Feeling like you want to celebrate the release of Drupal 6? Join me at the release party organized by Kieran at PariSoMa in San Francisco.

5pm, Friday, February 15th (upcoming)

P.S. Looks like I am going to be lucky enough to meet Dmitri (interview with DaveO here) on Saturday. If you're in the Berkeley area, give me a shout, maybe you want to drop by for coffee in the morning as well.

Dries Buytaert, head of the Drupal project, just announced that he will be down in San Francisco at the end of June for a Drupal Road Trip. I've been talking with both Dries and Jeff Robbins of Lullabot about the continued growth of the Drupal community, and I'll be joining them and Zack Rosen of CivicSpace in San Francisco. Jeff took the lead and organized this trip to connect Dries with a lot of interesting people in the Bay Area.

I made an introduction to SpikeSource, someone that we've been working with for some time now. We'll meet with them and talk about the role of SpikeSource and other commercial vendors in providing verified install profiles. SpikeSource has also shown an interest in training (Lullabot!) as well as working with the community on a testing framework.

Why is this happening? Well, as mentioned above, Jeff Robbins is the one who is getting Dries to San Francisco and is setting up all the meetings. He has some ideas around usability and multi-lingualism for Drupal, and ideally some funding for these initiatives. Dries wrote a great paragraph on what he hopes to get out of the trip:
These meetings will give me a chance to talk to these people about what is happening with Drupal and the Drupal community, and get a chance to promote all the great work we've done together. We're going to try and make sure that Drupal can be a little more connected with the larger FOSS community. Maybe it will open up further possibilities for collaboration and support. As always, we'll let things go naturally. Most importantly, I hope to learn from these people and that alone is going to be an invaluable experience.

I'm visiting San Fran until this coming Sunday, Sept. 4th. I'm hoping to have a meetup of local Drupal-minded folks on Wednesday, Thursday, or Friday night. Right now I'm leaning towards Thursday night. I don't know the city very well, but have been told that 21st Amendment might be a good venue. This is a good excuse to work with upcoming since the Google SoC project to implement upcoming in Drupal is nearing completion. Check out the (new functionality) of the Drupal group, where I posted a similar message to this one. Please leave a comment and/or watch the Drupal group on upcoming.org for final venue details and to indicate your attendance. (cross-posted to Drupal.org) Update -- it's going to be Friday, Sept. 2nd. See the upcoming entry for maps and attendee list.

Kris is at the Blog Business Summit in San Francisco along with tons of cool people like Evelyn Rodriguez and Bob Wyman (you can see them at the top of the photo. I believe Evelyn is in the middle and Bob is on the right). Don't hesitate to grab Kris if you are curious about Bryght and how we can help you!