In the interview, Selena and Audrey highlight some of the thinking behind the conference, provide some insight into the unconference portion of Open Source Bridge, and talk about the hacker lounge. Among other things.

On a tangential note, we’re proud to announce that Strange Love Live will be on the floor at Open Source Bridge. During the day, they’ll be streaming interviews with speakers and attendees. And Friday night, they’ll be broadcasting live from the wrap up party.

But you can’t be on the Strange Love Live set if you’re not there. So please register today—or sign up to volunteer.

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.”

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.