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).

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.