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Here are the slides from last night's Montréal Girl Geek Dinner. It provides a basic definition of open source, talks about what some of its benefits are, discusses why someone might want to get involved, what some of those ways are, and how to get started.

It was a lot of fun giving this talk, and it was really awesome to see how many people in the audience seemed excited about the subject matter (or at least didn't fall asleep ;)). I'm hoping that a few of the folks there who seemed extra keen will go on to become more involved in open source in general, but also Drupal specifically. In fact, probably a third of the folks there raised their hand when I asked who'd used Drupal, so that was cool. ;)

By the way, I totally spaced on mentioning this last night, but to anyone who attended, there's actually a Montreal Drupal User Group. Feel free to sign up and talk/plan stuff, because it's ever-so-lonely there now. ;)

A huge thanks to Tanya McGinnity for stepping up to organize these awesome events, and for forcing me to leave my house to go speak at one. ;) Without you, I think a lot of us would still be under the misguided notion that we were the only girl geeks out there in the big city. You rule!!

On Friday, February 8, in Los Angeles there's going to be a special Women in Open Source mini-conference as part of the larger Southern California Linux Expo (SCALE).

Both Addison Berry (add1sun) and myself will be speaking there. Addi will be talking about Open Source Mentoring, including efforts around the Drupal Dojo, and then I'll be doing a Drupal demo that will show how Drupal works by giving an overview and building a small website with it.

Additionally, Mike Stewart from the Drupal Los Angeles User Group will be helping to manage a Drupal booth at the conference. Stop on by if you'd like to meet some fellow Drupal users and talk shop with some folks who won't give you a funny look when you say "Druplicon." ;)

So if you are in the area Feb. 8-10, pick up your ticket and stop on by for some fun! :)

Also, on a slightly related note, if you're local to Montreal, I'm also going to be presenting Tuesday night at the January Montreal Girl Geek Dinner about open source. This is the second Girl Geek dinner, and the first one was a lot of fun, so go sign up at that accursed Facebook page if you want to come. ;)

Addison Berry and I had the opportunity to speak on a Google podcast with several women from other projects who are all helping to manage the Google Highly Open Participation Contest from their respective communities.

It was really interesting to talk to women behind other projects like Joomla! and Apache and see what their thoughts were about the program, about why they thought so many of us were involved, and so on.

Check it out!

Disclaimer: I was completely doped out on cold medication at the time, so cannot be held responsible for anything I said or didn't say. ;)

Thanks to Khalid for the heads-up about a video out there of my Women in Open Source talk I gave last month at the Ontario Linux Fest. Check it out here: http://www.archive.org/details/onlinux_womeninopensource

The slides for this talk are also available at http://webchick.net/files/presentations/women-in-open-source-onlinux-200...