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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.

This month's Contributor Spotlight goes to Adam Light (aclight on drupal.org).

This edition of Contributor spotlight highlights Keith Smith of Advantix, LLC.

Keith's mission for the past year or so has been to clean up user-facing text in Drupal core. People installing the next beta/RC of Drupal 6 should be pleasantly surprised by all of the improvements, which probably number in the hundreds by now.

Here's one example. In Drupal 5.x, the description for book pages is:

A book is a collaborative writing effort: users can collaborate writing the pages of the book, positioning the pages in the right order, and reviewing or modifying pages previously written. So when you have some information to share or when you read a page of the book and you didn't like it, or if you think a certain page could have been written better, you can do something about it.

Er. A book is an effort? :)

In Drupal 6.x, it's now:

A book page is a page of content, organized into a collection of related entries collectively known as a book. A book page automatically displays links to adjacent pages, providing a simple navigation system for organizing and reviewing structured content.

Simple, descriptive, and consistent with other type descriptions. This is why we love Keith.

These types of improvements are especially important to get hammered out now, because very soon (once Drupal 6 Release Candidate 1 hits) we'll be in "string freeze," which means that this type of text can't change anymore until Drupal 7, in order to allow translators to come in and do their thing. Since one of the killer features in Drupal 6 is the new internationalization stuff, this will be especially important this release. So don't delay; help with string fixes today! ;) If you're looking for a place to start, try the list of documentation issues in Drupal core.

I asked Keith some questions and here's what he had to say:

I did a recent interview that talked a bit about the upcoming Drupal O'Reilly book (code-named the "Lullabook"), how I got my start in the Drupal community, and how I went about surmounting the Drupal learning curve.

The short version is that, in my opinion, getting involved in the community is, hands down, the fastest way to ratchet up your Drupal knowledge. It was the only way I was able to make the leap from "total newbie" (who hadn't even installed Drupal at the time) to "contributing my first module" in 2 very short months (I started out my Drupal career as a Google Summer of Code student back in 2005).

It was a lot of fun to reflect back on my first couple months in the Drupal community, which included some of the following highlights. *cue the flashback wipe*