Development Seed Blog

RDF, China Recruits, Drupal, and Foosball

Last night more than 40 people came out on a rainy Monday night to meet other Drupal developers and talk shop. Needless to say, the energy in the room was incredible. Not only was the group big, but it was a great mix of Drupal ninjas, Drupal users, and people wanting to flex their coding muscles with the platform. This led to some great conversations that lasted well into the evening - and rolled over to some heated foosball matches. 

It's great to hear about some of the interesting projects the Washington, DC Drupal community is working on. Last night, Frank talked about the Open Calais module he's working on that integrates the RDF service into Drupal, Robert talked about the group workspace Green Media Toolshed is building to facilitate the sharing of resources and knowledge among nonprofit communications specialists, and Katherine talked about the Flickr image gallery she's working on for a client in a shared hosting environment. One thing I found very interesting was John Zhu's ChinaOSL initiative - he hopes to get 50 to 200 students in Bejing working with Drupal this summer and enhancing and contributing back basic modules. Not only is great to get more people developing with Drupal, but this could create a whole new and active local Drupal community. I'm excited to see where this goes.

The next Drupal get together in Washington, DC is on May 28, and it's the monthly Drupal Lab. The Drupal Lab is different from the meetup last night in that it's more technical. It's a chance to look at people's work on a big screen and dig into the guts of it - Drupal jargon and all. It's a great opportunity to discuss questions or issues you've run into with certain modules and share work arounds and new modules that have helped you. The Drupal meetups, on the other hand, are meant to be more social. They're held in bars and focus on making connections and meeting people over a few drinks. If you're new to Drupal, it's probably best to start out by coming to a meetup so you can get introduced to the community and then head over to the labs when you're ready to look into the code. 

All of these events are posted to the Washington, DC Drupal group and on Upcoming.
More photos of last night's meetup are here.