Michelangelo van Dam has a new post to his site today talking about PHP user groups and some suggestions you can follow if you'd like to start one of your own in your local area.

When going to conferences you always hear "join a local user group, and if there's none in your area you're the person who needs to start one". But then what? Where do you get started? How do you organise a PHP user group? Basically, you're left in the dark and you're missing out of all the great stuff everyone else can enjoy.

He makes a few suggestions as far as sites and resources to use to help you promote your group (including Meetup.com and even LinkedIn). He offers some guidelines as far as what to do for your first meeting and a few other people and groups at your disposal to help promote and group your group.

Lukas Smith has posted a "stream dump" of some of the thoughts he's had lately about the status of the emPHPower project including its organization and the potential popularity of the group.

I think the general idea of establishing a communication hub for core developers, end users and companies has been received with sufficient enthusiasm to start working on some of the boring details. The next logical step seems to be to start to fleshing out how the organization behind this communication hub should be structured. I want to leave as much power as possible with the individual members, which is one of the main reasons why I do not want companies to be come members.

He focuses on what he calls the "bootstrapping process" - the formation of the initial core group, opening the organization up for signups from the community, the creation of a constitution and the role of the core PHP developers in the group.