The Advantage Labs team is back in the office after another great DrupalCon!  Thanks for another well-run conference to support and highlight the rapidly growing Drupalsphere!

One highlight from last week was our presentation on Drupal as a GeoCMS.   We were sad that the team from Chicago Technology Cooperative were unable to attend, and wish Bec a speedy recovery. We were also looking forward to showing some of our progress on the Geo and Geocode modules, and grateful we still had the opportunity to do so.

As it turns out, the Drupal community was very excited as well.  We unveiled our progress to a full house and received a lot of positive feedback and encouragement.  We've been operating in relative obscurity, and it's such a treat to have someone come up and shake your hand, thanking you for the progress and the presentation.

We followed the presentation by hosting a BOF (birds of a feather) session the next day, which drew in over 25 people looking to discuss Drupal, GIS, Geo and the path forward.

The landscape (pardon the pun) of Drupal in the GIS space is changing, and most people's use cases go way beyond "just points":  People are looking to draw service areas on a map and store it as searchable polygons, or they want kids to be able to submit "earthworm survey" data and map the results in a scalable way.  They want to gather crime statistics, but they also want to combine that freely-available data with their own data and build things like informative Choropleth maps. they want to mix and mashup their user-submitted geo data with other powerful tools such as Mapserver, Mapnik, or Openlayers. Or simply share it via GeoRSS, KML, and other export formats.

We want all that too!  We look forward to working with the community and other developers to fully realize Drupal's potential as a Geo CMS.

For those who were unable to attend, you can check out a recorded version of the session below.  A big thanks to the DrupalCon organizers and Archive.org for making all of the session recordings available.

If you'd like to know more about the Geo modules, have questions or comments, or want to know how you can help move the project forward let us know!