OK, I initially included this in the body of the post, but it makes more sense as a reply, since it’s very much my personal experience.
Background: I started contributing to the Drupal project in 2003 (CSS edits!), held the first meeting with Dries in Vancouver in 2004, was a Founding Director of the Drupal Association, and helped to organize / run the first several years of DrupalCons.
Back then, open source was fighting for its life, all of this was new, and we didn’t have programmable money to power bounties. There are a bunch of other interesting aspects around DrupalOrg, the Drupal Association, and Dries the community lead that may be relevant – but mostly not, because we are actively trying to decentralize and let disparate activities lead to good outcomes for the broader Ethereum community.
I also attended the Ethereum Web3 UX working group that just completed, and think that we can scale these events by helping create templates and models for organizing them (and funding them, which is a separate issue – we need to build in sustainability of both peoples’ energy and compensate everyone fairly).
The very first DrupalCon was a part of FOSDEM, with a shoulder event that was titled a Drupal Developer Sprint. 27 people attended. It was multi-track, but mainly long working sessions hashing out different approaches to model code and implementation.
The notes from that first event even outlines working groups — with a shout out to “self-hosted digital identity solutions” and a meta discussion on software upgrades to DrupalOrg to help with collaboration.
Oh yeah, and I led a session on “Business in Drupal”, talked about reverse bounties (where developers write a spec they want to build, rather than end users bounty-ing a feature) AND … wrote up a summary.
Eventually, DrupalCons became quite large, so the Drupal community came up with “camp” as a complement to big annual DrupalCon events, sometimes also known as “regional summits” that tends to be smaller and more regionally focused. Here’s a page on organizing DrupalCamps.
The Ethereum community being decentralized should also have a sort of template for these types of smaller / regional events to help people succeed. Being decentralized, there is no one to give or deny permission for anyone running these, although we should think of a “code of conduct” and transparency – eg. for-profit or non-profit?, transparency on whether presentations are pay-to-play or have an open speaker submissions, availability of bursaries and other commitment to diversity, etc. etc.
Are there any rules around the use of the Ethereum logo?
Today Sprints still exist, which tend to be focused on a particular area of core, modules, or themed, like getting new contributors onboarded, or reviewing the issue queue, or writing documentation. That Sprints link has a bunch of sub pages with tips on organizing that we should review.
In practice, many of these sprints happen at Drupal conferences where many core contributors are already attending, although there have also been separate, dedicated sprints around certain working group items.
Finally, many conferences set aside time and space for BoFs – Birds of a Feather. This is another thing we can create a template for. This means that interested groups can arrange to come to an event and have space set aside them to talk about a particular topic, which might range from “Let’s meet in Classroom 2 at 4pm to talk about ticketing on the blockchain” to mini working groups or multiple presentations.
Dries Buytaert, the Drupal project lead, publishes stats on community contributions. The 2016 - 2017 edition included a very pointed look at the Bitcoin and Ethereum communities and their “core”. Useful reading for a number of ideas.