Earlier this week Ottawa had it's first ever Drupal meetup. I started talking up the idea after coming back from the Boston Drupalcon and found that there were a few folks I knew in my network who were interested. Turns out that there were more long standing Drupal users here in the community than I was aware of. There were over 25 people present at the discussion at the James St. Pub and people stayed for nearly 5 hours discussing different elements of Drupal.

The biggest surprise for me came from the number of government agencies who were in attendance. There seems to be a real groundswell of interest in the Government of Canada. There were several people using Drupal for private Intranet sites for their departments. The internal sites still often need to follow the Common Look and Feel of the GoC.

It was also great to talk with the developer of the new Drupal Modules site. This is a great tool for folks trying to track down modules of interest. It's also got a great rating/comments component in there which will be useful to help us all evaluate how mature a project is.

There was a good mix at the event and considerable interest was expressed about coming out at the end of May to do this again. It may follow the present informal discussion format, but there was also interest in featuring some of the work done in the Ottawa Valley on Drupal. A few interesting modules were discussed that have, or shortly will be uploaded to Drupal.org.

A small portion of Ottawa's Drupal users were informed about this event through Drupal Groups & also our new Facebook Group. If you are interested in participating or learning more about future events, please sign up for more information.

Another great community building opportunity is the Drupal Camp Toronto. They only have 150 spaces in their upcoming conference, but OpenConcept had a great time in our participation there last year. This year we will be providing more sponsorship support than we did in the past and look forward to a great set of educational sessions.