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Volunteering for OSBridge 2012: Important Dates

May 21, 2012 – 11:07 am

Calling all volunteers past, present and future: This year’s Open Source Bridge is happening June 26-29 and we need your help to make it happen!

We have many volunteer positions available — from simple errand-running and greeting participants, to more complicated tasks like registration and session room attendant. We have something for everyone, and you don’t have to be an über coder to be a stellar volunteer.

As in years past, we are offering a free conference pass to those of you who volunteer for 8 or more hours during the conference.

Scheduling for on-site shifts will open in a few weeks and we’ll post again at that time.

Meanwhile, read on for more information about upcoming Volunteer Meet & Greets as well as the dates for mandatory Volunteer Orientation.

***Mark these dates in your calendar!***

VOLUNTEER MEET & GREETS

Want to learn more about volunteering? Attend one of our three meet & greets where conference organizers will be present to answer all of your questions.

OSB Volunteer Meet & Greet #1
Wednesday, May 23, 12pm – 1pm
US Bank Tower (Mezzanine level in the SE Corner)
111 SW 5th Ave.
Portland, OR 97204
Calagator: http://calagator.org/events/1250462351

OSB Volunteer Meet & Greet #2
Thursday, May 31, 7pm – 9pm
Lucky Lab Tap Room
1700 N Killingsworth Street
Portland, OR 97217
Calagator: http://calagator.org/events/1250462350

OSB Volunteer Meet & Greet #3
Monday, June 4, 7pm – 9pm
Lucky Labrador Brew Pub
915 SE Hawthorne Boulevard
Portland, OR 97214
Calagator: http://calagator.org/events/1250462352

VOLUNTEER ORIENTATIONS

Volunteer orientations will be held onsite at the Eliot Center. You must attend one of the two orientations in order to volunteer.

Eliot Center (Buchan Building)
1226 SW Salmon Street
Portland, Oregon 97205

OSB Volunteer Orientation #1
Tuesday, June 19, 6pm – 9pm
Calagator: http://calagator.org/events/1250462353

OSB Volunteer Orientation #2
Monday, June 25, 1pm – 4pm
Calagator: http://calagator.org/events/1250462354

If you can’t attend the meet-and-greets or have questions, please contact our volunteer coordinators, Shepherd Griffin and John Labovitz, at volunteer@opensourcebridge.org.

Volunteering is the essence of Open Source Bridge and we are excited to work with you!

By christie | Posted in Uncategorized | Comments (0)

Announcing our Open Source Bridge 2012 lineup!

May 18, 2012 – 3:03 pm

We are very pleased to announce the session lineup for this year’s Open Source Bridge conference! These talks will be given as part of our 4-day event June 26th through the 29th in Portland, Oregon. We received hundreds of excellent presentation proposals, community comments, and other feedback, and our diverse selection committee was very busy carefully reviewing everything.

This year’s conference features knowledgeable speakers covering a broad range of open source topics. So, if you’ve been holding off on registering, now is a great time to do so!

We’re still finalizing the session schedule for Open Source Bridge, and plan to announce that in the very near future as well.

Without further ado, the selections for each of our five tracks:

Business

Chemistry

Culture

Cooking

Hacks

By Reid Beels | Posted in announcement, conference, content | Comments (0)

Our Third Keynote Speaker: Paul Fenwick

April 19, 2012 – 2:27 pm

The lineup of amazing keynote speakers for Open Source Bridge keeps on growing. We’re thrilled to announce that Paul Fenwick will be joining us as our third keynote speaker for this year’s event.

Paul Fenwick is the managing director of Perl Training Australia, and has been teaching computer science for over a decade. He is an internationally acclaimed presenter at conferences and user-groups worldwide, where he is well-known for his humour and off-beat topics. Paul is the author of Perl’s autodie pragma.

In his spare time, Paul’s interests include security, mycology, cycling, coffee, scuba diving, dressing like a pirate, and lexically scoped user pragmata.

You can join us to see Paul’s keynote speech along with all of the other great content at Open Source Bridge this year; our early bird registration is open through April 30th.

By jimmythehorn | Posted in announcement, conference, content | Comments (0)

We Want Your Input

March 23, 2012 – 11:49 am

You still have one week left on our Call for Proposals, and there’s still time to apply to be on our Content Selection Committee. But whether you’ve submitted your proposal already or not (or even if you’ve decided not to submit one), we’re looking for input from the entire Open Source Bridge community on the excellent set of proposals for our 2012 event.

Is there a session proposal you’re excited to attend? Be sure to take a minute to leave comments on the proposals you’d like to see at this year’s Open Source Bridge conference, and tell your coworkers, friends, and fellow user group members to comment too.

There are two ways to tell our selection committee what proposals you’re interested in: 1) by marking the ones you like as favorites (using the little stars), and 2) by leaving comments on them (using the form at the end of each proposal). This feedback is very important to us, and tells the Content Selection Committee which sessions the community wants to see.

By marking talks as a favorite, you also provide great assistance to the scheduling process for Open Source Bridge. We try hard to avoid scheduling talks that speak to the same subject, or are marked as favorite by the same people, and so the more people that mark favorite talks, the more our schedule can avoid conflicts.

The list of favorites is publicly visible on your user profile page, so you can share the list of talks you’re excited about with others. The comments are private and only visible to the selection team; this is the place to tell us why the presentation’s topic is important, how well qualified the speaker is, and so on.

Commenting on proposals and marking your favorites is very valuable feedback for us, and allows you to further help set the direction of Open Source Bridge.

You can get started now: http://opensourcebridge.org/events/2012/proposals

By jimmythehorn | Posted in announcement, citizenship, conference, content | Comments (0)

Sumana Harihareswara to Keynote Open Source Bridge

March 21, 2012 – 4:04 pm

The excitement never stops around here. We’re very pleased to announce our second amazing keynote speaker, Sumana Harihareswara.

Sumana Harihareswara manages projects and people, currently as Volunteer Development Coordinator at the Wikimedia Foundation, where she leads the Technical Liaisons and Developer Relations group (TLDR). She has worked at Collabora, GNOME, QuestionCopyright.org, Fog Creek Software, Behavior, and Salon.com, and contributed to the MediaWiki, AltLaw, Empathy, Miro, and Zeitgeist open source projects. She is a blogger at GeekFeminism and an advisory board member for the Ada Initiative, and was editor and release organizer for GNOME Journal. Harihareswara has presented at Foo Camp, Open Source Bridge 2011, Open Source Bridge 2010, MindCamp Seattle 2008 (“Three Models of Power: A Political Science Lens on Your Organization”), keynoted PICC, led or organized several Wikimedia hackathons, taught several courses at UC Berkeley, and performed at Bay Area stand-up comedy venues. She holds an MS in Technology Management from Columbia University. She also likes dinosaurs.

And don’t forget that we’ve extended our Call for Proposals, so you still have a chance to join what is already an excellent set of proposals, and sure to be an excellent set of speakers. You also have a chance to grab one of a limited number of $225 registrations if you act quickly and register now.

By jimmythehorn | Posted in announcement, conference, content, open source | Comments (0)