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

I'm just in from a fantastic day 1 of DrupalCon here in Szeged. This is a beautiful town and extremely welcoming of us Drupalers - this is how welcoming: the vice-mayor of Szeged himself gave a brief talk to welcome us this morning. He explained that before becoming a vice-mayor he actually used to be a software engineer, and that the City of Szeged administration is very pro-open source, using Open Office and "an open source content management system" for their website. Admitting that it was actually Joomla drew good-natured cries of "we can change that!" from the audience. I think everyone was really chuffed to be greeted like that by such a representative from the city, especially when he clearly shared so many common interests with us. It set the day off on a great note.

Great Net Tuesday about Drupal and Non Profits tonight (check out the comprehensive as usual Mis 604 Live Blog from the event).

I'll lead with the last presentation, the genocide (with a spotlight on Darfur) prevention site, StandNow.org from Agentic that Phillip Djwa presented

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.

For the past four months I have been working at Raincity Studios as a co-op student and thought it might be nice to try and sum up my experience. So what did I learn? Well, a couple things struck me in the first week that I still find impressive.

The importance of including community in your projects isn't normally covered in class and so far my schooling has had a focus on siloed programming and development. Raincity really stressed community involvement and some of my tasks in the first week were drafting a blog post, introducing myself to relevant Drupal groups, digging into the code, and filing issues for small improvements, with the overall goal of letting others know what we would be working on. Building momentum on your work is a great way to keep yourself going and often people are even willing to help out. Being able to build on an existing project like the SMS Framework module by Development Seed really helped get our work off the ground and now that I see my code and ideas being picked apart by other community members, it's nice to know that others can continue to improve on our contributions.