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Conference Registration Now Open!

Mark Building, Portland Art Museum

We are very happy to announce that registration for Open Source Bridge 2010 is now open!

This year we are thrilled to have an excellent downtown location, the Portland Art Museum, 4 full days of sessions (that’s one more than last year), and an on-site 24-hour Hacker Lounge!

Early Bird passes are available now through April 1st and are $225.

After that, conference passes will be $300. We are offering a student rate of $99 (you will be required to show current student ID when you pick up your badge).

Are you interested in attending more Portland conferences? Until May 19th, if you register for WebVisions or Open Source Bridgeyou’ll be able to attend both events for only $400, a significant savings.

Register now

Volunteer Sprint #2 – Stuff We Did

The volunteer work sprint on Saturday, February 27, 2010 focused primarily on logistics planning for the upcoming conference.

We had several enthusiastic volunteers help out with:

  • Preliminary Hacker Lounge Planning.
  • Initial draft of the Master Conference Schedule.
  • A review of open logistics tasks and filling in any missing gaps in Redmine.
  • We came up with some new ideas for Extras including Shanghai Tunnel Tours.
  • We talked about how to organize non-tech interest-based dinners — beer brewing, sci-fi fans and “war stories,” as a few examples — to make attendees feel at home socializing.
  • We started planning how we’d provide information to attendees about important topics like best local breweries.
  • Using the Hacker Lounge to do audio-processing so we can post session recordings the day after they are made

Finally, we took a tour of the Mark Building at the Portland Art Museum. Where, if rumors are true, this year’s Open Source Bridge is slated to take place.  There were many ooh’s and aww’s. Classy was another word frequently used to describe the Mark Building.

A big thanks to Scott Garman, David Cato, Jason La Pier, John Prohodsky, Jonathan Leto, Wendy Gabbe Day and everyone else who joined us for the work sprint and tour.

Volunteer Sprint: Saturday, February 27 11am to 4pm

Please join us Saturday, February 27, 2010  for a Volunteer Work Sprint and tour of the PAM’s Mark Building!

Join us at the McMenamins Market Street Pub (1526 S.W. 10th, Portland OR 97201) at 11am to work on a myriad of fun and exciting tasks guaranteed to help make Open Source Bridge 2010 a raging success!

Help Plan Parties and Fun Extras!
  • Fun Extras at Open Source Bridge: From Bike Rides to Karaoke to Massage to Rock Star.
  • Ada Lovelace Day: OSBridge Fundraising Party — March 24 — can we do it?
  • Start planning for the Speakers’ Party.
  • Hacker Lounge planning.
Getting ready for Open Source Bridge
  • Review existing logistics tasks and add missing items.
  • Preliminary on-site planning, start working on setup checklists, volunteer rotation schedule, on-site registration checklists and more.
  • Start talking about AV setup including a plan for streaming, recording and publishing conference content.
  • Very preliminary draft of Master Conference Schedule.

Help Write PR Content!

Lots of marketing work to do since we have several big announcements coming up: Venue, Opening Registration and more work to do around the CFP.

Tour the Mark Building at the Portland Art Museum (PAM)

At 1:30pm we’ll depart the Market Street Pub for a tour of the Mark Building, located next-door to and north across the courtyard of the Portland Art Museum (1219 SW Park Avenue).

You can add the event to your calendar and see a map to the venue at http://calagator.org/events/1250458352

Hope to see you Saturday!

Call for Proposals: Welcoming ideas again (until March 18)

The Open Source Bridge Call for Proposals is now open!

We would love to hear all of those interesting ideas you have in your head—and so would everyone else. That’s why we will be accepting your proposals for Open Source Bridge through March 18.

What kind of proposals, you ask? Open Source Bridge strives to be a different kind of open source conference. One that welcomes all open source languages, platforms, and pursuits while embracing responsible open source citizenship. As such, we’ve worked to craft categories that allow people to share their thoughts and ideas, independent of their chosen development methods.

Those categories include:

  • Cooking: Crafting useful recipes for software development, systems administration, and working with open source.
  • Chemistry: Explaining how our systems work, in theory and practice, in order to improve and extend.
  • Business: Building open source businesses that thrive.
  • Culture: Exploring how open source extends through technology into our communities.
  • Hacks: Tinkering, experimenting and bending the rules to make hardware and software do what we want.

Need more details? See the tracks descriptions for more.

So what are you waiting for? We’d love to hear what you have to say. Begin creating your proposal today.

Volunteer sprint #1: stuff we did

We had our first volunteer sprint of 2010 at the Daily Cafe in the Pearl today.

We had about 13 people show up over about four hours, and got off to a great start with the many small and large tasks required as we build up to our call for proposals!

Things that people worked on:

* User group contact spreadsheet update
Jason and Scott started the process of updating our user group database in the google doc! They got though verifying over 50 user groups that were contacted last year.

* Draft #1 to announce the call for proposals to user group participants
Additions, suggestions and revisions are welcome. The URL was posted to the mailing list.

* Processing of audio
Ed worked a bunch on processing the audio from last year’s conference!

* Specification of the workflow for registration
Igal, Eric, Selena and Reid went over requirements that were documented from a meeting last week by Sherri and several people created detailed diagrams.
A group of us then worked through exactly how the registration is going to work, and determined that a newly-discovered third party service would likely meet our needs, as long as we could extract money from it weekly (they currently only offer money extraction *after* the event :D ). Reid will check in with the service on Monday about this.

* Marketing progress
Christie documented a ton of tasks for the call for proposals release, and helped us refine our processes a bit.

* Sponsorship contacts
I spent a little time following up with sponsors.

* Open Conference Ware
Audrey made fixes to rake tasks and improved the documentation!

Thanks everyone, and look forward to another volunteer sprint announcement in the next day or so!

Photo courtesy of bushtick via a Creative Commons license