In a few short weeks, I have taken in BarCamp Vancouver, Drupal Camp LA, Digital Identity World, Drupal Camp Victoria and Drupal Camp Seattle.

I am still amazed by how groups that I once thought of as being separate; activists and geeks are now seemingly thriving together under the same roof are encapsulated within the same people. There still exists the ever present conflict between contributing to opensource, community and wanting to create a nest egg.

While the opensource environment allows for the greatest "American" dream, by giving people the tools and opportunities to achieve the highest heights that they aspire to. In order to do that, to allow for the best minds to create, freedom and creativity are absolutely necessary as well as sharing and passing knowledge to others. However sometimes the need to create ones own personal nest egg can divide attention and effort in a community that should waste no time.

While I do feel a little wiser from the talks that I have attended and the people that I have talked to, I may have more questions than ever. Here are some of the highlights of the various events:

DrupalCamp Seattle

Met with the terrific CivicActions folk, including Gregory Heller, Robin Barre:

Heard Angus Pratt on install profiles, Deployment with Greg Dunlap, the BOF on internationalization with Robin Barre was quite informative, as was the Media Mover presentation.

Drupal Camp Victoria

The van that 10+ people including myself was on was great fun. The van was driven by capable Ryan Dempsey, I learned about crappy internet in Australia, church owned businesses, and other trivia.

A quick 30 mins presentation on development environments that I was to give, became a 2 hour exchange of information between the participants. I heard TJ HolowayChuck on JQuery, Nedjo Rogers and Dale McGladdery on Translations, and also talked to Nedjo a little about Drupal Core Search, where he has submitted a patch for core search in Drupal 7

Digital Identity World

Fanciness abounded, with lunch and breakfast provided, swag galore. A noticeable absence of Dick Hardt was mentioned a couple of times, once even by a keynote speaker from Harvard University Doc Searles. Doc's presentation on VRM managed to get the gears in my brain moving in different ways.

The curious relationship between infocards and openid was evident, with many believing that they would work together rather than be competitors. However an "assassination piece on OpenID" as Ping Identity's Scott Kveton called the New York times article, was prominently displayed on the front page of the Info Card Foundation. It gets curiouser, as I heard from a Microsoft person who mentioned that one of the initial adopters of information cards, where it has gained traction is when signing on to MyOpenID.com

why???!!!

OpenID speakers / supporters seemed to be less noticeable from this big business event, shortly after though, the OpenID mailing list seemed to be on fire in a good way. Europe appears to be going the way of SAML, and Japan the way of OpenID.

SimpleSAML PHP looks very interesting, as it supports many protocols (SAML 2.0 as a Service and Identity Provider, Shiboleth 1.3 as a Service and Identity Provider, A-Select as a Service and Identity Provider, CAS for remote authentication, OpenID Provider and Consumer support) with an award given to Andreas Solberg. I especially liked his "Go Opensource" closing remark after accepting the award from the Liberty Alliance. Especially after I heard that it caused some rolled eyes in the audience.

One of the people that I managed to hear, meet and talk to, was Pamela Dingle of Nulli Secundus. She has done great work to forward Info cards. While I may not be as much of a fangirl of infocards, I respect her work. Other notables present were Will Norris of Vidoop, Charles Andres of the Information Card Foundation, Doc Searles of Harvard University, Philip Windley, Scott Kveton, David Recordon and Dale Olds

Drupal Camp LA

The biggest drupal camp ever so far. Organized by the fabulous Crystal Williams, who is now residing in Seattle, and the vice president of professional services at WorkHabit, kudos to this amazing lady.

Workhabit showed up in full force, with a keynote by Jonathan Lambert. His speech on thinking big, and doing good did strike a chord within me, I could not help but wonder about the balance of doing good for the community versus doing good for one's own pocket. His workhabit team members assured me that Jonathan's speech came from a deep and sincere place to do good.

The Asynchronous data processing presentation by Ethan Kaplan and Shaun Haber from Warner Bros was quite impressive. Drupal in Python, drupy by Brendon Crawford showed how much could be accomplished mainly by just one person. Drupal stars from young (the charismatic Dmitri Gaskin) to experienced (Victor Kane) were also available to push forward the quality of Drupal.