Drupal is one of the hottest open source community & content platforms going. And Lullabot is the arguably the top Drupal consultancy. Lullabot’s frontman and former rocker, Jeff Robbins, lives just over the MA border in Seekonk. And this April, Lullabot is offering two advanced Drupal workshops in Surrey. Whether you’re a Drupal pro or a wannabe, this is a great opportunity to learn from some of the Drupal community’s best.

Tom Hoffman spoke about SchoolTool to an enthusiastic crowd at last night’s geek dinner. In a twist, he gave the audience a choice of topics, and spoke about everything from Zope 3 to the Providence Grays. Check out the link above for a three-minute interview with Tom.

Big thanks to Tom and to all the geeks who turned out to make this a successful event!

I came across a mention of this exhibit of rediscovered maps on the excellent blog The Map Room.

The collection represents the world throughout the time these maps were collected by Brown University. Two-thirds of the maps are from the 1800s and early 1900s, with a major focus on the United States and Europe. The local collection for southern New England is also noteworthy. Some of the more exceptional maps are a Nazi tourism map, a map cited by Herman Melville in writing Moby Dick, and an anti-slavery map donated to the Library by the family of an abolitionist who graduated from Brown in 1831.

There is a talk on April 5th, but the show runs though April 25th 2007 at Brown University’s John Hay Library.

Photo Credit: Bret A. Ancowitz, M.D. of Garris Photography

Wednesday, March 21, 2007, 5:30pm – 9pm+
AS220
115 Empire Street, Providence, RI

The March Geek Dinner will feature a presentation by long-time Providence Geek Tom Hoffman. Tom will present SchoolTool, the open source project he manages, and discuss free software philanthropy. Details here. Tom is a very smart guy, doing important work at the center of the open source movement – yup, you’ll want to be there Wednesday.

Please RSVP in the comments section of this post so that we can give the good folks at AS220 an estimated headcount. And while you’re at it, subscribe to Providence Geeks’ RSS feed (see sidebar) and/or join our very-low-volume email announcement list (for the announcement list, send an email to Jack Templin, jtemplin over at Gmail with your name and affiliation).

As always, for first-timers here are the details on the Geek Dinners:

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• It’s totally casual. Wear whatever, bring whoever, arrive and vamoose whenever… And don’t worry about eating or not – come famished or full – eating is optional, and frankly, the least of the festivities (that’s not say the food isn’t good—it’s actually great).
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• Topics of conversation will vary as they will at any gathering of geeks, but many of us will be talking about AJAX, mash-ups, start-ups, new devices, innovative business models, interaction design, social computing, digital art, web services, etc. etc. etc.
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• Food and beverages are for sale at the adjoining Taqueria Pacifica and bar.
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• There is WiFi so bring your connected device of choice.
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The next Geek Dinner on Wednesday, March 21st, will feature a presentation by Tom Hoffman, who’s been at the center of Providence Geeks since its inception. Tom also gets points for having the best title of any presentation yet:

SchoolTool: Managing an International, Philanthropically Funded Open Source Project from a  Victorian in Elmwood

How did a former Providence school teacher end up working for a South African entrepreneur/philanthropist/cosmonaut, managing programmers in Lithuania and users in Nepal?  SchoolTool is a project to create free
administrative software for schools around the world, written in
Python and Zope 3, funded by Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth.  We’ll
take a look at the software itself as well as the unique advantages and
challenges of free software philanthropy.

Details and RSVP here.