Where in the world is dougvann

OK. Based on emails, IRC chats, Facebook posts, and tweets, it seems that ppl are quite confused as to where I am in this country and what I'm doing these days. So here's the scoop.

My contractor gig with the State of Ohio & The Ohio State University ended last week when the Board of Regents shut down the office that brought me in for training, consulting and development. No hard plan was in place to preserve, maintain, or further the tremendous accomplishments that we made in about a 12month span. This gig had me spending over 800hrs onsite. I even rented a home just off campus in Columbus since I was living their on the weekdays anyway. [Gotta say it. I MISSED MY WIFE & 4 CHILDREN LIKE CRAZY!]

One of the departments that handles the IT and Network infrastructure is going to be implementing APEX; a free tool that ships with oracle database. It appears that a lot of our Drupal work was for nought and might be replaced with APEX very soon or in the future. I believe they are in for a big disapointment in the form of Costs and Unmet Expectations. Oh well... I'll be their to get them back on track when they realize this. :-)

Here in Indianapolis I have stepped down from any leadership position in the local Drupal Users Group which I founded in January of 2008. In our hayday we had to do 2 meetings a month to even TRY and satisfy the hunger for Drupal. When twice became once and that one meeting was the 4 or 5 of us in the core group, we took a break. After that we started up monthly bar meets. That has been fun and saw some growth to the group via meetup.com but ppl eventually wanted to learn. In response to that expressed need, we did stage a few learing based meetups which have done well; not like the old days of attendence, but well. These days I find myself traveling exstencively and helping organize camps in SC, OH, NV so I've decided to let the full time Indiana residents manage the group and the camp.
BY THE WAY...
Be on the look out for DrupalCampIndy Nov5th 2011!
And DrupalCampOhio Dec3rd 2011!
And DrupalCampVegas likely in Jan 2012!

While all this is going on I was still able to make it out to a few camps this year. Eary this year I organized a single-track DrupalCamp for the 1st ever IndyLinuxFest which went very well. I organized DrupalCampSC at S.E.L.F. [SouthEast LinuxFest] a repeat gig from last year. This yr we expanded to three tracks. I attended DrupalCampAsheville and delivered the Acquia, Drupal In a Day training to 21 attendees. This was a blast! I'm looking at joining the folks at DrupalCamp Austin in Nov. And of course I'll be at DrupalCampOhio as I'm helping to produce it.

Meanwhile back home in Indiana I have a handful of local clients with whom I'm either wrapping up projects or expanding into new projects. Represented in that mix are the Center on Congress at Indiana University, The Institute for American Though at IUPUI I[ndiana University / Purdue University of Indianapolis] , An intranet site for a 500+ store chain of Bird feeders, seed, and related items, ExactTarget.com which is an Interactive Marketing firm with a host of email based solutions.

Beyond Indiana I'm also working with a TV Cooking show out of California, a Hotel/Casino Boxing production company out of Delaware, Northwestern University in Illinois, and a few more.

I'm REALLY looking forward to mid Octobre when I visit Langely Air-Force Base to deliver Drupal sitebuilding and module development training to NASA for three days. I'm only hoping that I can fight the urge to say something like, "Drupal isn't rocket science!"

There you have it. A quick [kind of] update on what's going on. 

- Doug Vann :-)