I'm Steven Jones, I organise the West Midlands Drupal user group, which holds regular monthly meetups. I've found it hard to get going with organising things and to work out what other local groups there are and how to advertise the group etc.

I have the feeling that the Drupal community in the UK is fairly disorganised in a overall sense, individual groups seem to be organised, but as a whole, we are not. I would like to change this.

I propose that 'we' should create some kind of 'UK Drupal Association' that can act as a central body for a few things:

• To channel funds for events. It's surprisingly hard to get a large business to pay a significant amount of money to some random person organising a Drupalcamp, or even directly to the people/company who will eventually need to be paid. It would be significantly easier to have a central organisation that could act as a bank account basically.
• To act as bank of knowledgable people, so that if you want to organise something Drupal related, or want to know something specific (where should we advertise our events) then we can respond to such questions.
• To help prevent schedule conflict. By having a central body that people can ask: 'Will my planned event clash with another', we can avoid the rather silly situation of two groups competing for the same attendees.

This is mostly just an idea in my head, but I floated the idea at DrupalScienceCamp Cambridge earlier this month and it seemed to go down well. The Irish Drupal peeps have a similar body, which they set up a year or so ago, and I am discussion with them about their pain points, I'm also in contact with 'the' Drupal association.

I can also imagine that handled and set up wrongly such an organisation could become overbearing, a clique or far too political, which I want to avoid.

Thoughts?

I've cross-posted this on groups.drupal.org, so if you pop any discussion over there, rather than here, that would be great.