Nowadays my interests are a bit more focused — with a family and a job, they pretty much have to be.  Still, I thought it would be cool to be able to attend something like the old Explorer meetings and shoot the breeze with other computer geeks.

There’s a .NET Users Group in town, but since I work in the PHP arena these days that didn’t quite cut the mustard.  Then my boss Dan and I got to talking about PHP User Groups — specifically, how there wasn’t one for the Colorado Springs area.  For that matter, it didn’t look like there was an active “PUG” anywhere in Colorado…at least one that had updated its website in the last five years.

This sounded like an opportunity to do something fun.

The easy part was finding people in the office who were interested in attending a group meeting.  Almost as easy was getting a basic website up and running: Dan provided hosting, I bought a domain name, and we threw some pages together.

A meeting location was a bit harder to find, but thankfully we’ve got some good libraries here in the Springs and we were able to secure a free 15-person room.  An in-office meeting announcement found its way to Zend, and through them out into the mailboxes of 20-some local developers who are interested in PHP.

We only had seven people show up for our first meeting, but two folks were from outside of our office so I took that as a good sign — especially since we weren’t working too hard on publicizing things yet.  After all, our first meeting was simply to take care of the boring administrative stuff…anybody coming for a good, meaty PHP presentation was going to be sorely disappointed.

Bylaws — the rules and regulations governing an organization — can be truly mind-numbing.  Were they really necessary?  For our next few meetings, probably not.  But in any small group (online or offline) that I’ve participated in, at some point there comes a problem or conflict…and without even a simple set of rules people end up making assumptions and somebody’s feelings inevitably get hurt.  Aside from getting the dull work out of the way first, we figured that by doing this now we’re going to save ourselves some problems down the line.

We ended up with three pages of bylaws…but all that took 90 minutes of discussion, even after working off of a template and taking some better sections from another user group’s charter.  If you think three pages is a lot, you should see some of the monsters out there: I think I came across a 30-page set of bylaws for a Mac User Group.  Hey, we just wanted to cover some basic rules and responsibilities for the people in charge, a means by which those people can be appointed and removed, and a way to ensure that the general member body doesn’t get screwed out of representation.  That’s hard to do in just three pages, even if you’re assuming that the rules will be interpreted in the same good-faith fashion in which they’re written.

We lost a couple of folks over the course of the first hour, so there were only five of us left when we were done with the bylaws.   You’ll probably not be too surprised when I tell you that by the end of the meeting there were five positions on the Board of Directors: a President, a Vice President, a Treasurer, a Secretary and a Member-at-Large.  It’s an odd thing, nominating yourself and everybody else in the room for an elected position; it smacks of a post-coup staff meeting in a banana republic.

This particular republic is the Front Range PHP Users Group, or FRPUG.  Our next meeting is the 22nd of this month, and now the real work begins: finding presenters and making things interesting for a typical PHP developer.  I’ll let you know how it goes.

Until then, if you’re a PHP developer (or just interested in Web technology in general) and live somewhere between Denver and Pueblo, I invite you to check out our website at http://www.frontrangephp.org and consider attending one of our upcoming monthly meetings.  I think we can make this fun.

And maybe we’ll be able to squeeze in the beer and pizza at some point.