Blog

Blog Archive

Announcing the 2012 Call for Proposals

Our call for presentation proposals is now open and we will be accepting proposals through March 16, 2012. Speaking at Open Source Bridge is a great opportunity to share your knowledge and enthusiasm. Now is the time to submit a proposal to speak at the conference!

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 and engaged open source citizenship.

The conference’s tracks are:
Business: How do you build a successful open source business?
Chemistry: What makes this work? Take the technology apart and teach us about its components.
Cooking: How do you write the script, configure the utility, debug the code, make it work? What are your best recipes?
Culture: What makes open source work? What else does the open source ethic lead us to do?
Hacks: How did you pull that off?

For a little additional inspiration, we encourage you to look through previous years’ archives of sessions presented at Open Source Bridge, but don’t let that limit you, either! We know that certain topic areas have been underrepresented in previous years, and we would very much love a diverse and broad set of proposals for this year’s bridge. We would very much love to see more talks about hardware, security, user experience design and just about everything else related to open source. No idea is too out there. We’d love to see it all.

If you speak at Open Source Bridge, we’ll happily waive the fee for your attendance. Not sure if you should register now, or hold off to see if your talk is accepted? If you wait and your talk is not accepted, we’ll give you a special discount code that will get you a ticket at $200 (that’s $25 off the early-bird rate).

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

Attend the conference

Register to attend Open Source Bridge 2012. We offer the following kinds of tickets:
Early bird tickets at $225 until April 30th.
Full price tickets at $300, great for corporate attendees.
As always, we offer a student rate of $99, available anytime.

Please register soon so you can help give the event some early support.

Interested in volunteering?

We encourage those of you interested in being more involved with Open Source Bridge to sign up for our volunteer list.

Interested in sponsoring?

Let us know by contacting sponsorship@opensourcebridge.org and we’ll send you a prospectus.

We hope that you are as excited as we are about Open Source Bridge 2012. Don’t hesitate to contact us at info@opensourcebridge.org if you have any questions. We thank you very much for your support and hope to see you in Portland in June!

–The Open Source Bridge Team

Volunteer Appreciation & Info Night – 1/27 from 6-9pm

You are invited to a night of merry-making, fun-seeking, and general geekery celebrating the volunteers of Open Source Bridge! Enjoy some food and holiday grog, watch a slide show of photos previous years and listen to a short talk about volunteering. There will even be some celebratory piñata whacking.

Will you be able to sign up to volunteer for OSB 2012? Yes! Core team members will be on hand throughout the evening to answer your quesitons and help you sign up to help out with Open Source Bridge 2012.

This invitation is open to all volunteers of Open Source Bridge; past, present and future. Please bring yourself, a friend and anyone else interested in volunteering.

When
Friday, January 27, 2012, 6pm – 9pm

Where
Collective Agency
322 NW Sixth Ave., Suite 200
Portland, OR 97209

Calagator link:

We look forward to seeing you at the party!

Core Team Planning Meeting Notes from November

June may seem so very far away, but we’re already well into planning the next event. We’ve had a few core team meetings recently, and here’s a rundown of things we’ve discussed. As always, if you have any questions, or want to get involved, let us know at info@opensourcebridge.org.

Who is the 2012 Core Planning Team?

The conference core planning team remains largely intact from last year’s event, and we’re adding a few more awesome people to this year’s team to make things even better. We’ll be updating the About Us page on the website soon and if you’re curious as to who we all are, you can check things out there.

Volunteer Outreach

We may not say it often enough, but we love our volunteers. Open Source Bridge could not happen without all of you. We’re planning a volunteer appreciation event at the moment, and will have a separate announcement out about that soon. We’re also looking at more ways to involve volunteers in pre-event planning and organization. And we’re looking at new volunteer management tools to make everything go even smoother this year.

Conference Content

We will be opening up our Call For Proposals in January. Many things will be the same as they’ve been in previous years, but we’re looking at additional topics that we’d like to encourage with this year’s CFP. If there are specific things you’d like to see at Open Source Bridge, please let us know.

Fundraising

We will have a sponsorship prospectus out soon, and are always looking for contributors to help finance Open Source Bridge. Stumptown Syndicate, the Oregon nonprofit behind the event, is also working toward 501(c)3 status and it may change how we handle sponsorship slightly.

Registration

You likely saw our latest reminder about tickets for Open Source Bridge. The $195 ticket price is only available through December 31st. After that, prices go up to $225 (full ticket price being $300).

Thanks for being a part of the Open Source Bridge community. We hope you’re looking forward to the 2012 event as much as we are!

Last Chance for Early Bird Registration! ($195 ends 12/31)

Register for next year’s Open Source Bridge conference at an amazing early bird discount price! Treat yourself or a fellow open source citizen to a pass at http://osb12.eventbrite.com/

As a special bonus, we’ll send Open Source Bridge scarves to the first 10 people who register starting today, December 14th, through the end of the year.

Now in its 4th year, the conference will be in Portland, OR from June 26-29, 2012. The $195 early registration fee is available through December 31st.

The conference includes 3 full days of sessions across multiple tracks, an unconference day, a Hacker Lounge, after parties, code sprints, work parties, and renowned keynote speakers. Also, get ready to submit your talk ideas! Open Source Bridge’s Call for Proposals opens Monday, January 17th.

More information about Open Source Bridge, past conferences, or the track schedule format, is available on this site.

Act now to save over $100 off regular admission!

Find OSB11 Speakers at OSCON

We’re quite proud of our speakers and want to continue to promote the open source work they are doing. If you didn’t catch any of the following people at Open Source Bridge, you’ll have a chance to see them speak at OSCON next week. And be sure to attend the Event Planning for Geeks talk, presented by three of our organizers!

Lance Albertson: Ganeti Web Manager: Cluster Management Made Simple and **Hands-on Virtualization with Ganeti

Matt Blair: **Cultivating Open Geo-Data in the Real-World: A Guided Tour of Three Portland-based Projects

Roger Bodamer: Building Web Applications with MongoDB and **Not Only SQL: Exploring Alternative Data Stores

Eric Day: **Introduction to OpenStack

Selena Deckelmann: Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger: PostgreSQL 9.1 and Mistakes Were Made

Audrey Eschright: Event Planning for Geeks

Paul Fenwick: **All Your Brains Suck – Known Bugs And Exploits In Wetware

Dawn Foster: **Crunching the numbers: Open Source Community Metrics

Eric Holscher: **A Completely Open Source Django Website

Christie Koehler, co-chair of Open Source Bridge: Event Planning for Geeks and Tools for Spelunking a New-to-You Codebase

Peter Krenesky: Ganeti Web Manager: Cluster Management Made Simple and **Hands-on Virtualization with Ganeti

Shyam Mani: **DNSSEC @ Mozilla

Jeremie Miller: **Your Personal Data Locker

Sherri Montgomery: Event Planning for Geeks

Sarah Novotny, program chair of OSCON: OSCON Town Hall

Noirin Plunkett: How to Win Friends and Write Documentation

Jacinta Richardson: Perl Programming Best Practices 2011 and Teach Your Class to Fish, and They’ll Have Food for a Lifetime

Garrett Serack: **CoApp—An Open Source Package Manager For Windows

Sarah Sharp: **Growing Food with Open Source

Chris Smith: **Transit Appliances: Open Data, Open Hardware and Open Source Software

James Turnbull: **Introduction to OpenStack and Vagrant & Puppet: Deploying Development Environments … Fast

Matt Youell: Wheeler

If you enjoyed these talks, be sure to register for Open Source Bridge 2012 to see more of these great speakers and topics.

[All talks with ** by them are a variation of a presentation given at Open Source Bridge this year.]