GeoLoqi hackathon at the 2010 Hacker Lounge (photo by Igal Koshevoy)

Once again, we’ll be hosting a 24-hour hacker space for you to meet, greet, nosh, exchange ideas, get tips and how-tos, and try out some of the hot new ideas and technologies you’ll be learning about during the conference. There’ll be plenty of wifi and power strips in an easily accessible, comfy, and attractive space to relax and gather. Beverages and snacks will be available.

This year, we’ll be trying out some new ideas to make the Hacker Lounge even better.

We’ll be encouraging presenters to find time in the Hacker Lounge to work on related projects, and to publicize this during your talk. If you’re associated with a company or organization that produces or supports open source, perhaps you’d like to sponsor an evening or a few hours in the Hacker Lounge?

Of course, you don’t have to be a presenter to participate in the Hacker Lounge: Any open source project — whether established or brand new — is welcome to set up shop for a few hours. Maybe you’re brainstorming about a project? Maybe it’s even something that could be developed during a sprint during the conference? Bring your idea, find a time, and let’s build something cool! We’ll be organizing some “midnight madness” hackfests with some group-hacking projects, too.

Evan Prodromou, Don Park at the 2009 Hacker Lounge (photo by John Labovitz)

We’ll also be making the Hacker Lounge more approachable. We’re brainstorming ways of letting people know what projects are being worked on when they arrive in the space. The idea is to keep it flexible, but provide tools to help organize: color-coded areas, an unconference-like time/space grid, and a friendly volunteer who can help you find the project you’re looking for. We’ll be publishing some best practice guides for project organizers, covering things like how to make it easy for people to get started working on your project, and how to make it possible for someone who only has an hour to still feel like they can contribute.

The Hacker Lounge is one of the most distinctive components of Open Source Bridge, and we look forward to bringing it to you again this year. If you’ve already submitted a proposal about a project, consider holding a hackfest session in the Hacker Lounge and encourage the community to come help. If you haven’t submitted a proposal, there’s still a little more time to do so! Visit the Call for Proposals page for more information.

Do you have an idea for a Hacker Lounge activity, or ways of making the space a success? Please let us know at hackerlounge@opensourcebridge.org.

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!

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!

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.

Josh Booth with the microwave antenna

The Open Source Bridge Conference will have a 50mbps microwave uplink backing our powerful wifi network at the 24hr Hacker Lounge, the area open to all attendees for open source collaboration. All of this is thanks to a generous sponsorship from Stephouse Networks.

I had finished most of the logistics work when Tyler Booth, president of Stephouse, came forward with an offer that I couldn’t refuse. After some quick planning, Monday morning I met up with Josh Booth, a Stephouse technician, for the installation of the microwave uplink. Having established line of sight to their NOC he placed the antenna and radio. With a little configuration work we were up and running.

The antenna sits on the roof above 23rd story Alexander’s Restaurant and Lounge in the downtown Hilton. Thank you Stephouse, for delivering premium connectivity to our 24hr Hacker Lounge. So everyone, drop your plans and come Hack on This!

As I’m working along on my project and presentation for OSBridge I’m taking a moment to think about how great the tools are that we have today.

These tools are making it much easier to be an open source developer. It is a whole new world.

We have access to heaps of data through Yahoo Query Language, Open Street Maps, Wolfram Alpha, Twitter, Facebook Connect and even the new data.gov effort.

We have access to increasingly powerful tools such as Ferret, Solr, Nutch… gosh and many more.

The open source repositories at freshmeat, sourceforge and especially github reflect a new maturity in how developers develop. We have an excess of riches.

Today you don’t even need hardware – you can deploy an app into the cloud using EC2, or even a free app onto Google App Engine.

We even have open source hardware platforms like the Arduino—going in entirely new directions making it easy to do hardware prototyping such as botanicalls has done.

I suppose all I really wanted to say was hurrah Open Source! If it’s good enough for mother nature it is good enough for us!

Now–back to work.

(Image courtesy salvez. Used under Creative Commons.)

Harvard Business just posted a piece bemoaning the state of the modern conferences and suggesting some ways to improve them.

We couldn’t agree more. And it’s nice to see the article reflecting some of the selfsame concepts Selena and Audrey have baked into Open Source Bridge, from the beginning.

1. Conferences and meetings should tell unique stories…. A conference should tell a story, one that unfolds and builds from the initial moments to the close. Like any good story, there should be moments of high excitement, followed by moments of relative calm. That’s different from panic and boredom in ceaseless alternation. A good meeting should make linear sense from start to finish, in a way that allows attendees to retain what they see and hear rather than just feeling overwhelmed by the information.

At Open Source Bridge, we started with a very specific story: trying to share the culture of being an open source citizen. And the conference tries to provide ways of experiencing that culture beyond sitting in sessions—from mellow to engaged.

A good example of that? Our hacker lounge will give you the opportunity to meet with open source citizens for hacking, chatting, or just hanging out, 24-hours a day—and it’s only a short train ride from the convention center.

2. Conferences should be for, by, and about the attendees. A meeting or conference should feel participative, and you, the meeting attendee, should have some significant part in it beyond being a warm body. Attendees should react, critique, judge, schedule, and vote for what they like and don’t like. And that’s just for starters. There are many ways to give attendees a larger role in meetings and conferences, from making them part of panel discussions to creating discussion groups to having them manage Q and A.

We tried to choose the best sessions that we could—but we also knew that getting a group of intelligent and passionate people would result in new ideas and discussions that needed a venue.

That’s part of the reason for the hacker lounge. It’s also why all day Friday will be in an unconference format.

See a session that you’d like to explore more? Set up a session on Friday. Is this conference missing a session you need to see? Plan it for the unconference. That’s why we’re giving you a whole day.

3. Conferences should be about more than just eating and sitting…. We live more and more of our lives in the splendid isolation of the Internet, with all the faux connectors like Facebook, Twitter, email, and the rest. Getting together is an increasingly rare and important privilege. Meetings and conferences should be constructed to take advantage of the gathered group. Every meeting or conference should use the power of the group to give something back to the community in which the meeting is held. Help a local charity, fix a local problem, champion a local hero, start a new movement. There are many ways one could imagine making use of the combined energies of the people assembled. It’s a crime to waste that gathered power.

You know as well as we do that this kind of activity is going to happen. It would happen in hallways, in sessions, and at coffee shops. That’s just how the open source community works. We get things done.

But we’ve tried to facilitate these interactions. We’re planning some activities to help stimulate discussions and solve some problems. But we’re also looking forward to seeing what happens when all of you get together.

Two weeks. Open Source Bridge can’t come soon enough. If you haven’t done so, please take the time to register. Or if you’re interested in helping, there’s a volunteer orientation tonight.

(Image courtesy Mr. Littlehand. Used under Creative Commons.)

For me, Open Source software is very much about leverage. Open Source tools allow their creators to share their own productivity enhancements with the entire community, thereby making everybody more efficient.

That’s powerful.

The Linux command-line is simply another one of these tools, but I’m finding that a lot of folks these days don’t get as much leverage from the shell as they could, and that’s really too bad. So I created my “Command-Line Kung Fu” talk as a compact way for me to download a few tricks and idioms that will make anybody vastly more effective and efficient in Linux.

Let me show you what I mean with a couple of examples:

• What does this bit of shell fu do?

for f in *; do mv -- "$f" "${f// /_}"; done

• Which of these is faster? Why? And how can you tell?

find /usr/include -type f -exec grep -l sockaddr_in {} \;
find /usr/include -type f | xargs grep -l sockaddr_in
grep -rl sockaddr_in /usr/include

Curious about the answers? Come to my talk! Have a thorny problem that you just can’t figure out the right set of commands for, or have a solution that you’re not happy with? I’ll even take requests!

Assuming you’re sufficiently geeked out by my talk, you’ll probably want to follow it up with Philip Tellis’ “Programming Patterns in sed” talk, which will be happening right after my talk. And after that you can get down with Josh Cronemeyer’s talk on “Your Shell History in the Cloud”.

Yep, it’s a whole afternoon of shell fu for you!

(Image “Squirrel Fu” courtesy Greg Westfall. Used under Creative Commons.)

If you’re as excited as we are to get to hacking, we’d encourage you to schedule some time in the hacker lounge. This will ensure that folks know about your project ahead of time and can schedule accordingly. Best of all, we’ll help you promote your project to the attendees, so you’re sure to have the best and brightest hacking alongside you.

Chris Messina and the DiSo Project have kicked off the scheduling by adding a session Thursday, June 18, from 1-5 PM.

What’s that? You wanted to run your project in the hacker lounge at that time? No problem. There’s plenty of room.

Fill in the table below with your project name, a contact person, the day and time you’d like to make use of the lounge, and a link to a page where people can get more information on what you’ll be working on. The hacker lounge will be open from 9am Wednesday through midnight on Friday.

We’re looking forward to seeing the projects Open Source Bridge attendees are creating. And we can’t wait to see you in the hacker lounge in June.

(Image courtesy of jeffandmandyg. Used under Creative Commons.)