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Drupal UK National Association

Robert Castelo's picture
Wed, 01/02/2012 - 10:57 — Robert Castelo

This forum is for discussing the set up of a Drupal UK national association, a central body to facilitate Drupal related goals in the UK.

See original discussion on groups.drupal.org UK Drupal Association

Discussion was moved here to keep it seperate from un-related posts and to enable a structured approach to planning.

Use this forum to brainstorm what goals and requirements the association could have, raise concerns you might have about the association, discuss it's structure, and generaly bring up any ideas that come to mind.

Newbie to Drupal needs HELP!!! ›
Wed, 01/02/2012 - 11:35 — stevepurkiss
stevepurkiss's picture

Bank Account

Thanks for setting this up Robert!

I'm organising a DrupalCamp in Brighton for 28/29 April and it would be really great if a bank account was set up at least a month ahead of that.

I was planning on setting up a Brighton Area Drupal Association in order to do this - if it's not going to be possible to do it through a UK one in time for any reason I'll just do that, but UK-wide I think would be preferable for the time being until we grow regions a bit more.

Wed, 01/02/2012 - 12:02 — Robert Castelo
Robert Castelo's picture

Bank Account

Hopefully we'll have an association and a bank account in place fairly soon, but I don't think we should set a deadline or in any way rush this through for a specific event - like the software, we release when it's ready!

At worst you can use your own company bank account, no organisation that's sponsored an event I've run has ever had a problem with that, just make sure you have a good paper trail of invoices and receipts.

Wed, 01/02/2012 - 12:11 — stevepurkiss
stevepurkiss's picture

Bank Account

As I understood it there are certain tax implications if I use my own account, which is why I ended up being the middle-man between sponsors and the venue as they had to pay them direct.

Is opening a bank account really like releasing free software? I'm happy to do anything necessary to get it set up in time, still 2/3 months to go, should be plenty enough time to organise opening a bank account, if not then we probably have bigger problems at hand with regards to organising things lol ;)

Plus, I don't have a business bank account, I still have to use my personal one as I went bankrupt a few years back and no banks like me any more, which is good because the feeling is mutual!

Wed, 01/02/2012 - 11:42 — stevepurkiss
stevepurkiss's picture

One for Ron - UK Councils

Here's one for later on - perhaps this would be a good place to take stock of and perhaps try and co-ordinate adoption of Drupal in Councils. 

At the DrupalCon London Gov BoF we found out there are a few councils in the UK using Drupal but none of them connected. One of the main benefits of Drupal is the generic nature of the modules - if we don't replicate that on the deployment and business side of things then it will be great that more people are using Free/Libre Open Source Software and Drupal, but they won't necessarily be getting the full benefits of collaboration. They will be sold lots of solutions for doing similar things, much like they are currently now with proprietary solutions such as form builders which many councils pay thousands of pounds to be on per month when webform would do much a similar task.

Councils in the UK have many shared issues, and my idea was to create a website where we could take stock of what software councils are currently using to do what, and how much those solutions cost. From that we could create a 'hitlist' of solutions to work on.

I'm not saying this should be the responsibility of the UK Association / Drupal UK, just a good place to host and promote the initiative. Other than that any views/tips/ideas welcome ;)