It's late Wednesday night and the first day of OSCON and the Drupal convention are over. I spent most of today at the Drupal booth, talking to all sorts of interested people.
Tuesday was of course the first session of DrupalCon at Portland State University. Nate Angell is the webmaster there and helped organize the space, along with Roland and Chris Messina. The full week of Drupal people is covered on the Drupal portland conference page.
One of the most interesting parts of the session for me was the attendance of a great cross section of people -- from interested newcomers to developers.
Another interesting data point was that about half the attendees were local to Portland and surroundings, and the other half had flown into Portland to attend. This points to an increased need/desire/opportunity for self-organizing local user group meetings. The Drupal community (and people that want to be part of the community) are growing so quickly, we need to start providing tools for this. This may be an events.drupal.org site or integrated directly into drupal.org...all possible on the new server infrastructure that will be in place.
Lastly, whether it was the academic venue or just chance, there were a large number of people interested in learning more about Drupal that came from academic institutions. DrupalED.org's end goal is to eventually provide several install profiles or distros applicable directly to the needs of these institutions, but today it means pointing out a best practices/tools list of existing modules and configuration.
