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.

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!

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.”

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