CivicActions

This morning we had a really good Drupal Shop Talk with about a dozen participants. These calls are really great for getting to know other people working in the sector and find out what kind of development is going on.

You can read the back channel transcript and my notes at groups.drupal.org

The next Drupal Shop Talk will be on December 19th at 10am PST. And I do intend to record that one.

If anyone is interested in working on editing the shop talk conference calls, please do let me know.

Last fall or winter I convened a few "Shop Talk" conference calls to bring Drupal development shops together on the phone to talk about projects, modules and other things related to the work we do with Drupal.

The idea stemed from my discussions with Phillip Smith, Mike Gifford and Joe Murray at Web Of Change in 2005. Since then those discussions have morphed into what I call "The Three 'C's": Communication, Cooperation, Collaboration.

There is a continuum of interaction that starts with communication and hopefully ends in collaboration. But you have to start talking first. This is why DrupalCon, Drupal User Groups, Drupal Groups and the Drupal Shop Talk are all important. They bring together people who are, despite the opensource nature of the Drupal Project, often isolated so that they can learn what eachother are doing, and avoid duplication of work (for starters) and collaborate on bigger and better things.

A few of us are getting together in Seattle on Wednesday, March 15th, to start planning a DrupalCamp for Seattle!

All are welcome...
We're meeting upstairs at 1:30 at Caffe Vita in Capitol Hill:
http://www.caffevita.com/location.html

So far the people attending are:
- Samantha Moscheck
- Gregory Heller
- Jakob Perry
- Mike Moscheck
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Seattle Drupal Developer Meeting

What: Informal gathering and planning sessions
Who: Drupal developers, implementors and professionals as well as people interested in learning more about Drupal.
Goals: Meet each other, network, begin planning Drupal Camp Seattle.

We just finished the first Drupal Professionals Conference Call.
The Agenda was:

1) Introductions: Rep from each shop introduces and mentions
any client funded module development, or other module development that
folks might not know about (please limit to 3 to 5 minutes)
2) Discussions:
a) Drupal Pros Directory (15)
b) Drupal Camp Training (15)
c) Contributing Back to the Drupal Community (15)
d) Building shared support infrastructure for customers
3) Next Steps (planning next call, smaller working groups, etc)

We had 21 total callers according to the conference call service.

Dan, Aaron, and I have been talking about sponsoring/organizing a crash course on Drupal for experienced PHP programmers. There is a big demand for folks that know Drupal well, and it seems like a worthy investment of time and attention. Has anyone done anything like this before that we could learn from? Are there any courses that are currently being offered?

I have just gotten back to Seattle from the Open Source CMS Summit / Drupal Con. My head is bursting with ideas. And it is going to take a few days to get all the ideas in order, but here is a quick list of interesting things that I will come back to in later blog posts:

Drupal Guild: lots of conversation about the Drupal Guild, about Drupal Foundation, Drupal Developer Meetings, Drupal Trainings, etc... I talked with Zack from CSL and others about moving forward on some fronts. (Rich and I will be working with Zack on a Drupal Service Provider listing)

Rich and I took a minute to talk to Eric Gundersen of DevelopmentSeed

I just talked to Chris Messina of Flock and formerly of CivicSpaceLabs about Microformats, Flock, Attention and BarCamp.

Chris is one of the Founders of BarCamp and seemed to be pleased with the outcome so far here in NYC. He was also happy to answer way more than three questions, even given the late hour...

Listen here

barcamp