The last few weeks have been truly amazing. A while ago Udo Gerhards was so generous to post a new module to the asset issue queue that allows integration with lightbox2. The module was written for imagecache1, which asset support back then. Not much later Owen Barton of CivicActions fame posted a patch to the asset module to support imagecache2. Now last week Schroedhelm (who has only been a d.o member for a week) posted a patch to Udo's module to also work with imagecache2. I'm so grateful for these efforts, this makes being a module maintainer an extraordinary experience.

I attended the OpenCollection seminar today which was organized by FARO (which is running Drupal by the way) and I'm really glad it turned out to be a big success. There were people from a lot of different fields throughout the Dutch and French cultural scene. I was afraid the concept of "open source" would be seen only as gratis and not so much as libre. It was with great pleasure that I heard people talking about how they persuaded their management into allowing them to contribute enhancements back to the project, or to fund Whirl-i-Gig for developing new features, or that people were busy translating the software in Dutch and Spanish.

Last Saturday, the 1st of December, marked the fourth edition of the Belgian Barcamp. With only just over half of the subscribed people showing up, the general feeling is that this installment was less fantastic and attractive than previous editions.

As a first-time participant myself I must say I had a really great time. I met up with a lot of great people, put a face on bloggers I read a lot of but didn't met yet, saw some interesting presentations (Yves, Elise, ...) and received positive feedback on my own presentation about The importance of FOSS for nonprofit organizations.

Many thanks go out to Peter Forret who organized all four editions of Barcamp Belgium and Vindesign who photographed the event.

Although it's currently unsure what format the next Barcamp Belgium will be, I surely hope 2008 will see at least one such event. In its heart it's a wonderful concept and Peter has done an amazing job capturing that spirit and turning it into something real.