Blog: Meetup

Debates, Open Source CMSs, and Start Ups

In typical DC-style, life is getting more political as we get within a month of the presidential election. If you haven’t yet registered to vote, get going. Today is the last day to register for Washington, DC and Virginia residents, while Maryland residents have until October 14. In more politics, it seems like almost every bar is throwing a debate watching party on Tuesday for the second presidential debate. If you don’t want to play debate bingo or presidential flip cup, stay in tomorrow night and plan to go out the rest of the week instead when there are some interesting tech events taking place. As always, a full listing can be found at DC Tech Events.

All Week

Plone Conference: Open source conferences seem to be flocking to Washington, DC, and with good reason since the city is home to so many techies using open source. If you work with Plone or want to, check out the conference and some of the post-conference parties.

Tuesday, October 7 and Wednesday, October 8

10:00 am

Presenting Data and Information: A One-Day Course by Edward Tufte: There’s little question that Edward Tufte is the master of presenting a ton of data in a clear, concise, and compelling way. If you want to up your data visualization know-how, check out this course.

Wednesday, October 8

7:00 – 9:00 pm

Drupal Lab: Here’s your chance to tear into the code behind a module with Drupal developers of all levels, show off your latest work, or just get a feel for what it’s like to program in Drupal.

Wednesday, October 1, 6:30 pm at Bailey's Pub

Tomorrow night the Northern Virginia Drupal group is holding the first of its newly revamped monthly meetups. What’s really exciting is that the NOVA group is going after a wider Drupal fan base, having the meetups not only focus on the business opportunities that come with a platform like Drupal, but also on topics of interest to Drupal developers and Drupal users. Phase 2 Technology is taking the lead in organizing these.  Tomorrow, two local shops will discuss

• Using Drupal for Multi-site CMS’s, presented by Phase 2
  
• Tuning for Drupal Performance and Scalability, presented by Blackmesh
  

This will also be the first NOVA Drupal meetup in awhile that is metro accessible, and it’s just a block from the Ballston stop on the Orange Line at Bailey’s Pub. More details are here. Alex and I will be there!

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Drupal, ICT4D, and Politics, How Very DC

Happy “One Web Day”;http://onewebday.org! For those not familiar with the new holiday, it’s “like Earth Day for the Internet” – an opportunity to celebrate the internet and it’s awesomeness and also do a little something to make sure it keeps headed down the right path. Here in DC the One Web Day team is putting together an e-democracy time capsule (which will be great for archival reasons and to get some laughs in 20 years when techies look at the stuff we thought was cutting edge). There’s still a couple hours to submit your stories and videos about e-democracy, internet policy, and what you think the future holds. And in case you were wondering why the metro was extra crowded this morning, it’s Car Free DC day. I hope you remembered to bike or metro to work.

In addition to the holidays, there are a lot of other tech events happening around the city this week. Here are the ones we’re hoping to attend, and you can find a full schedule of the week over at DC Tech Events. Hope to see you out this week!

Monday, September 22

7:15 – 9:00 pm

Recap of DrupalCon Szeged and News about the Next DrupalCon

Tonight we're holding our monthly Drupal Meetup at 7:15 pm at Stetson's, and it will be a fun one. The local Drupalers who made it to Szeged, Hungary for DrupalCon will be sharing news from the conference, and I'll be giving an update about the next DrupalCon and our bid to host it. If you've been working on something interesting and want to share it with the group, please post about it over here and come prepared to talk. We'll have a projector set up tonight, and the internet is working but is flaky. If you want to show something off, please bring a local copy of it in case the internet dies on us.

You can find all the details about the meetup here. See you tonight!

In Paris? Come Out for Drinks!

Eric and I are continuing our post-DrupalCon travels and landed in Paris last night. Tonight we'll be meeting up with local Drupalers over beers and we've both looking forward to it. We had the opportunity to meet several members of the Paris Drupal Community at DrupalCon, and it will be great to talk with them more about their work with Drupal. If you're in Paris tonight, come by Le Hall 1900 at 7:30 pm (64, Rue Rambuteau, 75003 Paris, France). The first round of beers is on us.

We've been incredibly lucky to be able to continue the Drupal party after our time in Szeged at DrupalCon. Earlier this week we attended Geneva's first ever Drupal meetup and were happy to see a great turnout, and before that we met several developers while attending Ars Electronica in Linz, Austria. The festival's theme was free culture and economy, and it was amazing to see how often Drupal popped up in the conversation : )

We're excited to bring this energy back to Washington, DC! It looks like the next DC Drupal meetup will be on Monday, September 22, and we'll have more information on that in the next couple days.

Talk RSS, Design, and News with Other DCers

The quiet days of August have passed, but the good news is that there are many interesting tech events on the horizon. From content syndication discussions to cocktails with local design babes, there is a lot going on in the world of technology this week in Washington, DC. Here are a few of our picks on events to check out. For all the local tech events, check out DC Tech Events.

However, you won’t see me out at any of these this week (although I will be attending some fun tech events in other cities this week). I’ll be back in Washington, DC next week and am planning an upcoming Drupal meetup, so stay tuned.

Tuesday, September 9
8:00 – 11:00 am

Web Sites Without Walls: Influential Strategies for Site Syndication: Few people can boast having a website where people actually hang out, but that doesn’t mean their content isn’t appealing – it just needs to be put out in other channels. This event will talk about how to syndicate your website content and give examples on organizations that are doing it well.

Wednesday, September 10

DC Design Babes DCDB2: This one is for the ladies, which happens so rarely it should be incentive enough to come out for drinks with other women working in design and online tools.

Thursday, September 11 – Saturday, September 13
All day

Online News Association Conference: If you have a news blog, podcast, or website, you should be at this conference. Online news creators from across the United States will come together to talk about their trade at the annual ONA conference.