washington dc

DrupalCon is coming to DC in just over a month. Many of you have been super involved in bringing the conference to our city, in supporting it through sponsorships, submitting sessions, passing out bling to maybe Drupal lovers, and and helping out all around. This has been huge : )

We're looking for volunteers to help with a few more things:

• Helping us make sure our internet connection doesn't suck

• Interviewing our sponsors on the DrupalCon blog

• Providing great DC tips on tourist sites (how to get to the top of the Washington monument, what's your favorite museum,etc.) to your favorite bars and restaurants

Plus some others. Check out all the volunteering opportunities over here. Thank you in advance!

We'll also be looking for volunteers to help with setting up for the conference the day before the conference (March 3), the weekend before (February 28 and 29), and during the fun. I'll post more details here on all that in the next couple of weeks.

We thought the Apps for Democracy contest was a great way to show the DC government that Drupal is the leading open source platform for government project and a great chance to get them familiar with the platform. So we built a Drupal site and entered it in the contest. You can vote for it here. You don't need to log in so it only takes three seconds to vote, but voting closes tonight at midnight, so vote soon!

The site we built is called DC Bikes and you can check it out here. It's a guide to biking in DC and puts mostly city data on a map so people find detailed bike routes in DC, monitor bike theft in real time, and buy bike equipment on Craigslist. This site is built on Drupal and is the only submission that is 100% open source - we used open source Mapnik for our maps rather than Google Maps. Specifically we used <a href="http://drupal.org/project/feedapi>FeedAPI and Feed Element Mapper for the site's aggregation, and the spaces module allowed us to build it pretty quickly.

Great job DC! DrupalCon DC registration opened today and the first 100 tickets sold within ten minutes! We are already well into our second batch of tickets. It's amazing to see how many people are excited about DrupalCon (and excited about the half price tickets that were available to the early birds). If you haven't gotten your ticket yet, about 150 tickets are left at the $175 rate so move fast. Once those are gone, prices will increase to $200.

Thoughts on having a meetup at Mayorga in Silver Spring? I've been meaning to make it downtown for the last three meetings but every time work interferes so it's either quit work or try to do something closer to home.

Over the last several weeks I've been contacting people in the DC Drupal community and the Drupal Association to evaluate whether DC would serve as a good space for the Spring 2009 North American DrupalCon. As we all know, it will and it will be awesome!

With our large and very active Drupal community, we'll be able to support it, and with all the nonprofits, associations, and political organizations based here there is a huge user and potential user base that we can engage and get to invest in Drupal. Our Convention Center is centrally located and surrounded by hotels and restaurants, which makes it convenient for people traveling from anywhere (including DC and the 'burbs) and for meeting and socializing after sessions are over. Plus, Washington, DC is a great city and a tourist destination in itself - it will be great to share the city with the entire Drupal community.

So, we are going to go for it. The proposal has been submitted to the Drupal Association, and now that the formalities are started, it's time to engage more people to further develop this and let the community discourse shape this into what will be an awesome conference. Here is the formal proposal we submitted if you'd like to give it a read: http://is.gd/X3m.

Have just been introduced to Drupal and am finding the learning curve a bit steep. Perhaps the lack of a 10000-ft view.

Other eager-but-clueless types in DC for a meetup?

The sooner the better.

Charlie