Chris Jones (of Oracle) has posted his trip report from this year's PHP Brasil conference he attended:

Last week's PHP Brasil '08 conference was held at the "UNIFIEO" University in Osasco, a region of Sao Paulo. [...] The conference was organized under the leadership of Er Galvao Abbott with community input, and in conjunction with a logistics team from "Tempo Real Eventos". The conference was very interesting and successful.

He mentions the training sessions, talks and the exhibition hall that was "arranged around a basket ball court with a life-size PHP ElePHPant dominating one end". Lots of Oracle elePHPants were given away and the social events were enjoyed, accomidations were nice and plenty of networking was going on throughout the days.

After taking part in this year's PHP Brasil conference, Chris Jones has issued a challenge to the PHP group members and developers there - do everything you can to be a part of the global PHP community.

At PHP Brasil '08, one of the themes I saw was community involvement. [...] In post-conference conversation, Luke Crouch (SourceForge) and I touched on what is gained from attending conferences, and how quickly technology is picked up in Brazil. So, one thing I specifically did during the conference was to encourage the organizers and presenters to make the English speaking world more aware of their activities.

He points out a talk that's already been translated to English and some of the people he met that are part of global PHP-using companies.