Because we <3 our volunteers, we will provide a complimentary ticket to those who commit at least 8 hours of their time. (Note: we can’t provide refunds to those who have already purchaed their ticket.)

And, for the first time, all volunteers will recieve a special Open Source Bridge volunteer t-shirt. Volunteers will also get their own lounge complete with yummy snacks.

Now is your chance! The volunteer schedule is now open for sign-ups. Visit the How to Sign-Up page on our wiki for full instructions on how to sign-up as a volunteer.

UPCOMING MEET-AND-GREETS

To learn more about volunteering on-site, please come to one of the following meet-and-greets:

• Monday, June 6th from 6:30 to 7:30pm – Lucky Labrador Overlook Tap Room: http://calagator.org/events/1250460674
• Monday, June 13th from 6:30 to 7:30pm – Lucky Labrador Overlook Tap Room: http://calagator.org/events/1250460675
• Tuesday, June 14th, 12:30 to 1:15pm – US Bank Tower, Second Floor lunch area: http://calagator.org/events/1250460676

ORIENTATION SESSIONS

We will also have an on-site volunteer orientation the day before the conference. While not mandatory, it’d be great if you could attend:

• Monday, June 20th at 12pm to 1pm – Orientation/Setup for Open Source Bridge: http://calagator.org/events/1250460677
• Monday, June 20th at 4pm to 5pm – Orientation/Setup for Open Source Bridge: http://calagator.org/events/1250460678

If you can’t come to any of the meet-and-greets or orientations, or just have questions, please contact our volunteer coordinator, Shepherd Griffin, at volunteer@opensourcebridge.org.

Volunteering is the essence of Open Source Bridge and we are excited to work with you!

The only requirements are that you have some in-depth knowledge or expertise of a field related to an open source technology, and that you have 5-10 hours to spare between April 2nd and April 15th to spend reviewing and discussing proposals. You don’t need to be in Portland, though if you aren’t, you should have the ability to participate via telephone or Skype in our final meeting to select talks (date/time to be determined, based on everyone’s availability).

To apply, please complete the form here by April 1st. If you have any questions, email us at content@opensourcebridge.org.

We plan to select about a half-dozen community members to participate in the content committee. Our goals are to represent a diverse set of experiences and views — including a range of expertise areas — and involve both those who have experience selecting conference talks and those who are new to the process. We also want the committee to be as gender-balanced as possible.

We hope you’ll considering being a part of the selection committee, but if that doesn’t seem like a good fit, there are many other ways to get involved. Also, don’t forget that anyone can view and comment on submitted proposals, to let the selection team know what you want to see.

• When: Monday, February 21, 2011 from 6:30–8pm
• Where: 1700 N Killingsworth St, Portland OR 97217
• Add this event to your calendar and see a map: http://calagator.org/events/1250459697

For people not local to Portland: We’ll do our best to take notes and questions via IRC, so please join us there. #osbridge on freenode.

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.

Scott (@zenpuffin) posted this message to our mailing list today:

Since OSB is at a new location this year, we can re-use the food cart map but not the coffee and food maps from 2009. I have started some preliminary maps for these which can be found here:

OSB 2010 Coffee Map:
http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?hl=en&ie=UTF8&msa=0&msid=116475709565834901227.000483e8339e7368dae12&z=16

OSB 2010 Food Map:
http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?hl=en&ie=UTF8&msa=0&msid=116475709565834901227.000483e88c08455aadac8&z=15

These maps are now linked to from the wiki. Please, if you can add some comments to the placemarks to inform people about whether the restaurants are good/spendy (“expensive” in non-west-coast jargon)/vegan-friendly, it would be much appreciated. Feel free to add additional placemarks as well. I’ve tried to focus on options that are a short walk from the museum or along the Max line.

Please check out the maps and add pointers for guests of the conference.

You’ll need to be logged in with a Google account to make modifications to the map. And when you click ‘Edit’, a new menu appears on top of the map which allows you to add items:

Thanks!

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.

Help Write PR Content!

Lots of marketing work to do since we have several big announcements coming up: Venue, Opening Registration and more work to do around the CFP.

Tour the Mark Building at the Portland Art Museum (PAM)

At 1:30pm we’ll depart the Market Street Pub for a tour of the Mark Building, located next-door to and north across the courtyard of the Portland Art Museum (1219 SW Park Avenue).

You can add the event to your calendar and see a map to the venue at http://calagator.org/events/1250458352

Hope to see you Saturday!

We had our first volunteer sprint of 2010 at the Daily Cafe in the Pearl today.

We had about 13 people show up over about four hours, and got off to a great start with the many small and large tasks required as we build up to our call for proposals!

Things that people worked on:

* User group contact spreadsheet update
Jason and Scott started the process of updating our user group database in the google doc! They got though verifying over 50 user groups that were contacted last year.

* Draft #1 to announce the call for proposals to user group participants
Additions, suggestions and revisions are welcome. The URL was posted to the mailing list.

* Processing of audio
Ed worked a bunch on processing the audio from last year’s conference!

* Specification of the workflow for registration
Igal, Eric, Selena and Reid went over requirements that were documented from a meeting last week by Sherri and several people created detailed diagrams.
A group of us then worked through exactly how the registration is going to work, and determined that a newly-discovered third party service would likely meet our needs, as long as we could extract money from it weekly (they currently only offer money extraction *after* the event ). Reid will check in with the service on Monday about this.

* Marketing progress
Christie documented a ton of tasks for the call for proposals release, and helped us refine our processes a bit.

* Sponsorship contacts
I spent a little time following up with sponsors.

* Open Conference Ware
Audrey made fixes to rake tasks and improved the documentation!

Thanks everyone, and look forward to another volunteer sprint announcement in the next day or so!

Photo courtesy of bushtick via a Creative Commons license