In the wake of Gnomedex, we're rallying up a crew of Vancouver Drupal geeks heading across the Georiga Strait to Vancouver Island to commune with our Drupal colleagues for another camp.

This shindig is organized by the fun-loving NorthStudio.com crew and The Victoria School of Business and Technology plus feature what's sure to be an excellent field trip to the Great Canadian Beer Fest.

As Boris pointed out in his recent How Drupal Can Help Change The World spiel, beer and Drupal seem to go hand in hand. Is that what make the modules so tasty? For those less lubriciously inclined, the NS crew are also setting up movie night.

With the remnants of Drupal Camp Vancouver coffers, and the organization and driving skills of Ryan Dempsey, many of the Vancouver contingent are riding over in a big ole van.

Now i doubt that it will get quite as *magic* as the web archive company Iterasi's Gnomedex Magic Bus with the sage-like Nat at the wheel taking the assembled geeks on a magical mystery tour of hi-jinks, but I am confident a rollicking ferry ride to the kick off party - followed by (not too early) solid sessions of peer education on Friday and Saturday - will be a winner!

How about you? Are you on the Drupal Camp Victoria bus?

The Deets:

• September 5th (~8:30AM to ~4:00PM)
• September 6th (~9:00AM to ~5:00PM)
• @ Gateway Village 301 - 771 Vernon Ave. Victoria BC.
  Get Directions
• Cost: FREE, Yes Free as in nada, zip, zilch

Drupal Camper Alert!

Prepare for two impending Drupal Camps - in Seattle, (Organized by the Seattle Drupal User Group), and in Alberta at the University of Lethbridge with Michael Warf at the helm.

You can participate by presenting, helping out or by sponsoring (AB, SEA) - Yes! join the sponsors of Drupal Camp Vancouver by "paying it forward" - the self-education of Drupalist is paramount to success!

Specifically, Seattle Drupal Camp seeks presenters to speak about:

• Views
• Panels 2
• jQuery
• Contributing Back (anything but code)
• Theming Views, Panels, and CCK
• SimpleTest

Robin Barre from CivicActions is your contact for signing on and making your knowledge known to the community.

I'll resist writing a lengthy treatise about how worthy these events will be for Drupal entusiasts and fotering community relations and instead provide a quick lowdown with details. Be sure to say "hi" to any RCS crew who make it - we are fairly decent folk ;-).

We had a good Drupal Camp Shanghai! The heavy rain on Sunday didn't stop the most active local Drupalers from getting together to enjoy this event. In all, over 60 people attended over 12 sessions and discussions.

Within the rooms you could see knowledge virally spreading throughout the attendees as well as connections being made by people from different companies and countries.

RCS-powered Sessions

Here are the sessions by the Raincity Studios team (with links to presentation materials):

• What is Drupal - Xiong
• Fix up that module! - Jacob Redding
• Internationalization - How to Build a Multilingual Website with Drupal - Ronan Berder
• Build site with Drupal 6 (familiar with PHP, want to code with Drupal 6) - Makara Wang
• Online service API as a trend -Jacob Redding
• Introduction to JQuery - Steve Krueger
• Build Mashups with Drupal - Ronan Berder
• Debugging with watchdog, xDebug fivebug, etc. - Jacob Redding

Finally online here this afternoon and in the Creativity Panel with a fashion designer, a theme park designers, a comic and a giant spider maker riffing on taking ideas into reality so, ... here since KK is rocking the camera today, i'll compile a few highlights of the day with his snaps as well as other Vidfest-tagged pics on Flickr.

Chris Anderson's Presentation about the Economics of Free

Chris is an economist and busts out the fundamental maxims of the macro-science and applies these universal laws to practical daily micro-economics. He's a fine story teller and quick on his feet and you can tell the well runs deep.

RCS comrade Roland joined the packed house to hear Chris explain how all things (products, services, utilities, factors) which can become digital, will AND all things that a re digital will eventually be free. The trick - dear entrepreneurs - is to find the scarcities created in the realm of abundance and create a biz plan around that. Laden with examples - read the article in Wired and look for the forthcoming book, called Free, which will be sold for $0. I recorded the speech so look for a forthcoming podcast.

In the meantime, see also:

• The Future is Free
• NowPublic @ Vidfest2008: Chris Anderson, Keynote
• Notes From Chris Anderson’s “The Future of Free” Talk
• Robert Shaer's Last Dispatch from VIDFest 2008