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.

Some take aways about what the Drupal community can do:

• Encourage and help support growth of more local user groups and meetups
• Help groups of users (e.g. education) find information relevant to them
• Provide good documentation and discussion about advanced, next generation capabilities like multi-site, shared user tables, and hub-and-spoke architectures

For the last point, Doug Kaye (probably most well known for IT Conversations), offered to participate and help drive requirements gathering towards a good combined solution. Two other groups that we have been talking to about this concept are SPAWAR Europe and telecentre.org, so I think we can join forces and put together something very powerful and useful.

If you want to know a little bit more about this hub-and-spoke concept, Troy Angrignon leads people through the 17 stages of mental evolution about the shift from Web 1.0 to Web 2.0. These Drupal hub-and-spoke sites will be among the first examples of the inter-linked world of users and content that we are seeing emerge.

Yes, that is not nearly enough detail about these hub-and-spoke concepts -- more to come as we ramp up this effort and start putting diagrams together that can better articulate how this works. Suffice to say that single user databases/single sign on play a role, as does moving beyond the lowest common denominator of RSS.

I do have more notes from the OSCON Wednesday to post as well, but for now a heads up: Dries Buytaert, founder and lead of the Drupal project will be giving a presentation on the past, present, and future of Drupal at OSCON, followed by an open "birds of a feather" session talking about open source communities and citizen journalism. Both are at the OSCON conference center tomorrow, Thursday, August 4th.