One of the great things about OSCON is how it brings people together, and this year's conference was no different. I had the privilege of meeting a number of people for the first time:

• Andrew van der Stock, a well-known web application security expert from Australia and prominent member of OWASP
• Arjen Lentz, a Community Relations Manager at MySQL
• Cal Evans, editor of the Zend Developer Zone and organizer of Nashville's PHP User Group
• Ed Finkler, member of the PHP Security Consortium and employed by CERIAS
• Jay Pipes, a Community Relations Manager at MySQL
• Kevin Murphy, employed by Renkoo
• Kevin Yank, Technical Director of SitePoint
• John Herren, founder of TagCloud and employed by Zend
• Jeremy Johnstone, a PHP Yahoo who was kind enough to give Wez and I a ride back to our hotel for our Passports when we were denied access to alcohol at Portland City Grill. (Neither of us drive, so our licenses have expired.) Thanks, Jeremy!
• Susan Wu, Chief Marketing Officer of the ASF and employed by Zend

I may have forgotten a few people, and if so, I apologize.

Laura blogged about her T-Shirt Index, an idea that uses the number of free t-shirts available at OSCON as a rough approximation of the economic health of the industry. If more vendors would realize that XL shirts don't fit everyone, I might have picked up more than two. :-)

Ted Leung mentioned a cool idea from Zak:

Zak Greant of the Mozilla foundation discussed how he is using a bug/issue tracker to deal with community issues. This sounds like a no brainer kind of activity, particularly for open source projects, but I am not aware of any other community that is making use of this practice.

This reminds me of another tip from Zak's blog, Don't get pwn3d: Why Professionalism Matters In Community Discussions.

Other topics of interest from OSCON include the PHP trading card game (which you can now download), the PDXPHP meeting, the PHP Security Hoedown, the OmniTI book signing (another photo), and sponsored events at establishments like American Cowgirls.