My own private birthday party (also known as the Dangerous Drumstick GeekDinner) was held last night (and bits of this morning for some of us).  I think we've got the formula right - it seems to have been a great success, and we're obviously reaching new people, given that we probably had a good 20% of the diners being first-timers.

It was a slightly smaller than usual event, though, but I think that's mostly to do with the geographical location of the venue.  Besides the location, the venue, Summerville, worked out great.  There were a few people unable to see the screen from their dinner seats, but they made a plan.  The service was excellent - swift, timeous, and the food was prepared in decent sized portions and at a good quality.  Got a good price for the food, and got corkage waived on the wine, and they provided Plasma screens, sound equipment, and microphones!  (And when we checked if everything went well for them, they said they'd love to have us again!)

The wine was sponsored by GetWine again.  These guys are great - not only giving us 24 bottles of their fine Sénga wine, but giving the diners a special GeekDinner deal to save a good R100 from a case of the wines they provided (AND they gave a really well-received talk at the previous GeekDinner, Carnivorous Cantaloupe in July).  We had a white blend named Sénga Ilanda (Chenin Blanc/Chardonnay/Sauvignon Blanc/Viognier) and (as usual, much preferred) a red option in a Sénga Merlot/Cabernet Sauvignon.

Ashley Shaw (who doesn't seem to have a personal web site anymore, but who is responsible for Lightspeed 2.0) gave a tour of the variations of social networking out there - aggregators vs. social bookmarking vs. plain social networking and so forth.  As a pretty social-network-aware geek, there was nothing new for me, but I think it was a good introduction to the many geeks who're being slowly dragged kicking and screaming into the new era.  If you're interested in that, Ashley posted something about Between The Lines Advertising of which this talk is probably the first of many explorations into the space.

Stefano Rivera spoke on CAcert.org, which is a free way to get trustworthy digital certificates based on individuals assuring each other in a similar way to a web of trust (except with points).

Ian Gilfillan and Jonathan Hitchcock spoke a bit about the Cape Town Wikimania 2008 bid, which looks to be in pretty good shape at the moment.  Wikimania is the annual Wikimedia Foundation (the guys behind Wikipedia) conference, and Wikimania 2008 is the fourth one.

Johann "Joe" Botha gave an update on SchoolWAN (the mostly-wireless effort to connect schools to the Internet), WAPA (the wireless industry organisation), on wifi.org.za (which isn't quite live yet), and gave away some pirate frog Frogfoot t-shirts and an access point or two (or I just imagined that, since I probably was on my fifth tequila at the time).

I think I've forgotten someone (sorry, the tequila's fault), but then I soft-launched *Camp, which is a self-organising not-a-conference in the BarCamp spirit that we're organising in December in Cape Town for anything technology or Internet related.  "We" isn't well-defined yet, but so far a bunch of GeekDinner people have offered to help out with *Camp planning, and I'll be chatting with the great guys I met at BarCamp Cape Town 2006 and the guys who generally hang out at the 27dinners about making this something big together!

In the "open mic", Nick Coyne announced that he's interested in putting together a Ruby / Ruby on Rails user group (I assume with meetings and so forth) in Cape Town.  If you're interested, please get in contact with him.

It was an awesome evening (even if I was at the Ruby / Ruby on Rails table with  Nick and Farrel Lifson), and thanks to everyone who attended for doing so, and also to those who spoke, and to those who bought me drinks (thanks especially to Bryn!) and wished me well on my birthday.

Other coverage by Tania, Joe (and Joe and Joe's pics), and Ian so far.

Tomorrow night is Dangerous Drumstick, the fourth of the new-style GeekDinners in Cape Town.  This might sound familiar, but I think it needs repeating, since it's also my birthday, and thus I want as many people to attend so that I get more presents.  Looks like we have an eclectic mix of talks tomorrow night as well.

Saturday night was The Event With Many Names (Jonathan calls it The Open Content Party) which again (like the iCommons Bring and Braai) somewhat rejuvenated my ailing soul from the despair of the lack of participation of South Africans in the global Free and Open Source Software and related areas.  And the free wine on an empty stomach probably made things particularly enjoyable too.

Unlike the iCommons Bring and Braai, I managed to do more than just introduce myself to Jimmy Wales, and he seemed to be a pretty decent guy - enjoying (or, at worst possibly interpretation, being kind enough to pretend to be enjoying) chatting with everyone.

I reconnected with a lot of old acquaintances and friends - I got the feeling I knew at least half the people there.  I also managed to meet a few new people, but I'm a bit disappointed at myself that I didn't try harder to do so.

Has got me thinking of making Geekcamp (name pending) more friendly to people who otherwise contribute to open content (even though Geekcamp isn't intended to exclude proprietary software or other cool things, if they're sufficiently of interest to the participants).

I think last night's CLUG meeting about OpenStreetMap by Corey Burger was one of our best in recent memory.  At the talk, a decent sized crowd pitched up and there were many questions and generally lots of interest.

We also had some really lively discussion at the dinner afterwards, with about 16 people coming along.  Unlike some of our invited guests over the years, both Corey and his brother, Brian, were very approachable and happy to talk to anyone about anything.

So, thanks to Corey and Brian for coming to visit us on your vacation, and I hope you had an enjoyable night.

The September Cape Town GeekDinner is Dangerous Drumstick on the 27th September (my birthday!).  Our venues have moved up the Southern Suburbs - Barbarellas in Constantia, The Wild Fig in Mowbray, and Krugmanns Grill at The Waterfront, and now we're taking an excursion down the coast to Camps Bay to Summerville.  The Dinner is 7pm for 7:30pm until we're kicked out), but it may be an idea to come early and watch the sun set from a great spot.

If I'm not plied with drink at sundowners beforehand, I'll probably be giving a talk on Routes as an implementation of the right way to deal with URL generation and URL dispatching - ie, using the same set of rules for both.  And I'll probably have something to say about GeekCamp (name pending), which has had some good wins already.  There are only a few other talks up at the moment, but that will fill out as we get closer to the evening.  If you have something geeky to talk about, do both us and yourself a favour and give a talk about it.

Also, we're already half-full at three days after the first announcement (but, then, some people sign up way before the announcement), so book early to make sure you get to go to my birthday par^W^W^W the GeekDinner.

While there are probably hundreds of people employed as Linux systems administrators, and hundreds more people using Linux at home for fun, in Cape Town alone, our Linux User Group, CLUG, isn't growing along with these numbers.  It should, though.  It provides two talks a month, on weekday nights, by some of the best people to talk about them, on both beginner and advanced topics, on programming to administration.  And it also has a dinner afterwards for people to meet and learn more about each other and help each other.  CLUG meets on the second and last Tuesday every month, with roughly 20 people attending the talks and about 10 people going to the dinner afterwards.

Growing the pool is making new connections, bringing new people into the community, providing new people to learn from and new opportunities for work or play.  It isn't necessarily about bringing new people into the field (but it is a by-product) so much as it is about making everyone in the field more aware of each other.