Group 42

Last week was Mozilla Service Week and local Mozilla Messaging Technical Support Lead Roland Tanglao organized a Vancouver event at the offices of Agentic. At this point many Drupalistas are probably thinking: Wait a minute, is this the same Roland who used to work at Bryght? Yes, yes it is. And Vancouver readers are probably thinking: Wait a minute, Mozilla has an office in Vancouver? Yes, yes they do. I suspect Roland's short time there has already raised their community profile by a number of hundreds of percent.

The event was primarily Drupal focused, but all topics were welcome. As luck would have it, there was a excellent mix of technical resources and people with questions. It was a wonderful mix of round table, Q & A, and birds-of-a-feather.

Half of the Vancouver Participants (Wish I had wide angle)

A very big thank you and props to Agentic's Darko Hrgovic and Phillip Djwa for an excellent job hosting and facilitating. And a big thank you to Roland for organizing.

Oliver (Olly) Walker shared four techniques he uses for making Drupal easier for his customers at the August 28th meeting of the Vancouver League of Drupalers. Olly, better known as baronmunchowsen on GDO, is a web developer who specializes in websites for small businesses. He's promised to post presentation slides and we were fortunate enough to catch him on tape. The video is available below or at blip.tv as Remembering the User - 4 Drupal Enhancements.

Update Sep 4/08: Slides are now available at Slideshare: Vancouver League of Drupallers - Remembering the User (August 2008)

In April 2008 the Vancouver League of Drupalers featured a presentation on email newsletters by Monique Trottier of Boxcar Marketing titled: Email Newsletters: WTF?, and an overview of the Simplenews module by yours truly.

The video of Monique's presentation turned out well and can be viewed with complete show notes at Email Newsletters: WTF? (6 Mistakes to Avoid), or by watching the embedded video below. It's filled with practical information and a must-see for anyone serious about using newsletters.

My presentation didn't video so well, so here's the recreated notes:

Overview

Simplenews is a module that adds newsletters to Drupal. It has the following major features:

For those that might be interested I've posted a recap of the Net Tuesday Podcasting presentation over at Digital Doodles: Podcasting for Social Change. There's lots of links to event coverage and a couple of photos.

Here's an event budding podcasters might be interested in:

What: Net Tuesday4 - Podcasting for Social Change

When: Tuesday, July 8, 2008 5:30 PM!

Where: WorkSpace
400, 21 Water St.
Vancouver BC
V6B 1A1

More: Meetup, Facebook Event

Sponsors: Communicopia, Social Signal, and WorkSpace

Topic: Ways Non-profits/Social Change orgs can use podcasts to spread their message

Three ways:
1) publishing conferences and repurposing stuff you are already making
2) event and campaign crowd coverage (including micro podcasting i.e. utterz)
3) special reports interviews etc.

To make it easy, we’ll cover:
1) planning
2) producing tips (with toys to demo)
3) publishing/promoting

Panel:
dave olson - moderator/podcaster
john bollwitt - podcaster and audio engineer
rob cottingham - social change technologist
roland tanglao - mobile pundit and tech-evangelist

Cross-posted at Digital Doodles
iPod Graphic by ~deleket

The team has been working hard on Drupal Camp Vancouver:

Volunteers
Website
Location
Sponsorship

Registration has been open less than a week and we're already 33% booked!

Our next big goal is getting a great line-up of speakers. We're looking for presentations on anything Drupal from beginner to advanced. Please check out our Call for Speakers page and become a part of Vancouver's premier Drupal event!

We've been mentioning the Open Web Vancouver 2008 conference at our Vancouver League of Drupallers meetings, but I realized I haven't blogged about it. If you're in Vancouver April 14/15 you'll want to take a look.

Zak Greant said it quite eloquently: For Geeks, by Geeks: The Open Web Conference.

For us Drupal types, there's one Drupal presentation by the Donat Group titled, A Social Intranet with Drupal: Case Study. The Donat folks do interesting and cool stuff, as they demonstrated at the August 2007 League of Drupallers meeting.

This month the Vancouver PHP Association and Vancouver League of Drupallers had a combined meeting. Mack Hardy of the Post Carbon Institution spoke on how the Post Carbon Institute was using Drupal to meet their organization's goals.

Mack has promised to post his slides, and hopefully there will also be a video of this presentation available. My summary forgoes the more involved details. Please check the slides for those.

Mack started with an overview of the Post Carbon Institute:

It's time for the 2007 Vancouver PHP Conference!

It was a full house this morning for Rasmus Lerdorf's keynote speech. I'm a member of the conference committee so I didn't get a chance to watch the whole thing. What I did catch was quite interesting. His discussion of the reason people contribute and happy hormones was quite entertaining. He demo'ed Pipes, of course, which has the coolest web interface. Rasmus has put the slides from his presentation on the web, but I didn't manage to copy down the URL.

This conference scored some very good presenters. I enjoyed the sessions I managed to catch. And thankfully the day went quite smoothly. There were some minor hiccups but no major disasters. Except for having to get up at 6am, the first time in a long time, it was a great day.

I thought February was supposed to be a slow and boring month. Another technology related event for consideration:

vancouvertechfest.com

"TechFest's are about the community at large. They are meant to be a place for developers AND IT Professionals to come and learn from their peers. Topics are always based on community interest and never determined by anyone other than the community."

Speaker list available on their website

The event is free and taking place at the BCIT Burnaby Campus on Saturday, Feburary 24, 2007.

This is happening the same day as Northern Voice, so sadly I won't be able to make it.