Dries Buytaert, head of the Drupal project, just announced that he will be down in San Francisco at the end of June for a Drupal Road Trip. I've been talking with both Dries and Jeff Robbins of Lullabot about the continued growth of the Drupal community, and I'll be joining them and Zack Rosen of CivicSpace in San Francisco. Jeff took the lead and organized this trip to connect Dries with a lot of interesting people in the Bay Area.

I made an introduction to SpikeSource, someone that we've been working with for some time now. We'll meet with them and talk about the role of SpikeSource and other commercial vendors in providing verified install profiles. SpikeSource has also shown an interest in training (Lullabot!) as well as working with the community on a testing framework.

Why is this happening? Well, as mentioned above, Jeff Robbins is the one who is getting Dries to San Francisco and is setting up all the meetings. He has some ideas around usability and multi-lingualism for Drupal, and ideally some funding for these initiatives. Dries wrote a great paragraph on what he hopes to get out of the trip:
These meetings will give me a chance to talk to these people about what is happening with Drupal and the Drupal community, and get a chance to promote all the great work we've done together. We're going to try and make sure that Drupal can be a little more connected with the larger FOSS community. Maybe it will open up further possibilities for collaboration and support. As always, we'll let things go naturally. Most importantly, I hope to learn from these people and that alone is going to be an invaluable experience.

The Drupal community is lucky that it has Dries as a benevolent dictator. Actually, that's not really fair. Perhaps the term community plumber, after Drupal's own slogan, is a better description. Dries continues to look to the community for feedback and input, acting only to perhaps clear the pipes or indicate in which direction he is interesting in moving.

So, I'll be down in San Francisco June 24th through 27th -- taking the opportunity to talk to Dries and de-brief about many of the opportunities that will I'm sure arise out of this trip. Then on to Drupal Camp Seattle and finally Gnomedex. (Yes, I'm taking a vacation afterwards -- here's the trip so far if you are interested)