Thank you all for your patience as we worked to come up with a schedule that will hopefully suit everybody. We’re still sorting out a few remaining details and expecting some additions to the schedule over the next few days, but as the bulk of the schedule is in place, we wanted to let you all know when each session will be so that you can start to plan your time at Open Source Bridge.

It’s only four short weeks until Open Source Bridge is here, and we hope you’re as excited as we are. We look forward to seeing all of you in June!

This year’s lineup features knowledgeable speakers covering a broad range of open source topics. So, if you’ve been holding off on registering, now is a great time to do so!

We’re still waiting to hear back from a few speakers, so stay tuned in the next few days as we fill in a few gaps – but the bulk of our speakers have responded to acceptances, and we’re happy to share what we have with you today!

We’re still finalizing the session schedule for Open Source Bridge, and plan to announce that in the very near future as well.

Without further ado:

Business

• Diary of an Open Source Sysadmin Entrepreur by Luke Kanies
• Doing NoSQL with SQL by Michael Widenius
• Drupal distributions, an open source product model by Lev Tsypin
• How 5 People with 4 Day Jobs in 3 Time Zones Enjoyed 2 Years Writing 1 Book by Ian Dees
• How Governments are Building Communities with Open Source by Chris Strahl
• How to ask for money by Selena Deckelmann and Scott Kveton
• Improving estimates for web projects by Alex Kroman
• Keeping Agile at the Heart of the Internet by Larissa Shapiro
• Learn Tech Management In 45 Minutes by Sumana Harihareswara
• Marketing: You’re Soaking In It! by VM Brasseur
• Open Source at Microsoft – Less Evil and More Organized than you’d think by Scott Hanselman
• Open Sourcing Your Legacy Project: A Game of Adventure, Danger and Low Cunning by VM Brasseur
• Pulling the Plug by Ryan Snyder
• Sales-fu by Amye Scavarda
• Starting and Scaling a Startup Outside of the Silicon Valley by Michael Richardson
• The Independent Software Developer by Peat Bakke
• Turning Mediocre Products Into Awesome Products by Bryan Zmijewski

Chemistry

• Beaming up with alien and lua by Brandon Philips
• Cookies are bad for you: Improving security on the web by Jesse Hallett
• Gearman: From the Worker’s Perspective by Brian Aker
• Geek Fitness: Your body is not just transportation for your brain by Kurt Sussman
• GraphViz: The open-source body scanner for code, systems, and data. by Matt Youell
• OSWALD: Lessons from and for the Open Hardware Movement by Tim Harder
• Open Source GIS Desktop Smackdown by David Percy, Darrell Fuhriman, and Christian Schumann-Curtis
• Parrot: State of the VM by Christoph Otto
• Previously Untitled Meditation on the Zen of Python by Dan Colish
• Qs on Queues by Eric Day
• So, you want to make a map? by Sarah Beecroft and Darrell Fuhriman
• The Current State of OAuth 2 by Aaron Parecki
• The History of Concurrency by Michael Schurter
• The Locker Project, TeleHash, and You by Jeremie Miller

Cooking

• A Dozen Databases in 45 Minutes by Eric Redmond
• Composing Software Systems by Jamey Sharp and Josh Triplett
• Cooking GeoData with PostGIS by Larry Price
• Creating Your Specific Live GNU/Linux Distribution with Debian Live Build by Steven Shiau, Chenkai Sun, Yao-Tsung Wang, and Thomas Tsai
• DNSSEC @ Mozilla by Shyam Mani
• Data Science in the Open by John Taylor
• Data Warehousing 101 by Josh Berkus
• Designing Error Aggregation Systems by Gavin McQuillan
• Fast VoIP: Build your own Asterisk server in less than an hour by Jonathan Thurman
• Getting Started with FPGAs and HDLs by Phil Tomson
• Getting Started with Semantic Web Applications by Leif Warner and Brian Panulla
• Hands-on Virtualization with Ganeti by Lance Albertson and Peter Krenesky
• Have Your Cake and Eat It Too: Meta-Programming Techniques for Java by Howard Lewis Ship
• Inclusive Design From The Start by Eitan Isaacson
• Intro to CouchDB by J Chris Anderson
• Inviting Contributors to Open Source Webdev through Virtualization by Les Orchard
• JavaScript up and down the stack by Mikeal Rogers
• King of the Data Jungle by Melissa Hollingsworth
• Massively scaling Django for a global audience with Playdoh by Frederic Wenzel
• Modern Perl Made Painless by chromatic x
• No More Joins by Nuno Job, J Chris Anderson, and Roger Bodamer
• Preventing runtime errors at compile time by David Lazar, Michael Ernst, and Werner Dietl
• Put THAT in your pipe and deploy it! by David Brewer
• Read the Docs: A completely open source Django web site by Eric Holscher
• Run your Javascript everywhere, with Jellyfish. by Adam Christian
• Similar, But Not The Same: Designing Projects Around Three Open Datasets by Matt Blair
• Technical Debt by Elizabeth Naramore
• Testing Antipatterns by Matt Robinson
• The Big Data Exploratorium: Data Mining, from Patents to Memes by Noah Pepper and Devin Chalmers
• Twiggy: The First New Logger in Fifteen Years by Peter Fein
• User, user, who art thou? by Jacinta Richardson
• Write better Javascript with RequireJS by Chris Pitzer
• ePUB – What, Why, and How by Jason LaPier

Culture

• Geek Choir 3.0 (Short Form) by Michael Alan Brewer
• Get ‘Em While They’re Young: Cultivating the Next Generation of Open Source Contributors by Jane Wells
• Give a Great Tech Talk by Ian Dees and Josh Berkus
• Hacker Dojo: Anarchy with Respect by Kitt Hodsden
• How Python saved 263 lives, and our sanity by Jonathan Karon
• How not to be a Jerk OR Something Awesome About Brains by Paul Fenwick
• Is your Community Connecting to the Future? by Mary Beth Henry
• Kick Asana by Sherri Montgomery
• Law is Code, and We’re Here to Open Source It by Robb Shecter and Lisa Hackenberger
• Learn open source skills without embarrassing yourself by Asheesh Laroia
• Mozilla School of Webcraft @P2PU by John Britton
• Online Community Metrics: Tips and Techniques for Measuring Participation by Dawn Foster
• Open Source: Saving the World by Noirin Shirley
• Open source: Open to whom? by Valerie Aurora
• Seven Habits Of Highly Obnoxious Trolls by Bart Massey, Selena Deckelmann, and Duke Leto
• Transit Appliances by Chris Smith

Hacks

• 5 Easy Pieces: “Rabid Prototyping” With “Physical Computing” and other dirty tricks. by Donald Davis
• Cloud Scaling: High Performance Even in Virtualized Environments. by Gavin McQuillan
• Control Emacs with Your Beard: the All-Singing All-Dancing Intro to Hacking the Kinect by Devin Chalmers and Greg Borenstein
• Drizzle, Virtualizing and Scaling MySQL for the Future by Brian Aker
• Growing food with Open Source by Sarah Sharp
• Hardware/Software Integration with Txtzyme by Ward Cunningham
• IRL: how do geeks undermine their presentations and conversations with body language by sarah novotny
• Location-Based Hacks – How to Automate your life with SMS and GPS by Amber Case and Aaron Parecki
• Snooze, the totally RESTful language by Markus Roberts

These tips aren’t meant to be exclusive to Open Source Bridge. We hope you will be able to apply some of them when you submit to speak elsewhere.

Have your own tips? Add them in the comments.

Read and understand our Call for Proposals

This falls under the general “know your audience” type of advice. Before you submit your talk, you should understand what type of content we’re soliciting.

Because we are trying to promote cross-pollination as well as provide space for in-depth discussions, our Call for Proposals is rather broad. We’re looking for:

• Useful recipes for software development, systems administration, and working with open source. (Cooking)
• Understanding how our systems work, in order to improve and extend. (Chemistry)
• Building open source businesses that thrive. (Business)
• Exploring how open source extends through technology into our communities. (Culture)
• Tinkering, experimenting and bending the rules to make hardware and software do what we want. (Hacks)

You can read more about our conference tracks here.

Look over previously accepted talks

You can get an idea of what we’re looking for by reviewing the proposals we accepted as sessions for previous years (2009 talks and 2010 talks).

Be specific, but also clear and concise

Let us know the question and give an idea of the answer. Make sure to give clear details about the content of your talk.

Write well and use standard English

Use proper spelling, capitalization, grammar, and punctuation. Use the active voice. Proposals without these things are difficult to read. Our content committee has a lot to read through; please don’t make this process more difficult.

Provide a good title

A title can make or break a talk. It should be concise, yet comprehensible. Clever, but not overly so. Sparking curiousity is good, but make sure people can tell what you’re going to be talking about. If your title accurately reflects both the subject matter and the tone of your talk, your ideal audience will find you.

Explain why you’d give a good talk

You don’t need to be an expert, but if you are, let us know. Don’t assume we’ll know who you are even if you’ve given a bunch of talks all over the world. Also don’t assume that we won’t pick you if you’ve never spoken. Have you given this talk at a user group with overwhelming success? Let us know in your proposal’s Note to organizers field.

Spread the word

Open Source Bridge allows public viewing and coments on all proposed submissions. Advertise that you’ve submitted a talk (we even have badges for this) so that people can comment and let our selection committee know they want to see your talk.

Ask questions

Not sure if your talk would be appropriate for OSBridge? Have other burning questions that are keeping you from submitting? The co-chairs and content commitee are available to answer your questions: content@opensourcebridge.org.

Practice makes perfect

One sure way to test a talk is to give it to a small audience first. These include your local user group, a brown bag session at your company, or even to a group of friends.

Hopefully these tips will help your chances in getting your talk proposal accepted. Don’t forget that the last day to submit proposals is Wednesday, March 16th.

• Ace Hotel: $109.00 per night
• Jupiter Hotel: $75.00 per night
• Paramount Hotel: $94.00 per night
• Benson Hotel: $129.00 per night
• Hotel Modera: $99.00 per night
• Best Western Convention Center: $54.00 per night
• Courtyard City Center: $80.00 per night
• Comfort Inn City Center: 70.00 per night
• Mark Spencer Hotel: $75.00 per night

View Open Source Bridge 2010 Lodging in a larger map

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!

Say you were organizing a kick-ass conference that wasn’t focused on specific technologies or languages, but rather on being an open source citizen.

You’d want to contact all the user groups out there, and not just the local ones, hosted in your city, but the ones in other cities around the world. You’d want to get these people excited about your conference, and you know they’d get excited.

Why? Because your conference is different. It’s focused on open source as a whole, as the sum of its various parts, not on the parts.

You’d want to get these people excited, but you just can’t possibly reach out to everyone.

What do you do?

You put a call out to anyone who belongs to a user group and ask for help spreading the word.

This is that call for Open Source Bridge.

So, we spent all day Sunday, trying to contact as many user group leaders as possible, and not just the user groups focused on open source projects, but other groups too. After all, OSB isn’t just for open source developers. It’s also for people in IT too.

Problem is that we can’t possibly scale to reach every user group that might want to participate. We’re just humble volunteers, and we don’t have infinite time, sadly.

That’s where you come in, my new best friend. If you’re made it to here, you’re probably a little interested. Great. Do you belong to a user group? Even better. Would you mind mentioning our conference to your fellow members? Hmm . . .

What’s in it for you? Glad you asked. We’re offering discounted registration for people registering with the user group code, and we’re giving a free registration to each user group to raffle off to members. Fun, right?

Interested? You can find more details here.

The deadline to submit proposals is quickly approaching (ahem, March 31), so hurry if you have a great idea for a session.

Need more information or want to help more? Sweet, check out how you can get involved.

We really need and appreciate your help.

If you’re a student, you can register and attend Open Source Bridge for the low, low price of $99.

You read that right. $99 and all you need to do is show us your current student identification when you arrive at the conference.

Not a bad deal.

Photo by LWY on Flickr, used under Creative Commons

Since we began organizing the conference last year, we’ve had the help and advice of Bart Massey, an associate professor in the Computer Sciences Department at Portland State University (PSU). Bart was instrumental in helping us secure PSU as a sponsor, and he also supported our desire to keep the cost as affordable as possible for students.

We’re planning a conference for developers, by developers, and Open Source Bridge will be a three-day crash course in open source citizenry, giving attendees access to all aspects of open source through our famous five tracks: Cooking, Chemistry, Hacking, Culture and Business.

Say you’re a CS student. Chances are you know about open source and maybe you already contribute. Come to the conference, check out projects and meet the people who write the code. Find a project, or just dip your toe in the pool and see if you like it. (If you’re already swimming in open source and have a project you’re excited about, consider submitting a proposal.)

Say you’re an IT or IS student. Ditto. You probably know about open source. Maybe you don’t contribute, but you want to know what’s what because you’re smart and you know that increasingly, employers are evaluating open source for enterprise use. Here’s your chance to get an edge; come to the conference, meet the people who write the code, ask them the hard questions, watch and learn.

Say you’re a business student. You don’t write code, but you’ve got big ideas. You’re just looking for the right technical people to help you realize your vision. Come to the conference, check out the business tracks, and mix and mingle in the hacker lounge. Maybe you’ll find a startup partner.

Sound enticing? Don’t over-think it, register now, make sure to pick the student rate, and tell all your friends.

When we had our very first planning meeting for the conference, we made a big list of everything we wanted to cover (with colorful commentary—sorry, we were pretty excited).

Our initial conference content outline

In the course of the discussion, we realized that if every topic we were excited about had its own track, we would have way too many of them to manage. Also, it would go against one of our core principles: we want to bring people together, not shuffle them off into separate rooms. So we decided to take a different tack, and group the content around how we approach it, not what the underlying technology is.

That’s how we ended up splitting the most technology-heavy topics into three tracks: Cooking, Chemistry, and Hacks. I think they make the most sense if viewed as a group. We learn what to do via cooking, following recipes until we’re able to improvise our own. We learn why it works by studying the chemistry, which lets us see what’s happening at lower levels. Finally, we rewrite the rules by hacking. This isn’t a linear progression; we may jump from one approach to another frequently in the course of our work.

The other two tracks round out the picture. Business is about how we earn a living. Culture is all of the other things we do around our work, like organizing user groups, managing projects, and applying the open source ethos to other areas of our lives.

We arranged these five tracks to cover the full scope of our open source existence. Within them, there’s plenty of room to talk about individual languages and tools, even at the advanced level, but sharing with people from a range of backgrounds. We can all learn much from each other.

Hopefully, this provides a better frame of reference for our tracks. (And now you’ve got even more reason to submit your own proposal.)

Lots of people took notes and hopefully will publish blog entries. I’ll link them here as they come in. Feel free to pingback as well.

Open Source Bridge will be a completely volunteer-run, community effort to connect developers working with open source. We’re kicking things off with a town hall discussion and planning meeting on October 30th, 7:30pm at CubeSpace (located at 622 SE Grand Avenue in Portland). We’ll talk about overall goals for the conference, then break into small working groups to start tackling the event planning needs. If you can, bring an audio or video recorder to help document the discussion.

Please let us know if you can attend. If October 30 doesn’t work for you, let us know as we will be having a second meeting on the west-side. We’d very much like to have your participation in making this conference a fun, educational experience.

You can RSVP by filling in the form at
http://spreadsheets.google.com/viewform?key=p1ZDddPXGskYFX5NnM9FaXA&hl=en ]]> http://opensourcebridge.org/blog/2008/10/open-source-bridge-town-hall/feed/ 5