Our Advocate Level sponsor, Facebook, will be hosting Thursday evening’s starup crawl. We’ll begin with a party at at Kell’s Irish Pub from 6:00 to 7:00 PM. Don’t forget to bring your conference badge as it’s required to get drinks!

We’ll then hand out maps with the locations of three startups on one side and a scavenger hunt on the other. After Kell’s we’ll stop in at the offices of JanRain, Puppet Labs, and Urban Airship, for beer and snacks. And last, but not least, from 9:00 – 11:00 PM the party continues to its last stop at the Wieden & Kennedy agency rooftop space with more beer (contributed by Southern Oregon Brewing via Taplister) and desserts.

If you want to get a jump on the scavenger hunt, you can already get the clues in the Hacker Lounge. Check the beverage tables for information sheets while you’re getting your afternoon dose of caffeine.

Thanks to the 30+ people who showed up to our inaugural town hall! We saw familiar and new faces and got down to the business of organizing the conference. Ed graciously recorded a video, which we’ll publish as soon as its ready.

I forgot to mention a few important things for the new comers – like we’re having the same format as last year! Five talk types, over three days, and a full day of unconferencing on Friday. The presentation lists the many, many areas we’re looking for volunteers to assist with.

If you’d like to help out, have a look at the presentation, and sign up on our volunteer page.

Finally, we are going to be opening up the request for proposals Very Soon. Within days (we like to call this “February 1st-ish”). We’ll announce here, so stay tuned!!

If you haven’t already, please subscribe to our mailing list as well. All important communication will be happening there.

We’re really looking forward to seeing everyone, hearing your feedback, and seeing your photos. So is everyone else.

First things first. If you’re not already following OSBridge on Twitter or OSBridge on Identica, please do. We’ll use those accounts to keep you up-to-date on changes, retweet astute observations, and announce cool happenings throughout the event.

Or maybe you’re more into the FriendFeed? You’re in luck. We’ve got a FriendFeed room dedicated to Open Source Bridge discussions.

[UPDATE] And of course, who could forget (except me) the #osbridge IRC channel? Thanks to John DeRosa for reminding us.

Now that that’s out of the way, let’s make tracking the Open Source Bridge conversations as easy as possible, shall we? We shall. Here are a few tips for tagging your content.

• When you’re tagging your content on Twitter and Identica, please use the #osb09 hashtag. If you want to use #osbridge that’s fine, too. But it will cost you those precious extra characters.
• We’re hoping a few of you are bringing cameras. Please make sure to tag photos osb09 and osbridge. We’ve also established an OSBridge group on Flickr for your photos, so join and add away
• And of course, we’re likely to see a bunch of blog posts about the conference. Again, using osb09 or osbridge tags and categories would be appreciated.

Thank you for attending and sharing your content. We can’t wait to see what you’re saying—and seeing—at Open Source Bridge.

Audrey Eschright, one of the co-founders of the conference, took some time to delve into the concept of open source citizenship:

We’re planning a conference that will connect developers across projects, across languages, across backgrounds to learn from each other. We want people to experience something beyond “how to use tool X” or “why databases keel over when you do Y” (even though those topics are important, making up our tools and trade, and will be a central part of the conference content). We’d like to share what open source means to us, what it offers, where we struggle, and why we do this day in and day out, even when we’re not paid for it.

In order to do that, it seemed important to bridge the kinds of roles we have in open source, user/contributor/owner/institution, getting down to something more fundamental. What else are people who interact in this multi-directional way? Perhaps we’re citizens. Not residents—we do more than live here. We are, like citizens of a country, engaged in the practice of an interlocking set of rights and responsibilities.

For more of Audrey’s thoughts on open source citizenship and the thinking behind Open Source Bridge, read her post “Open Source Citizenship.”

Now, we’re fairly certain that Audrey’s not the only one with ideas on “what it takes to participate in the open source community.” In fact, it’s highly likely that you’ve got your own ideas on open source citizenship. We’d love to hear you talk about them—and so would the rest of the open source citizens.