OSCON, the O'Reilly Open Source Convention wraps up today but some of the PHPers out there have already made some blog posts and have shared their slides from the event. Here's the list so far:

• Luke Welling - SNAP - PHP Taint Tool
• Ed Finkler - Securing the PHP Environment with PHPSecInfo
• Sebastian Bergmann - Quality Assurance in PHP Projects
• Laura Thomson - Write Beautiful Code
• Wez Furlong - Hot Chocolate: You got cocoa in my PHP
• Theo Schlossnagle - Full-stack Introspection Crash Course
• Ben Ramsey - Give Your Site a Boot With Memcache, OSCON 2008: Day One
• Mike Naberezny - Integration Testing PHP Applications & Supervisor as a Platform
• John Coggeshall - Top 10 Scalability Mistakes
• Andrei Zmievsky - intl me this, intl me that
• Chris Shiflett - OSCON Wrapup
• Jan Lehnardt - OSCON 2008 (wrapup)

Keep an eye out here for more slides and blog posts as they come out.

Sebastian Bergmann has poted about a new something that he'll also be doing at this year's OSCON - leading a discussion about the emPHPower initiative.

As the PHP community grows however, it becomes harder and harder for people to come together from the various corners of the community. [...] That being said, maybe there is still something we could change for the better? PHP contributor Lukas Smith has formulated his vision for such an effort in the form of an organization that would serve as a mediator and catalyst between all the members of the PHP community under the code name emPHPower.

The session will be happening on Monday the 21st from 7-8pm.

Lukas Smith has posted a quick emPHPower update to his blog today concerning recent thoughts and progress he's made on the initiative.

I hope this all will lead to a few people to step up and really start getting involved deeply in emPHPower. Aside from this Sebastian has handed in a BOF session on emPHPower for OSCON. I hope this one will work out.

A spot has also been set aside at the upcoming Zend/PHP Conference & Expo's unconference for someone to speak on the subject and to get a feel for things from the business perspective. Lukas has also been working up more details about the effort and has set up a mailing list to help with collaboration.

Lukas Smith, originator of the emPHPower idea (a network of like-minded PHPers looking to further the language's presence in the online world), is asking for a little help with getting the project mentioned somewhere at this year's OSCON 2008.

Now the key thing is to have someone there to spearhead the thing. I cannot afford to go unless some sponsor steps up and fly's me down there and points towards a bridge to sleep under and manages to squeeze me by the guards at the door. So maybe someone else is interested in bringing up this topic at OSCON to collect some feedback, ideas and comments. Any takers?

If you're willing and want to check out more about the community effort, head over to their web page and get all the details.