I am at the MySQL conference and expo in Santa Clara, CA this week. I am representing Drupal at the dot org pavilion. There was no expo on Monday, so I spent my day arranging a Drupal Birds of a Feather for Wednesday, at 7:30PM and working with Sooz on perfecting the Drupal booth kit.

I spent most of my day meeting and talking with MySQL folks. I apologize for the shameless name dropping.

CEO Martin Meekos - I asked Martin how he planned to grow MySQL’s contributor base beyond the one hundred to one hundred and fifty developers they have now. He indicated they had a large ecosystem of tools being developed. He admitted the copyright restrictions in MySQL’s development model were restricting contributions, but that MySQL had made a lot of progress in growing their development contributions in the last year. I suggested that he look at http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com as a model.

VP Products- Zack Urlocker. On my third try Zack graciously agreed to meet with me and walk through http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com. He agreed that this was interesting and rounded up a cabal of MySQL folks to talk about how Drupal could be used in MySQL product management.

CTO “Monty”, Brian Aker “Drupalcon Keynote” , Edwin DeSouza, David Axmark Co-founder and community liason- We talked about the Drupal project and how we had built an amazing community model for contributions. I showed them http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com, and talked about http://spreadfirefox.com, http://haiku-os.com, and other projects which were making use of Drupal to help build their development communities. These four have done an amazing job over the last four years paving the way for open source to be a successful business model. It was inspiring to capture their attention and receive offers to help with the success of Drupal.

Jay Pipes North American MySQL community manager - was amazingly helpful introducing me to key PHP leaders in the MySQL community and generally introduced me, or connected me with everyone I could possibly want to know at the MySQL conference. Jay was gracious in ensuring the Drupal Birds of a Feather was moved to the hour before the Sun party. I pitched Jay my ideas to get more Drupal-MySQL blogging cross posting going on http://mysql.com

Lenz Grimmer European MySQL community manager - worked with the O’Reilly folks to ensure we had a Drupal Birds of a Feather. He’s working with me to consider moving various MySQL properties to Drupal and is interested in the vibrant Planet Drupal, and online development community model that is being implemented with Drupal.