I realize that this is kind of late notice, but if you are in the
Washington DC area, have Dec 2nd free, and are interested in the
implementation and use of search technologies please join us for
SearchCampDC.

  http://barcamp.org/SearchCampDC

//Ed

-- 

The goal of SearchCampDC is to bring together people working on and
using search releated technologies in and around Washington DC. We all
rely on tools like Google in our daily lives, but as IT professionals
we often need to build or integrate search technologies into
applications, and the enterprise.

Search technologies typically rely on a wide variety of techniques
such as fulltext indexing, geocoding, named entity recognition, data
mining, natural language parsing, machine learning, distributed
processing. Perhaps you've used a piece of technology, and care share
how well it worked? Or perhaps you help develop a search-related tool
that you'd like to get feedback on? Or maybe you've got a search-itch
to scratch, and want to learn more about how to scratch it? If so,
please join us for SearchCampDC.

The idea for this event came about from a happy coincidence that
several Lucene, Solr, OpenLayers and TileCache developers were going
to be in the DC area at the same time. The idea is to provide them
(and hopefully others like you) a space for short & sweet
presentations about stuff they are working on, and also to provide a
collaborative space for people to try things out, share challenges,
ideas etc.