The open source community is built on the hard work of active volunteers. But what if those hardworking volunteers are people on your staff, and motivated to contribute their energies to something external to the company? And what if they ask you to support their endeavours in some way? Most managers would find this hard to support, and in fact many actively discourate moonlighting, either voluntary or otherwise. But anecdotal evidence seems to indicate that this is actually an excellent way to grow the skills of your existing workforce.

As an example, I'd like to share my own story. I hope that it'll inspire you to encourage your team members to dedicate more time on open source/community efforts.

10th October 2009 sees the second annual PHP Conference to be held in Manchester, PHP North West. As one of the organisers I've been watching the arrangements come together with growing excitement: this year we have a new venue, a schedule literally packed with excellent sessions, plenty of social activity, and some community-driven input on Sunday morning - I'll even be speaking myself this year. Some of the topics at this year's conference include various PHP frameworks, performance, Drupal, project management, and much more.

The conference is a regional event aimed at PHP developers of all levels as well as their managers, coming together and exchanging ideas around developing PHP within teams today. Our attendees range from those living locally or making a daytrip of it right across to speakers and attendees flying in from mainland Europe. We're very grateful to all our sponsors, they've stepped up to get involved even in the difficult economic climate and without them this entirely volunteer-organised conference simply couldn't happen.

This year's php|tek conference was hosted by php|architect just outside Chicago in the US in mid-May. I attended this year as a speaker delivering a number of sessions, and was also able to attend the some of the other sessions on offer at the event. There were some particular highlights of the week.

The first session of the main conference was the opening keynote, "The Future of PHP 6" by Andrei Zmievski. The talk was great but will be forever remembered for Andrei's t-shirt which read "I ? Unicode". With the conference in full swing, we moved on to some of the more technical sessions.

I have been working on a fun project recently which is built on Zend Framework. While looking at options for paginating a large result set, I came across a Zend Framework module called Zend_Paginator ... and it does just what it says on the tin!

The idea of this module is to allow collections of data to be paginated. It takes the set, restricts the results, and can also generate the page numbers you need to move around between the resulting paginated data. Basically it saves me writing the same pagination code multiple times and then having to fix the bug where the last result on the previous page appears on the next ... all this has been thought of already.

Over the last month I've been to quite a few of the GeekUp events which are local to me in Leeds, UK. These are where a selection of technologically-minded people get together, usually have a few small presentations, and then mostly chat and drink beer all night. I've been to these events as both a visitor and a speaker, and met lots of people and learned a lot.

The month started with a visit to the Leeds Geekup in April, where I gave a talk entitled "Enterprise Web Development" - the slides are available on slideshare.