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!

Keynotes

We’ll kick off the conference with Pete Fein’s keynote about Hacking for Freedom. On Thursday, Portland Mayor Sam Adams will deliver our closing keynote.

Many Awesome Sessions

We have all sorts of great sessions in this year’s schedule, including…

• Ward Cunningham, inventor of the wiki, on Hardware/Software Integration with Txtzyme
• Amber Case and Aaron Parecki, from Geoloqi, on Location-Based Hacks — How to Automate Your Life with SMS and GPS
• Jeremie Miller, co-creator of Jabber/XMPP, on The Locker Project and TeleHash
• Sarah Sharp, Linux Kernel hacker, on Growing Food with Open Source

That’s just a small sampling of the many great sessions at this year’s Open Source Bridge. Check out the full schedule for the full line up.

22-Hour Hacker Lounge

This year we have an on-site hacker lounge, sponsored by Intel, and it will be open nearly 24 hours a day starting Tuesday at 9am. There’ll be plenty of wifi, power strips, beverages, and snacks in a comfortable and friendly space.

We’re making a special effort to bring active open source projects into the Hacker Lounge. If you are a project developer or contributor, consider scheduling a time when people can collaborate, discuss, and brainstorm. To participate, email hackerlounge@opensourcebridge.org. The schedule will be posted on Hacker Lounge page on our wiki.

Birds-of-a-Feather Sessions (BoFs)

A BoF is an informal evening session to share your interest in a particular technology or area of open source. There have already been BoFs scheduled on a number of exciting topics. Check them out and add your own.

Unconference!

The last day of Open Source Bridge will be an unconference, so bring your ideas and consider giving an impromptu session! If you’ve never been to an unconference, never fear; we’ll give instructions during the Friday morning kick-off before scheduling begins.

Want to brainstorm sessions before then? Add them to our wiki.

Parties!

On Tuesday night, Yammer and Sauce Labs are hosting a party and on Thursday night, Mozilla and Emma will be hosting a party. Details to be announced during the conference.

Short on Cash? Volunteer!

We love our volunteers and will give a free conference pass to anyone who commits to eight or more hours of volunteering. Spots are filling up, so get yours soon! Details: http://opensourcebridge.org/2011/wiki/How_to_Sign-Up

Short on Cash AND Time? We Have Free Events!

We want to make Open Source Bridge as accessible as we can for all. If you can’t afford a regular ticket or a day pass to the conference, and don’t have time to volunteer, we still have a bunch of stuff you can check out for free. The evening BoFs are free, as well as evening Hacker Lounge access. The unconference day will be sliding scale (pay what you can). We still ask that everyone register (choose Community Pass).

Thanks to our wonderful sponsors!

Open Source Bridge is made possible by our sponsors:

• Intel
• Mozilla
• Google
• Gilt Groupe
• OpenStack
• Discogs
• Emma
• Yammer
• …and more!

Register Now

What are you waiting for? Go register!

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.

It’s been quiet around here on the Open Source Bridge blog, but rest assured we’re hard at work planning the 2011 conference, once again held in Portland, OR.

We’ll be posting more details about next year’s conference later, but in the meantime we want you to mark your calendars for June 21-24, 2011.

See you at Open Source Bridge next June in Portland!

We want you to be involved in making the next Open Source Bridge as awesome as the first two. If you’re interested in helping out with next year’s conference, please come to our Volunteer Kick-off meeting TONIGHT, 7/28 at 6pm.

• When: Tonight, Wednesday, 7/28 at 6pm
• Where: 117 NW 5th Ave. Suite 210, Portland OR 97209
• Map: http://calagator.org/events/1250458860

We’ll provide an overview of our plans for 2011, things we want to improve, outline our volunteer needs, and listen to your ideas about how you want to contribute.

If you’re unable to attend in person, you can participate online:

• Following the group notes here: http://etherpad.opensourcebridge.org/general-interest-07282010
• And asking questions in IRC: #osbridge on Freenode.

We’ll post meeting notes on our Google Group, so make sure you’re a member. Also, if you haven’t already, please let us know you’re interested in volunteering here: http://opensourcebridge.org/get-involved/.

Questions? Email volunteer@opensourcebridge.org.

So you’ve spent the last three days learning about the coolest open source projects, exploring Portland and making new friends. But wait – there’s more! Please join us for Friday’s Unconference After Party at Beer and Blog. For those of you who aren’t familiar with Beer and Blog, it is Portland’s premier tech happy hour where folks from near and far congregate and share their love of all things geeky. We’re looking forward to hearing about all of your recently gained knowledge from the conference and to enjoying each others company over fine local beers.

If you need any beer suggestions while you are at Beer and Blog this Friday, just Tweet to @kfinsand, the Chief Beer Officer of @Taplister and the Portland Chapter Host of Beer and Blog, so he can point you in the right direction.

Portland Beer and Blog takes place every Friday at the Green Dragon (928 Southeast 9th Avenue) from 4-6pm, though people usually stay a lot later. See you at the after party this Friday, and we hope to see you any Friday you find yourself in Portland!

During the conference, your Open Source Bridge badge gives you access to all of the museum galleries. This includes all of the open exhibition space within the Mark Building itself, home to the Jubitz Center for Modern and Contemporary Art, as well as the galleries in the main building itself.

For the entire month of June the Portland Art Museum is pleased to offer Bridge participants a 20% discount to becoming a member (use Promo code ‘OS10′) . Members enjoy free admission to the galleries, 10% off purchases made in the Museum gift store, invitations to members-only events & exhibition viewings, as well as discounts on lectures, films, art making classes, and other special programs.

For a complete list of membership categories and benefits visit http://portlandartmuseum.org/join//membership/

Promo code: OS10 valid through 6/30/2010

A few of us are getting together to do work sprinting for Open Source Bridge. It’s a beautiful day, so our plan is to occupy the patio at Ristretto (3808 N Williams Ave) until my battery runs out, and then enjoy a pint at the Fifth Quadrant in the early afternoon.

We hope you’re having a lovely day. Come join us if you’d like to work on a few things for the conference, or if you’d just like to hang out on this fine day.

I’ll head over to Ristretto at 11am.

Our mighty volunteer army hacking away at our last code sprint

The next Open Source Bridge volunteer sprint will be this Saturday, May 1 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.

Come help with volunteer tasks for Open Source Bridge, likely including technical work, outreach activities, and …?

This week:

Please join us Saturday, May 1, 2010 beginning at 11:00 am for a Volunteer Work Sprint.

Stuff we’ll work on:

1. Planning for contacting attendees and speakers
2. Planning around an art display and reception at City Hall
3. Writing blog posts to get the word out about our awesome talk lineup!
4. Strategizing around sponsorships
5. Work on documenting requirements for enhancements to Open Conference Ware around email contact management of speakers
6. Discuss possibilities of using combinatorial search to help plan the schedule
7. Plan for the next sprint on May 8, 2010 for Open Source Bridge, where Leslie Hawthorn, former program manager for the Google Summer of Code program, will be visiting and helping us plan!
8. Or whatever you think would be helpful.

Please join us!

Thanks and see you at the sprint!