So, the first GoRuCo came and went more than a month ago, and not a peep out of me here. What can I say? I was tired.

I’ve been going to Ruby conferences for four years, and at each conference there’s always a point where I find myself wondering what happens in the next 12 months as a consequence. What new collaborations take shape? What new opinions get formed? What changes? What stays the same?

A month later, there are a few developments that GoRuCo might have played a part in:

• After we announced that GoRuCo would be offsetting its carbon emissions, NYC Rubyist John Murch started green-tech blog Hippy Green. Certainly we’re not the only Ruby or Rails conference that’s charitably-minded: RailsConf, for one, raised $33k for charitable causes this year. We chose to donate as an organization, forcing attention on an issue: RailsConf’s decision to let attendees make a choice focuses more on the act of giving itself. All around a good bandwagon to have.

• I feel like almost every time the organizers met, we ended up talking about gender in the Ruby community, possibly at my prodding. So I was happy to see organizer Gregory Brown later bring up the subject on the O’Reilly Ruby blog, which spawned lots of healthy discussion. Tim Bray brought this up again at RailsConf and blogged about it, too. I’m with both of them. The gender disparity is a big problem, and it needs to be fixed. And, by the way, IRC comments like “if we wanted women we would have become nurses” don’t help.

• Without giving away too much, I will say that one prominent Rubyist seemed to be having a great time with us at the afterparty and out on the town after we closed the bar. Later he moved back to New York. Coincidence?

While all the talks were buzz-worthy, the one that seemed to most buzz-worthy in the “I could start building something with that next week” sense was Jay Phillips’ VoIP framework Adhearsion. I wonder if anybody in NYC has built any Adhearsion apps yet? Let me know if you have.