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!

Not sure what to do? Well, they have some examples using earthquake data. Or you could check out their guidance on building widgets.

Better yet, you could join Yahoo! Developer Networks Tom Hughes-Croucher and OSU Open Source Labs’ Peter Krenesky to work on the 50 states project:

Sunlight [Foundation] wants to make sure that legislative information for every single state is easily available. Many of the state government websites are hard to navigate, and provide information in formats that aren’t exactly Web 2.0 friendly (CSV anyone?). The 50 States Project aims to rectify that and make important information easily available for anyone who wants to know what’s going on in their state. We’ve built an example of how you can scrape data by building open tables to get the data from the Louisiana legislature. We hope we can inspire you to write many more tables, one for every state. I’m going to be writing in more detail soon about how I did it and what I learned, and how that can be applied to get data from any web form system. If you live in the Portland, Oregon area and are interested in hacking on the 50 States Project, I’ll be up at the Hacker Lounge for OSBridge this week.

Sound interesting? The hacker lounge at the top of the Portland Hilton is open 24-hours. That should give you plenty of time to muck with this new offering.

Hacking on code

We’ll be getting together again this Sunday, March 29, at Ristretto (3808 N Williams) starting at 10am to hack on Open Source Bridge-related code, and work on contacting User Group and university outreach.

We have a list of dozens of user groups and universities to contact. We have tests that need to be written for our conference application. And, if you’ve got some other work to do, and just want to hang out with some hackers – come join us

Tell @selenamarie (via Twitter or identi.ca) if you’re planning to come so that she can plan for a group. If you can show up a little early, please do and save us some seats.

(Photo courtesy supervillian. Used under Creative Commons.)

What rocking out looks like

Hey Portlanders. You’re probably going to rock out this Friday in Portland with the rest of the Beer and Blog crew at Cubespace.  While you’re waiting for your turn at the mic, consider taking a few minutes to help us out.

A group of Open Source Bridge volunteers will be hitting the internet, contacting individuals and user groups we think should know about our conference.

We have a list. We have information to share. We just need your help to get the word out.

So, bring your laptop and find one of us at Beer and Blog this Friday!  Just ask around once you get there. You’ll find us.

(Photo courtesy of greggoconnell on Flickr, used under Creative Commons license)

Hacker lounge view of Portland, OR

We’ve been to any number of open source conferences. And for as much as we get out of the sessions, we always seem to get just as much—if not more—from the time spent with other developers.

Whether it’s camping out in the hallway, hanging out in coffee shops, or late-night code sessions at the hotel, spending time with other attendees working on projects—and reveling in being an open source citizen—is always one of the highlights of any conference.

So, when we had the opportunity to build Open Source Bridge, one of our primary concerns was that we had plenty of space for hacking. But we weren’t thinking a couch in the hall or a bunch of people crammed around the table. And we wanted our attendees to have something better than a desperate search for places with outlets, wifi, and space to code at 3:45 AM. We were thinking about dedicated space for hacking, 24-hours a day.

Introducing the Open Source Bridge hacker lounge, a space dedicated to code sprints, development projects, user-group get-togethers, and general hanging out—open all-day and all-night, throughout the conference. Perched atop the Hilton Portland, the hacker lounge will feature food, drink, interesting people, and plenty of space for various groups to gather.

Even if you’re not interested in hacking, you’ll still want to spend some time in the hacker lounge. From spectacular views of the Portland skyline to direct access to the best and brightest people, the hacker lounge is sure to be the crown jewel of the conference.

The hacker lounge is accessible to every Open Source Bridge attendee staying at the Hilton Portland & Executive Tower. So make sure you’ve got a room. If you’re interested in scheduling time for your group or project to meet, please contact us. We’ll make sure you have all the space, power, wifi, and sustenance you need. Interested in sponsoring the hacker lounge? We’ll be happy to work with you.

We’re looking forward to seeing you at Open Source Bridge—at both the sessions and in the hacker lounge. Make sure to register today and book a room. Have something you want to present? Our Call for Proposals is open until March 31. Submit your Open Source Bridge proposal today.

(Photo courtesy Hockley Photography. Used with permission.)

Ah monster trucks.

Anyway, we’re hosting a volunteer-a-thon this Sunday, 10 AM to 4 PM, starting at Ristretto Coffee for coffee, and migrating to Lompoc 5th Quadrant for lunch.

Want to help? Here’s what we’ll be doing:

Join us to work on one or more of these for Open Source Bridge this weekend:

1. Code: Add features and specs to the OpenConferenceWare conference
app. Join in if you’ve got Ruby on Rails coding experience, such as
contributing code to Calagator.

2. Text: Compose documents for outreach to user groups, educational
institutions, open source projects, and the like.

3. Outreach: Contact user group leaders, educators, open source
projects, mailing lists, etc to encourage them to spread the word about
the conference and submit proposals.

We’ll meet up at Ristretto at 10am, then move on to a working lunch
nearby at the Lompoc 5th Quadrant. Some members will leave as soon as
2pm, but others will stay on later. Join us for however much of this you
can.

Thanks!
-igal

Join us! First three people to make it to Ristretto in the morning get one of these open source nerd merit badges.

Cross-posted on Calagator and Selena’s blog.

Hope to see you there.

Audrey Eschright

As we’ve mentioned before, we’re all volunteering to pull Open Source Bridge together. It’s a great deal of effort, but we’re really excited to see the enthusiasm from the community as things begin to take shape.

What are we learning as we work to build an event for open source citizens? You can get a little more insight from Audrey Eschright, one of the co-founders of the Open Source Bridge effort, in a recent interview on Web Worker Daily:

I’ve worked on FOSCON (a free Ruby event that took place during OSCON in previous years), BarCamp Portland, Ignite Portland, WhereCamp Portland, and now Open Source Bridge. The camps (unconferences) were all quite similar to each other to organize, but Open Source Bridge is much bigger than anything else I’ve worked on.

For more of Audrey’s thoughts, read “Audrey Eschright: Web Worker and Community Conference Organizer.”

Connect with us at #osbridge on irc.freenode.net. Selena (handle: selenamarie) hangs out there most of the day (Pacific timezone), and a few other hackers will drop in from time to time.

We’d love some help staffing the channel. Also, if you’re a wizard with bots, and have a few minutes to spare, ping selenamarie in IRC.

Feel free to join in!

/end transmission