For those of you in the Portland Metro area, mark your calendars to attend the CivicApps Ideas Discussion on May 27, 2010, 18:00-20:00 at the Portland Building Auditorium. This is your chance to discuss your ideas for development with the CivicApps dataset providers and representatives from the City of Portland.

Please register here: CivicIdeas Discussion – registration is free but space is limited so sign-up soon!

After you’ve solidified your idea the next step is to make it a reality. You can do this at CiviCode day – co-located with Open Source Bridge on Thursday, June 3, 2010. A day of CiviCode unconference and hackathon activities begins with a keynote by Mayor Sam Adams and concludes with a show-in-tell of what you built!

CiviCode Day is located in the 24 hour Open Source Bridge Hacker Lounge – this year located in the Portland Art Museum’s – Mark Building. Come work on your CivicApps project in a space guaranteed to inspire creativity surrounded by peers and project stakeholders.

Register for CiviCode Day here: CiviCode Day – Registration for CiviCode day is free – but space is limited. Please add your name the list soon!

Additional information about the events can be found here: Important Upcoming Events for CivicApps.

Hope to see you at both the CivicApps Ideas Discussion and CiviCode Day!

Photo by Aaron Hockley, hockleyphoto.com

Attention speakers, volunteers, past and future attendees, and all open source citizens across the world: We need your help spreading the word about this year’s conference!

We’d like you to write and publish a blog post about Open Source Bridge. Tell people why you’re attending, why you’re speaking, why you’re volunteering. Share your passion and encourage others to do the same.

Need some specific inspiration? You could write about:

• the awesome PHP/Python/Haskell/… talks
• the awesome “cloud” talks
• the awesome hardware hacking talks
• the awesome business talks
• the awesome lawyer-ly talks
• the awesome operations and sysadmin talks

Be sure to send us a link to your blog post so that we can promote it here.

Don’t have a blog? Send your writing to us and we’ll post it here on the Open Source Bridge blog.

Don’t want to stop there? There are lots of other ways to get involved.

Image courtesy of Rick Turoczy.

Open Source Bridge is 100% volunteer run event and we can’t have a successfull event without you! One of the most direct ways you can make OSBridge a fantastic event is to volunteer on-site, during the conference. We have many volunteer positions available, from dead simple errand-running, to the more complicated registration, speaker lounge, and volunteer coordinator positions. We have something for everyone, and you don’t have to be an uber coder to be a stellar volunteer.

Because we <3 our volunteers, and as we did last year, we’ll be providing a complimentary ticket to those volunteers who commit at least 8 hours of their time at the conference.

To learn more about volunteering on-site, come to one of the following Volunteer Meet & Greets:

Tuesday, May 11th from 6:30 to 8pm – Lucky Labrador Overlook Tap Room
http://calagator.org/events/1250458647

Wednesay, May 19th from Noon to 1:30pm – Lunch 2.0 at the Portland Development Commission
http://calagator.org/events/1250458488

Monday, May 24th from 6:30 to 8pm – Lucky Labrador Brew Pub
http://calagator.org/events/1250458648

You can read a sneak-preview of the on-site volunteer positions on our wiki:
http://opensourcebridge.org/2010/wiki/Volunteer_Positions

If you can’t come to any of the meet and greets, or have questions before then, please contact our volunteer coordinator, Christie Koehler at volunteer@opensourcebridge.org.

Our organizing committee is working closely with the City on a plan, and we’ll update you as soon as we know more!

This event will be a great place to learn about open source GIS tools, meet fellow practitioners, share your geo-related topic or project, and get feedback and ideas. The event’s unique format combines invited talks by seasoned presenters and unconference sessions where the attendees set the agenda.

You can expect to learn about several desktop GIS programs with powerful analytical capacities, a web mapping framework (GeoDjango), the spatial database (PostGIS), image processing (GDAL), and more:

• Register for the PDX Open Source GIS Unconference
• Join the Portland Open Source Geospatial User Group mailing list
• Find the Portland Open Source Geospatial User Group meetings

Our mighty volunteer army hacking away at our last code sprint

The next Open Source Bridge volunteer sprint will be this Saturday, April 10th at the Market Street Pub. We’ll be there from 11am till 5pm, but you can come to as much of it as you’d like. Add this event to your calendar.

Some things we need your help with:

1. Audio: We need to process last year’s audio from our sessions and be ready to quickly process this upcoming year’s audio. It would be great if you could download the 2009 event’s audio, familiarize yourself with it, think about how to clean it up so it can be posted, and bring it along with your computer to the sprint.
2. Wiki: We want to provide useful information to our attendees and offer structure to help them organize and contribute information through our wiki. There is a lot of useful content on our 2009 wiki that can be used as inspiration for content to add to the 2010 wiki.
3. OpenConferenceWare: We have a few branches containing valuable contributions to our open source conference software that we’d like to finish reviewing and testing so we can incorporate them, including security improvements, performance fixes and software upgrades.
4. Complimentary ticket issuer: We’d like to make it easier for our volunteer staff to be able to issue complimentary tickets to speakers, raffle winners, and volunteers. We have developed a plan (PDF) for doing this, and need to start development.
5. Hacker lounge planning: We have a 24-hour on-site “hacker lounge” this year for attendees to collaborate and hang out at. We need to discuss how to organize events in this room to provide just enough structure to help attendees without stifling their creativity.
6. Logistics, venue and activity planning: We’re using the beautiful Portland Art Museum Mark Building as our venue this year. Discuss how to make the best use of this space and incorporate fun activities ranging from mobile donut trucks to on-site massages with our logistics crew.
7. Or whatever you think would be helpful.

Thanks and see you at the sprint!

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.

Selena Deckelmann welcomes Open Source Bridge 2009 attendees, photo by Aaron Hockley

Join other Open Source Citizens at Nedspace Old Town for a Town Hall meeting this Thursday at 7PM and help us prepare us for our 2010 conference.

Meet the Organization Team and hear about what we want to continue to do right this year, the improvements we want to make, the conference venues we’re considering, and when you can submit your proposals.

We also really want to hear your input and ideas on sessions you’d like to see this year. Open Source Bridge cannot happen without community involvement. Come hear the volunteer opportunities we need filled and sign up to make your event a success.

• What: Open Source Bridge 2010 Town Hall
• Where: Nedspace, Oldtown – 117 NW Fifth Ave. (between Couch and Davis)
• When: Thursday, January 28, 7PM

Open Source Bridge cannot happen without community involvement. Come hear the volunteer opportunities we need filled and sign up to make your event a success:

• Add the town hall event to your calendar and view map: http://calagator.org/events/1250458164
• Subscribe to our blog: http://opensourcebridge.org/
• Join our mailing list: http://groups.google.com/group/osbridge
• Follow @osbridge: http://twitter.com/osbridge && http://identi.ca/osbridge
• Obey @osbridgebot: http://twitter.com/osbridgebot && http://identi.ca/osbridgebot