Surge [1] is scalability focused conference in late September hosted in Baltimore. It's a pretty cool conference with a good mix of operationally minded people interested in scalability, distributed systems, systems level performance and good stuff like that. You should go!
Anyway, I'll be there if there, and are if any other Kafka users are coming I'm happy to help herd us towards meeting up, lunch, hacking, etc. I *think* there might be some time for structured BoF type sessions as well. [1] http://omniti.com/surge/2011
