As Norm mentioned in his post earlier this week, I, Derek Arnold, once and current IT analyst for REALNEO, went west to attend the Open Source Content Management System Summit March 22 - 23 and the DrupalCon that went from March 22 - 25 in Sunnyvale, California, right in the middle of Silicon Valley.

A Flickr pictorial is available here (http://www.flickr.com/search/?w=all&q=oscms2007&m=text).

I attended some very constructive sessions and connected (and re-connected with some very cool and knowledgable folks within the Drupal community.  I also got to run into an old friend who works on a different content management system.  Though Drupal wasn't the only CMS represented, there were lots of Drupal sessions.

  The most constructive were Dries Buytaert's (creator of Drupal, the Content Management System on which this site is built) "The State of Drupal" presentation (http://2007.oscms-summit.org/node/492) and Karen Stephenson's Date & Calendar presentation(http://2007.oscms-summit.org/node/188).  One interesting moment in Dries's presentation was when Rasmus Lerdorf, one of the creators of PHP and Yahoo! employee, commented. He offered encouragement to the Drupal community to move towards stronger utilzation of the featureset of PHP5.

I also attended the Lullabot podcast episode recorded live from the conference where the Drupal theme song was the object of a mass singalong (if it could be called singing...).  Lullabot and Bryght, one of our long-term partners at REALNEO, convened a seminar Saturday which offered a lot of information on care and feeding of Drupal.   They also put out a great Drupal-centric podcast which you can check out here (http://www.lullabot.com/podcast).
The community of Drupal users, although unashamed of letting their geek flag fly -- myself included -- is a great bunch.  Some of us are straight up codeaholics (like Bryght's Adrian Rossouw, who, unfortunately couldn't make it, but was there in spirit) and some, like Steven Peck, keep us on planet Earth with thought of usability and documentation.

What did I learn? There is lots but the most exciting this came from Karen Stephenson's presentation on Calendaring in Drupal 5.x.  Since REALNEO will be upgrading, you will see this functionality soon.