Some Joomlashack friends might have stumbled upon the fact that while our small & lean team is spread all around the U.S. (Alabama, California, Pennyslvania, and Texas), the company's "official headquarters" is here in Vermont. (By headquarters I mean two of us in the same office at the same time occasionally, a wireless network named "Joomlashack," and a P.O. Box for our mail. Our real HQ is a persistent skype chat.)

Needless to say, previous Joomla Days in the U.S. were not anywhere near Vermont, a tiny state 4,000 miles from Silicon Valley and closer to Montreal than any major American city. So when the the first East Coast Joomla Day scheduled just 300 miles away in New York, we jumped at the chance to drive to the Big Apple.

Hosted at Google-NYC, the event was worth giving up a gorgeous fall Saturday to stay inside their flourescently geekchic meeting rooms all day. I can't say anything more about what it's like inside the GoogleBigAppleplex because we all had to sign a promise not to- but it was a very cool place to have a Joomla Day. Google's caterer is top notch as well.

There have been a couple interesting blog posts about Joomla Day NYC that are worth a quick read, from two very different viewpoints. Joomla Core Team member and developer Louis Landry gives thanks to everybody who attended and to Google, while also filling everybody in on what happened there. "Relatively new to Joomla" Norman recaps the day's event from the perspective of someone just getting their feet wet in the Joomlaverse.

I enjoyed the sessions and talks at Joomla Day, but I was most impressed by the number of people attending from the New York City Joomla User Group (JUG). JUGs are popping up all of the U.S., and the NYC JUG is particularly active. One of its members announced that www.joomlacities.org is on the verge of being launched as a clearninghouse for future JUGs across the country. (The site is currently under construction- we'll let you know when it launches here on our blog.) I was inspired to come back to Vermont and start working toward creating a JUG for our local area.

I guess that's how the magic of open source spreads- person to person, offline or online. If you'd like some ideas on how to form your own JUG in your area, check out this forum thread on Joomla.org. And if you can get yourself to a Joomla Day, please do. Joomla is so much more than software, and you experience that first-hand at a Joomla Day.