Another event to add to your planner - Social Tech Training is geared towards training social change-minded organizations in using the web to activate, communicate and inspire.

In this edition of the "Catching up with Krug" report, we get the quick recap on KK's participation at ICE 08 in Toronto, Ontario (note to Americans, Toronto is still not the capitol of Canada).

{Pardon the digression} from American Bacon:

[the Mountie explains that Honey has been taken to the capital]
Boomer: The capital Toronto.
RCMP Officer at Headquarters: No, the capital of Canada is Ottawa.
Boomer: Yeah, right. Do we look that stupid? Ottawa!
Roy Boy: Nice try, Dudley.

Whist there, Kris spoke on a panel - moderated by Eli Singer from Segal Communications - with Amber Macarthur, and Mark Relph, about leveraging the power of social networks. Here's a live blog from the session "Community Watch: Leveraging the Power of Networks" for your interest.

Coming back from the Drupal Camp in Toronto, I only have praises for the the organizers.

The sessions I attended provided a good balance between topics relevant for the newcomers and more experienced drupalists. I also really enjoyed the variety of points of view that were taken: from quasi philosophical such as i18n - Fitting Drupal into a bi/multi-lingual organization, by Mike Gifford to hands-on such as Performance tuning and optimization of high traffic Drupal sites, by Khalid Baheyeldin.

Roland has done a great job posting videos and other content about the Drupal Camp Toronto. Friday was an absolutely fantastic day. It took place at the Centre for Social Innovation, ably facilitated by Jason Diceman and Philip Smith.

There were two tracks for the day, roughly split into talks between newer and advanced users. From the round the room intros of who was attending, I figured there was a need for a "I don't fit" track, so I volunteered to lead the rooftop gang. This was an interesting cross section of folks that talked about lots of things, and led to the realization that a session on CiviCRM was needed.

Joe Murray facilitated the second session, talking about CiviCRM and we found out that there are a lot of people in Canada looking for solutions in this space. I encouraged Joe, Alan Dixon (likely also Mike Gifford, who wasn't in attendance), and others to step up and promote the concept of "CiviCRM.ca". The main CiviCRM team is necessarily focused on US-centric issues, so this would be a chance to tackle issues like localization and non-US mapping.

The site recipes section at the end was great -- everyone stepped up and showed a little something that many people had never seen before, showcasing sites and/or features of Drupal. I demoed the Liquid Wiki module, which implements a Mediawiki parser and the accompanying functionality. We've got it running at test.bryght.com, sign up for an account if you want to test it. I also briefly showed off groups.drupal.org, which is showing great promise as a way to further collaborate and organize.