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.

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.

We would love to hear all of those interesting ideas you have in your head—and so would everyone else. That’s why we will be accepting your proposals for Open Source Bridge talks through March 31.

What kind of proposals, you ask? Open Source Bridge strives to be a different kind of open source conference. One that welcomes all open source languages, platforms, and pursuits while embracing responsible open source citizenship. As such, we’ve worked to craft categories that allow people to share their thoughts and ideas, independent of their chosen development methods.

Those categories include:

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

Need more details? See the guidance for submitting a proposal.

So what are you waiting for? We’d love to hear what you have to say. Begin creating your proposal today.