As many people know, I enjoy going into the city to attend technology events. I actually ran the Philadelphia WordPress meetup for a while, and I've attended many other meetups, including the blogger meetup, PANMA events, the PhillyCHI design slam, the Philly Standards meetup, DrupalCamp, and the Philly PHP meetup. I've even presented topics at a couple of these meetings. While all of these meetups have been fun and educational, I think it would be beneficial to have some events exclusive to the suburbs and attract suburban developers who might want to attend regular meetings without having to drag themselves into the city every month.

With the economy the way it is, some folks might consider it useful to informally enhance their skills or extend them into other areas. Networking with other people in these fields could also lead to more industry contacts when times get rough.

So I've been considering which to do. It's always been a thought of mine to build a local blogger meetup. I think it should start off on the right foot, too. Rather than being just a social gathering of bloggers, it could hit those topics that bloggers always find themselves asking about, like how to make money doing it, how it can benefit your business in a practical way, what software to use, and even what to write about. But blogging... It's got a stigma attached to it that maybe it deserves ("Today for lunch I ate...") and maybe it doesn't (see any of the excellent journalistic blogs on the net).

Instead, maybe it should simply be a technology meetup. We could talk about blogging, or we could talk about development, or we could talk about... Whatever technology-related topic someone wants to bring forward. The only reason I'd consider this is because I think it might offer more value to the common person than a blogging-specific meetup.

I realize that there are classic "user groups" that meet in our area, and I mean to attend at least one of their meetings. But my impression based on what I've read is that they're really user-oriented, readers or blogs or consumers of technology, and not creator-oriented. Also, I get the impression of them being run by the stereotypical 80's computer geek, who looks and acts much like that comic book guy on the Simpsons. None of the meetups I've attended in the city give that impression, and I'd want to stick with the format I know and like - informal but regular and informative presentations along with useful and enlightening networking social events.

What do you think? Are you local in the suburbs to me? I'm thinking that a good place to hold these meetups would be in the Exton, Downingtown. or West Chester areas, since those are fairly central and built-up places to suburbanites in my area. But Phoenixville might also be a worthwhile destination. Would you be willing to travel that short a distance, rather than into the city? And what topic would you like to discuss? If there's enough interest (and we'd only really need a handful of people to get the ball rolling), I'd be happy to start the organizing process.

I found a list of events that Abby's going to participate in with her Girl Scout's Brownie troop over the next couple of months. Apparently, Berta gets emails from their scout leader every so often with a list of updated events and notices. I think this is an effective way to keep in touch with the troupe, but I think there's room for improvement technologically.

It might be nice to have a published calendar of events, along with a feed that parents could consume in Outlook, Google Calendar, or in my case, Lightning. I've discovered that meetup.com provides iCal feeds that make it easy to subscribe to events. Of course, there are my usual misgivings with meetup.com, particularly that it's a paid service and that they retain control of the data so that you can't move it elsewhere when you decide you can't pay them anymore. So I think there should be a better, open solution.

That's where I think Habari can step in. This isn't meant to sound like an advertisement, because I really think there's something here. First off, having a blog gives you a centralized location to publish event information (and results!), which is the important part. There is apparently already a plugin (yes, the Habari scene is now moving so fast that I can't keep track of everything going on anymore) that will track events as a separate content type within Habari. So it should be easy to segregate a scheduled event from a news posting or a page of contact data. There are still a couple of important pieces missing.

The plugin, as far as I know, does not produce iCal feeds. That's a dealbraker for me because one of the major problems I'm trying to solve is to be notified of when new scout events (and other kinds of meetup events) take place. But producing iCal output shouldn't be too difficult if you've got a set of data with dates, right?

Another thing is that the site should be protected from unvalidated visits. We don't want just anyone knowing when these events take place or having access to contact information, so it's important that we lock that down. This might not be as important for other groups, but for the brownie troop, I think it's warranted. Thankfully, Habari's on the verge of having a complete (if not entirely finalized) ACL system that should allow exactly that.

I've been considering Drupal as an option for such sites. But the thing I've come to understand from working with it is that Drupal, while extraordinarily functional, is not something that a brownie troop leader can grab off the shelf and make go. Particularly for events and calendars, I think Habari - for something more than a blog, but less than a CMS that you'd pay someone to configure for you - is a better fit for people looking for a light, efficient, uncomplicated CMS.

Some might also suggest WordPress for such a purpose, and perhaps that would work, but what I've been noticing from how we've assembled the template system, and how plugins work, is that Habari has a way of integrating the extra features provided by plugins that makes it feel more intrinsic. In comparison, many plugins that offer these extra features in WordPress, while they might work well, seem like extra things that are hung off the main system when you're using them and not things that are integral to the system on UI. I'm not sure how to quantify this exactly, but I think as we start to see Habari move toward the light CMS role, the differences in how well add-ons integrate into the system will become more apparent. Then again, I'm obviously a bit biased toward Habari.

I really don't have a lot of hope for getting Abby's brownie troop on Habari, or Meetup, or any web platform for that matter. But it's these real-world ideas that help extend the offerings of software so that when websites for brownie troops becomes the norm, we're positioned well. Until then, maybe Berta will produce an iCal feed for me somewhere.

I've registered for PodCamp Ohio on June 28th, which takes place in Columbus. Podcamp is all about podcasting - having some kind of beyond-written blog with syndication. I think PodCamps aren't going to be my best venue -- I'd like to try more of a barcamp. It would be ideal if there was another BlogPhiladelphia, alas I've heard nothing and the people who I might have expected to be involved aren't talking about it. Oh, well.

I've been thinking about presenting something at the PodCamp to accumulate more for item 30 on my 43things. I'll be adding to this count shortly with another Philly PHP meetup presentation at the end of April, this time on PHP testing. For the PodCamp presentation (which is really more of a group-leading, since it's an "unconference"), I was thinking about talking about software tools for podcasters.

I wrote up a whole pitch for the tool presentation to submit to the PodCamp Ohio guys to see if they'll take me. Here's what I have:

Produce your podcast more efficiently. Learn about new tools from other podcasters that use them. Go home from this session with a list of software tools and services to try for your next podcast.

* Learn about hosted and self-installed blogging tools and feed publishers.

* Discover commercial and free audio and video editing applications.

* Learn of a/v compression systems.

* Learn what web hosts people use.

* Learn about distribution services used by popular podcasters.

The idea is to stick with the software side of things and get people talking about what tools they use. I think I'll start off by listing a few categories like the ones above, and come up with a list of tools for each category that I know of and how they work just to get things rolling. Ideally, I'd like to have the session be a rapid-fire callout of people's favorite tools and what one thing they like about them.

I think the audience participation format of the unconference is a largely untapped resource at big pay-for conferences and I'd like to encourage everyone in the session to take advantage. Maybe I could bring some candy bars to throw at to people who chime in.

It would also be neat to tailor the presentation toward the audience on the fly. So if most of the attendees are just starting to break in to podcasting, they might be more interested in free open source solutions. Whereas if the attendees have podcasts already that they'd like to improve on by stepping up their software, the session could lean more in that direction. Plus there's Windows versus Mac versus hosted versus service... Lots of good separations between groups such that it'll be a challenge to maintain interest for one half of the group while targeting the other.

So my real question is about time. The slots they're allotting on the PodCamp Ohio site are for 30 minutes or 60 minutes. I could certainly fill 30 minutes with tool discussion. Do you think there are enough tools to cover to fill 60 minutes? There probably are, easy, especially if we've got to cover different ranges of platforms and price. Still, I think I might rather emphasize the speedy nature of the session to get a list that everyone could take home and investigate on their own. There's nothing worse than having someone drone on for 5 minutes about how they used some application and they couldn't get it to do whatever and so they were wondering blah blah blah, or they launch into a "here's how you do X" when only the single person out of 50 who asked is actually interested. Perhaps the session could spawn smaller spin-off connections, which is another great value of the one-on-one nature of the *camps.

I haven't put my bid in for this session yet, because I'm wondering if anything thinks it's viable or worthwhile. Thoughts? Would you come hear a bunch of people talk about podcasting tools?