This time of the year is usually a very busy one, as there are plenty of events and conferences to attend. Just take a look at our calendar of OSS events on the MySQL Forge to see what I mean! Here's a quick summary of the ones that I will attend and speak at until the end of this year:

On November 14-15, I'll attend the openSQL Camp in Portland (OR), USA. I missed the first one that took place in Charlottesville (VA) in 2008, but had a lot of fun organizing the European Edition earlier this year. The upcoming one will be more like an unconference again - the list of …

It's almost two weeks now since FrOSCon and the OpenSQL Camp subconference have taken place in Sankt Augustin, Germany — about time for a summary and update from my side!

First off, I would like to thank all of the participants and supporters, particularly my colleagues Regina Steyer and Iris Musiol for the perfect logistics and co-sponsoring as well as Uli Graef, Thorsten Frueauf, Matthias Schmidt, Alexander Rubin and Joerg Moellenkamp for manning the Sun booth and the help on site.

Another big Thank You goes out to my team mates …

One of the things about working with MySQL Community is trying to reach you all. If you are reading this then we have reached you.  Talking about community is frankly about where our community exists, where you chat and feel comfortable. To that end we've created a poll about where you might be intrested in hearing *from* us. Please, do let us know which social network you are interested in here from us!

There is no ulterior motive, the poll is anonymous, but it gives us some crucial information on where you want to interact with us, or where we might begin to ask the questions.

Check out the poll.

I was warned by my brother a while ago that should I start tweeting, he would stage an intervention. I had already confessed to accounts with facebook, multiply, myspace, and several others (disclaimer/explanation: all of those sites are customers of my longtime employer). Twitter, to the uninitiated, looks like the crack cocaine of social networking that turns the weekend photo-poster into a hardcore jittering lifecaster. Nobody wants to see their family member come to that, right? But follow along, twitter has purpose. Or just skip to the bottom.

 I was never an active friendster user. The first site I used …

I was warned by my brother a while ago that should I start tweeting, he would stage an intervention. I had already confessed to accounts with facebook, multiply, myspace, and several others (disclaimer/explanation: all of those sites are customers of my longtime employer). Twitter, to the uninitiated, looks like the crack cocaine of social networking that turns the weekend photo-poster into a hardcore jittering lifecaster. Nobody wants to see their family member come to that, right? But follow along, twitter has purpose. Or just skip to the bottom.

 I was never an active friendster user. The first site I used …

I was warned by my brother a while ago that should I start tweeting, he would stage an intervention. I had already confessed to accounts with facebook, multiply, myspace, and several others (disclaimer/explanation: all of those sites are customers of my longtime employer). Twitter, to the uninitiated, looks like the crack cocaine of social networking that turns the weekend photo-poster into a hardcore jittering lifecaster. Nobody wants to see their family member come to that, right? But follow along, twitter has purpose. Or just skip to the bottom.

 I was never an active friendster user. The first site I used …

Giuseppe stumbled over this website and recommended it to me as a potential useful service for organizing the registrations of the OpenSQL Camp: Eventbrite is a Python/MySQL-powered web site (judging from their job openings) that provides the following:

Eventbrite is the leading provider of online event management and ticketing services. Eventbrite makes it easy for anyone to hold a successful event of any type and size. Eventbrite is free if your event is free. If you sell tickets to your event, Eventbrite collects a small fee per ticket. So just like you, Eventbrite wants your event …

The OpenSQL Camp 2009 web site is now ready for business, I've updated various pages and added some more information about the call for papers. I've also set up a Twitter account (no way without one nowadays, right?), which might also play an important role in the voting/rating of talks later on (Giuseppe came up with an interesting proposal for that).

So we're now seeking your input! Let me quote from the web pages directly:

OpenSQL Camp is a free conference of, by, and for the open-source database community of users and developers. The first OpenSQLCamp 2008 took place in Charlottesville, Virginia, …

Just a short announcement: I am going to join Ulf for his PHP Barbeque Tour across Germany, which will take place between June 15th until the 21st. We will start in the south of Germany and will work our way up north in one week, stopping by at various cities in Germany to enjoy a barbecue with local PHP User Groups and to talk about PHP (of course), MySQL, Open Source, The Web and anything else. We've set up a Wiki page that outlines the various stations of our journey. At the Moment, we will visit the following cities:

• Monday, 15th: Munich
• Tuesday, 16th: Frankfurt
• Wednesday, 17th: Karlsruhe
• Thursday, 18th: Berlin
• Friday, 19th: …

If you are a twitter user, you may like to know that there are many people from MySQL who are regular twitters.

For a start, you may want to follow these ones:

People

1. kajarno Kaj Arnö
2. datacharmer Giuseppe Maxia
3. bytebot Colin Charles
4. LenzGr Lenz Grimmer
5. dups Dups Wijayawardhana

Non-people

1. mysqlconf MySQL Users Conference, which is going to be used during the conference to collect feedback for the panel …