Joomla Demo Camp - Vancouver

I am spending this evening at the Joomla! Demo Camp at The Network Hub in downtown Vancouver.

Joomla! is an open-source content management system (CMS) that makes creating sophisticated websites with dense, extensive, and/or media rich content as easy as posting to a blog on Wordpress. The presented/educator of the evening is Vancouver’s own Joomla! developer and scholar, Rastin Mehr.

I could go on about everything I am learning about using Joomla! and improving costinmedia.com to be media-rich and regularly updated, but here are the points of relevance to the weblawg:

1. Just like everything else I do with Tazzu (this event is sponsored by Tazzu, of which Rastin is one of the owners; the other, Jeannette is in the seat next to me at this event), this is a networking event. Networking within the local business and technology community is not an occasional activity. Tonight I have met, and been met by, members of that community who are not members of Tazzu (or at least not active members whom I’ve met before).
2. This website is about an information economy, and the intersection of information economics with law. Joomla! is about information management and dissemination. So is this community.
3. Keeping up with new information technology is essential to anyone who intends to work in the business and law of information technology. We are dealing here with the integration of multiple technologies and sources of information - the aggregation of multiple data sets (with all of their unique quirks and traits). Can you begin to imagine the legal issues that arise from this much rapid integration? I’m beginning to…

Attending developer forums like this is not only a requisite for developers. It is a requisite for anyone with practical interest in the industry; familiarity with emergent information technologies is as necessary for practitioners and academics in IT Law as reading biotech journals is for patent lawyers.

Incidentally, Joomla! is fantastic. Great presentation, Rastin!