I received word this morning that the Drupal Association has been awarded a booth in the .org pavilion. The Bay Area has a strong Drupal community and we anticipate have a good cross section of support from the local community to help staff the booth. But if you are planning to be at Open Source world, or you would like to help staff the booth, please feel free to sign-up to staff the Drupal booth.

Last Thursday I was fortunate enough to participate in the living in the free world panel at the Gilbane Content Solution conference. The panel was hosted by Joseph Bachana, the president of DPCI, and Acquia platinum partner. The panel included Jeremiah Owyang, the web content management analyst for Forester Research.

Last year I met Sameer Verma, a professor of Information Systems at San Francisco State University. I was immediately intrigued by his class which involves giving business students the job of building an online business using Drupal. The students are required to vet and justify each contributed module and how it helps users and the business.

A few weeks ago I was asked to present to students, staff, and faculty about the Drupal project.

This is the third year the Drupal project has had a booth at the MySQL conference. This year we are the only web content management project represented and it is our biggest presence at the conference yet. This year we have four booth volunteers including Joshua Lawrence from Chapter Three, John Faber from AF83, Avi Harsh from Halosys, and myself.

The redesign sprinters met early to discuss what the priorities, and blockers were for launching the re-designed drupal.org. The critical path is documented in the redesign theme implementers group. The base theme, blue cheese, for the redesign is progressing along nicely. The themers are focusing on getting the content for landing pages and theming those top level landing pages.

Today was the beginning of the fifth Drupal.org redesign sprint. The prior sprints in order are: Cologne Germany, Cambridge Mass. USA, Paris France, Drupalcon Washington DC USA, and now San Francisco USA.

Narayan Newton and I gave a talk at Drupalcon on the state of the http://drupal.org infrastructure. Narayan, Gerhard, David, and myself are currently working on a infrastructure budget proposal for the Drupal association. This proposal will give you some insight into the challenges of running Drupal.org and why it is not just another Drupal site. In fact, our use of Drupal as a web application platform for Drupal.org pushes the Drupal project in many directions that lead to innovation.

Approximately a year ago I helped layout out a vision for how we could add test driven development to the Drupal core development process. Here's an update on the automated testing process. Jimmy Berry and I gave a talk at Drupalcon DC.

It has been a really exciting year at Acquia and I am celebrating with Champagne with my colleagues at Acquia for a couple of reasons, one of them being the New Year. It has been a lot of fun the last few weeks helping our sales team deal with a huge amount of interest in our new products.

I just literally finished helping a customer who called in this afternoon to evaluate and buy a professional subscription at 11:59PM EST. I am taking the rest of the year off, all 3 hours of it. Here's looking to a successful 2009!

Greg Beuthin, from AF83 has been running San Francisco Drupal local group meetings for the last year. He moved from San Francisco to Paris last month, and long time Drupal user John Faber stepped up to take over Greg's AF83 responsibilities including keeping a vibrant San Francisco Drupal users group going.