Create dynamic group activity blocks

This is something I'd be very excited to see. My sense is that a group activity block would make it easier to find interesting and / or relevant content. Like Patch Bingo but for groups!

I'm not a fan of how voting is set up, though. Specifically, I don't like downvoting. I said before at http://groups.drupal.org/node/69658#comment-219138 that upvoting promotes positive behaviors and still allows stale or unpopular content to disappear from view. Downvoting enables things like bullying and retaliatory behavior.

I don't mean to derail this discussion (voting is already being discussed at http://drupal.org/node/1116820 and http://drupal.org/node/780044) but I'd like to see voting figured out before those statistics are featured in a new activity block.

I'd like to add to the people who get shown:

People who help set up, run, and clean up at an event.

Some background might aid in understanding. I'm a member in Los Angeles, a large metro area. We have 60+ attendees at our "senior" meeting, and we now have 5-6 spinoff daughter meetings, where some are getting so big to be called "sister" meetings now. Each meeting has a "host" offering us the venue, who is sometimes also the Master Of Ceremony (MC), who is also sometimes the "Organizer", or one of them, sharing the role with others. Due to the size of the events, the MC often has member volunteers do many, if not most, of the tasks MCs do to prepare the hour before the meeting, thus freeing the MC to supervise, or hand hold the main speaker(s), and solicit lightning talks, and other "leader" roles.

These "other" tasks done for the MC include and is not limited to:

* Sign in sheet, for many reasons, often to let the venue hosting firm see how many faces are there, as most hosting firms do so looking to hire Drupal talent. Also, in the USA, several years worth of monthly sign in sheets is a sure sign the "user group" is indeed meeting, and if donating sponsors like to have a greater tax deduction for giving to non profit, then one day these many sign in sheets, can be shown to the USA government who grants NPO status, proving our status, to a degree.

* Raffles attract attendees to stay to the end, and the MC likes to have volunteers to hand out the tickets, and run the raffle, pick the winning tickets, give out the prize, and take pictures of the prize winner, giving the MC a chance to rest their voice.

* Setting up chairs, finding more chairs as late comers arrive, so they do not stand for the next two hours. And putting those chairs away. 60 chairs takes about ten minutes for 3-5 volunteers to set up and re-stack, so the venue host employees do not have to the next day.

* Clean up half drunk and empty cups, paper plates, used napkins, any trash, leaving the place cleaner than when we arrived, so the venue host will keep inviting us back. The kitchen and bathrooms are cleaned up. Pizza boxes are broken down and place in trash to prevent inviting ants and pests. Soda cans go into the recycle bin. Spilled drinks are mopped up.

* Projector set up, assisting the speaker connect their laptops, find adapters, run power cords, set up microphones, set up recording software, set up webcasting, set up network connection or wifi, troubleshoot any of this, and find more expert troubleshooter for the hard ones.

* Solicit for speakers, both 5 minute lightning talk to 90 minute big talks.

* Post "Meeting Minutes" afterwards, to let those members who could not make know the URL resources mentioned, and increase the value of attending the next meeting.

* Find venues for new Organizers who desire to MC, but do not know how to approach venue facilities, for whatever reason.

* Donating food, raffle prizes, and other ad hoc assistance, both big and small, short or long term.

Maybe these volunteer roles do not need to have the public see they are done?

Some volunteers have doing the same tasks for 12 months or more.

How do we get so many volunteers working at each meeting? By making the needs of the meeting visible on our website www.LADrupal.org and the MC thanking the many volunteers at the end of the meeting.

I believe every little bit of "thanks" and "credit" (if even private) does help retain, and get new volunteers.

Solving the "burn out" problem means finding your own replacing, training them, or making sure potential volunteers know they can complete the task to a satisfactory level for the group.

I like to include the solution when pointing out a problem, but here, I'm not too sure enough Drupal User Groups have so many active volunteers, doing tasks at more than one monthly meeting, to justify any "central" DO effort to design, iterate, and implement a solution.

Getting feedback from other large groups, or even small groups that do have one or more "helpers" and what they feel would retain and attract new volunteers would be good.

I know 'small' tasks, or tasks just done once a year, should not be getting support of DO programmers, more the responsibility of the individual User Group if they wish to publicly thank such levels. Should "large" tasks and tasks done year after year be something DO programmers take on? Where is the dividing line in how to give such community recognition, and does it include the "task(s)" done?

Does any one know of a design that works for giving active volunteers "loyalty points" or similar? Or other solution proposals?

I like to include the solution when pointing out a problem, but here, I'm not too sure enough Drupal User Groups have so many active volunteers, doing tasks at more than one monthly meeting, to justify any "central" DO effort to design, iterate, and implement a solution.

The solution already exists. We can use the user reference fields on groups.drupal.org's event posts and include the usernames of each and every organizer. The Downtown LA Drupal meetup organizers (myself included) have been doing this for a while, as you know. Whether other meetup organizers do it can discussed at the LA Drupal organizers meetup later this month and it isn't relevant to this groups.drupal.org issue.

Anyway, my point is that each time that a person is listed, the displayed "Co-organized events" count on their profile page goes up. I can't find the patch at #1063992: Provide user activity metrics that does it, but the code starts at line 43 in groupsdrupalorg.module.

Something to review after D7 migration.