a relationship with Zend and MySQL, especially with regard to their certification programs. Maintains a relationship with php|architect regarding their suite of PHP training courses. Maintains relationships with publishers and their user group programs.
Ben Ramsey
http://benramsey.com
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| Re: Atlanta PHP Officers and Duties [message #45 is a reply to message #40 ] |
Mon, 12 June 2006 15:00  |
cspruck
Messages: 70
Registered: March 2006
Location: Carrollton, GA |
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Ben,
Thanks for putting this together - I agree that it's a good time for our next step on the growth curve.
I'm wondering if we should combine Business Development with Community Relations and just call it "Community Relations" or "Community and Business Relations"? In some ways, it would seem that we'd be killing two birds with one stone by contacting businesses and getting the word out to developers. Do you think they would be fundamentally different or were you just going for division of labor?
I'd also like to suggest "Program Chair" to separate the meeting/agenda related duties from the Director of Education. I say this based on our offline conversation concerning all the implied tasks like making travel/pickup arrangements and covering expenses for speakers, discovering and scheduling local people, and so on. This sounds like it could be a lot for one person to handle when coupled with the education things you brought up.
I imagine there would be some cross-over between the officers, based on what you've described, so maybe any one position won't be as intensive as it might seem, although I do think the "meeting coordinator" would be the heaviest of these.
As far as nominations go, I think you, Ben, are the obvious choice for President, as you've been the driving force as a co-founder (and near constant presenter, hehe) and you're more plugged in to the greater PHP community than any of the rest of us. Although I haven't discussed this with him, Kevin Roberts has made a good impression on me and I think he'd be great in a community relations capacity, if he'd be interested.
Chris
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| Re: Atlanta PHP Officers and Duties [message #46 is a reply to message #45 ] |
Mon, 12 June 2006 18:18 |
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ramsey
Messages: 239
Registered: March 2006
Location: Canton, GA |
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You're right. There's going to be some overlap between these roles, and I intend the roles to work together rather than separate.
Some of the inspiration for this kind of organization comes from the way NYPHP handles their group. Their charter defines the way their organization is set up, and you can see a list of their principals (and titles) here.
Now, I don't think we need to develop a charter quite yet, nor do we need as many roles as NYPHP has, but I see several areas in which we need to focus our efforts, especially with regard to our mission statement. Those areas are mainly: community, businesses, and education. Thus, I've created a division of labor between these three areas.
I agree that the community relations person is going to end up contacting a lot of businesses to get in touch with developers, but their focus is going to mainly on the developers, while the business dev person will focus on the middle-to-upper management people (or will focus on entire dev departments in the organization, rather than connecting with each developer).
So, the roles require special skills from each of the people filling them. The business dev person needs to be skilled in dealing with business people. Perhaps they're even a business person themselves, or they've worked in businesses in the past. They need the ability to relate to management and "talk the talk" so to speak. While, the community relations person needs to be less formal, perhaps. They need to be someone who can talk to the community, not necessarily skilled in the business world. Sure, they'll be talking to businesses, but their focus is on the lowly developer.
Now, as for the "Program Chair," I don't think we need to divide that up into another "top-level" role. I still think the organization of our monthly meeting falls under the Education "department." So, the Director of Education would manage it, but that doesn't me he or she can't appoint someone to run the meetings and manage tasks associated with meetings.
And if one role starts looking as if it's got more on its plate than the others, then the President role can help take on some of that burden and/or it can be distributed to some of the others.
I also agree that Kevin is a good choice for community relations, if he'd like to fill that role, and I'll nominate you (Chris Spruck) for the education role. 
Ben Ramsey
http://benramsey.com
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| Re: Atlanta PHP Officers and Duties [message #500 is a reply to message #40 ] |
Wed, 23 August 2006 14:10 |
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ramsey
Messages: 239
Registered: March 2006
Location: Canton, GA |
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I just want to "freshen" up this thread to point some attention to it. I'd like to revisit this and start moving forward on some things in the near future.
Does anyone have anymore input or suggestions they'd like to offer?
Ben Ramsey
http://benramsey.com
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