080808, that's the Chinese way of August 8th, 2008. Awesome numbers, awesome date.

8 means "lucky" in Chinese Culture, it stands for fortune. In order to alternate the "luck", opening ceremony of Olympic Games in Beijing started at this special moment: 8:08:08pm of the day. People were also crowding into restaurants and hospitals to get married or to get their children born on this day.

To share this unique event with geeks around Shanghai, we held this BBQ in the front of our office (since it seems that we don't have a yard). We spreaded out the buzz in forums and emailed to some friends to gather together for this greate moment.

Vancouver writer Jonathon Narvey interviewed Raincity's CEO, Robert Scales and President Kris Krug, and chatted with some of the Raincity Studios crew, for an article in Business in Vancouver magazine.

He discussed the Raincity Shanghai office including the work/lifestyle, communication processes, team building across oceans and technical challenges and advantages of working with a very multi-cultural team.

Having attended open source software and blogger symposiums in Beijing and Shanghai, Krug has seen China’s Web 2.0 dynamism up close. With a team of 13 employees in Shanghai, mostly open-source online publishing software developers, and their CEO Robert Scales, Raincity now has an established beachhead in the country.

The article also explored the size of the Internet market in China and the rise of open source software and inpact on innovation.

“Web 2.0 is exploding in China,” said Raincity Studios president Kris Krug. “The Chinese are totally wired, totally online, using web phones and all the mobile technology we use here.

“There’s a growing middle class wanting to use all these open-source tools, in part because that means they don’t have to worry about using proprietary software and pay licensing fees to western companies.”

He also dug deep into the personal expression issues around the Beijing Olympics - a topic we've discussed a lot recently in the China, Social Media, Olympics, etc. series and Scales' article at Now Public.

“Last time I was in Shanghai, the Chinese government announced they had just hired 100,000 new cyber-police,” Krug said. “That’s on top of however many they had to begin with.”

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Krug has also learned how easy it can be to run afoul of vigilant Chinese cyber-regulators.

“We were running a bar camp (an informal Web 2.0 drupal tutorial seminar), and our wiki was totally open. Anyone could register and write on it.

“Within a couple of days, we received a letter [stating] that we had to change our site in accordance with the rules in China. Users had to be pre-approved, content had to be moderated and we had to make changes on the website. We scrambled to make the changes in 24 hours.”

The Drupal community movement carries on to all corners of the globe with volunteer-run, peer-taught Drupal Camps! The Raincity Studios crew will proudly participate at events coming up in Vancouver, Canada, Sydney, Australia (for the entire Asia/Pacific region) and now, a newly-announced camp in Shanghai, China in conjunction with Open Source Camp Shanghai.

Last Saturday offered one of those long waited sunny afternoons here in Shanghai, but we still found a way to preserve our CRT tan. Last March 15 was our third SHDUG meet-up and we managed to share with more than 30 people our interest in Drupal at Yomovo's office, thanks to our host Mr. Gao Hong.

The atmosphere was a bit geekier than usual yesterday evening at the Abbey Road in Shanghai. As our fellas in Vancouver are getting ready for the upcoming SXSW and Drupalcon, we held in China an event at least as important; beer, finger food and a Wifi connection, we were sure that the ones that answered Raincity Studios' invitation to our geek meetup would be satisfied.