Open Source Bridge » talks

Proposal Submission Tips

christie — Tue, 01 Mar 2011 22:16:40 +0000

We’re getting close to the deadline for proposal submissions and thought it might be helpful to provide some tips about how to get your proposal accepted.

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.

Open Source Bridge final schedule: Let the “how am I going to go to all of these cool talks?” begin

Rick Turoczy — Fri, 15 May 2009 17:34:09 +0000

We, here at Open Source Bridge, have been humbled and awed by the amount of involvement from open source citizens around the world. First, we had a ton of proposal pour into our proposal system. Then we got a ton of comments about which speakers should be selected. Finally, we’ve had continued feedback on the strength of the selected talks.

We couldn’t be happier. But there was only one problem: we didn’t know who was going to talk when.

But now, we do. Introducing the Open Source Bridge schedule.

The schedule will provide—at a glance—the time, title, track (including a color key for all the respective tracks), and room of each scheduled talk. Need more details? No problem. Simply roll over a particular talk and you’ll get the additional details you need, including an excerpt and scheduled speakers—as well as the ability to drill deeper into information on the talk, the speaker, the track, and the room.

So have it! Tell your friends! But most importantly start filling your calendar with Open Source Bridge goodness!

(Image courtesy Aaron Hockley. Used under Creative Commons.)

Announcing the Open Source Bridge conference speakers

Rick Turoczy — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 18:59:49 +0000

After much deliberation, reviewing more than 260 submissions, and taking into account more than 400 comments, it is our honor and pleasure to announce the confirmed Open Source Bridge speakers for 2009.

Please bear in mind that there are still some outstanding “accepted but not yet confirmed” speakers, so this list will likely change. For the latest and greatest list of confirmed talks, see the Open Source Bridge sessions.

Business

Chemistry

Cooking

Culture

Hacks

If you were among those accepted, congratulations! Please share your achievement far and wide. If your talk didn’t happen to make the cut, don’t fret. You could still propose your talk for the unconference sessions on Friday or gather some folks in the 24-hour hacker lounge for a chat.

We can’t wait to see these sessions in June. If you feel the same way, please register today.

A sneak peek at our accepted talks

selena — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 07:25:46 +0000

Why hello there!

The Open Source Bridge team has been hard at work: cranking out code, contacting user groups and reviewing all the amazing proposals we’ve received since we opened our call on January 26.

It’s paid off with more registrations, our first Gold Star member, and even more great proposals.

You’ve been good to us.

Because you’ve been so nice, we’d like to share with you a few proposals we are very excited about. We’re so excited, that we jumped the gun a little, and asked these folks if they wouldn’t mind committing to present at our conference, like, now.

We’ve got lots of work to do tomorrow. While we take a little break and enjoy some pie, please take a peek into our first scheduled talks:

RubySpec: What does my Ruby do?, Brian Ford
Brian Ford is leading an effort to create a complete, executable specification for Ruby. We think this is a great project, and can’t wait to hear from the source how it’s going. Brian is a local, and we hear he’s part of our local Ruby Brigade.
Drizzle, Rethinking MySQL for the Web, Brian Aker
There’s been a lot of discussion about MySQL’s future. Come see it as Brian Aker envisions it: trimmer, modular and optimized for the cloud. Brian hails from Seattle, WA and would really like a bullet train between there and Portland.
Advanced Git tutorial: Not your average VCS., Sarah Sharp
Sarah Sharp gave a great presentation about git at a local user group where an audience member called the knowedge she shared “dangerous”. You can be dangerous too! Sarah is a Linux kernel hacker in the Portland area, and a rocket enthusiast. And she rides bikes.
Remember Tcl/ Tk? Grandpa might be old, but he can still kick your ass!, Webb Sprague
Come see the talk Nat Torkington made fun of. Webb Sprague teaches an introductory bash class at our local Free Geek chapter once a week, works mostly from Eugene on his PhD research, knows a ton about PostGIS, and loves the idea of Cyborg Anthropology. We had no idea that he liked Tcl/Tk.
Open Source Library Software: Empowering Libraries – Creating Opportunities, Lori Ayre
Are you a Librarian? Interested in Open source software for libraries? Come hear Lori talk about the culture shift that needs to happen in our libraries to get FOSS in there. Those people who are interested in “switcher” talks, will want to attend this talk to learn another way of making the pitch to shift from proprietary to open source in your business or among your peers.
The Linux Kernel Development model, Greg Kroah-Hartman
Greg K-H gave the opening keynote address at the Linux Plumbers Conference last year. My hope is that people new to free and open source software development, as well as people currently involved in open source projects can come learn how the most visible and successful FOSS project actually works. Greg K-H is a Linux kernel hacker living in the Portland area. He has a twitter account that used to track his command-line history.
Configuration Management Panel, Moderated by James Turnbull
Configuration management is the future of system administration. James Turnbull has gotten together the biggest names in configuration management – the original authors and developers themselves – in ONE MONSTER PANEL. That’s: cfengine, Puppet, Opscode, AutomateIT and bcfg2. Check it out! Be amazed. James is from Australia and claims to not like long walks on the beach.
My Grand Experiment: A Portland Women-focused Tech Group., Gabrielle Roth
Gabrielle Roth started Code-N-Splode after OSCON 2007. What started as a conversation between 3 people, grew into a large, free-wheeling programmers haunt for women. Come hear about how she did it, what she learned, and where she wants to go next with the group. User groups are very important to the co-chairs of the conference, as that’s how both of them got involved with open source community. This talk will be a great case study for anyone wanting to start a user group.
Is the Web Down: a Practical Tutorial on How the Web Works, Michael Schwern, Joshua Keroes
We first met Michael Schwern (known to most people as ‘Schwern’), and Joshua Keroes (known to most people as ‘ua’, pronounced “ooo-uh”) at the Portland Perlmongers. Schwern is known for his ability to explain complicated topics in easy to understand ways, and Joshua knows his Perl and his networking. United, these two will be an unstoppable “how it works” force. Schwern and Joshua live in the Portland area. Both seem to enjoy fine, mixed cocktails, and Perl.
HOWTO earn an open source living without taking on investors or selling your soul, Brian Jamison

Brian Jamison is CEO of Open Sourcery, an open source-focused consulting company in the Portland area. We love that they want to share their strategy for success with you, and, at least from the description, their model seems like the type of sustainable business typical of the Portland area. We are not as focused on venture capital and investment, and perhaps more interested in quality of life, the long term plan, and keeping our souls safe.

A Tour of CodePlex, Sara Ford
Sara Ford’s submission grabbed us — Microsoft hosts open source projects? We’re curious about the features CodePlex offers, what the community is like and how it is growing. Our hunch is that peering into CodePlex will give you ideas, and hopefully, we can embrace and extend them.
Drop ACID and think about data, Bob Ippolito
We heard great things about Bob Ippolito from our friends that just went to PyCon 2009. As much as the ‘Drop ACID’ title pained one of our co-chairs (for relational database reasons), Bob’s presentation promises to be a fabulous tour of the “database” engines popping up for the web (also for the “cloud”).
Organizing a Volunteer-Driven Open Source Community Project, Sarah Beecroft, molly vogt, Joaquin Lippincott, Melissa Anderson
Last but not least, this talk promises to be amazing. Sarah Beecroft is an Americorps volunteer who led a team that created http://www.rosecityresource.org/, the online version of a comprehensive print guide for public services and assistance programs in the greater Portland area. We’ll let you visit the site and see it for yourself. But, briefly:

The development of this website was an entirely volunteer-driven community effort; it didn’t cost a physical dollar and was built with the intention of providing an existing organization with a sustainable tool to better do what they already work very hard to do well.

Wow. Anyway. Street Roots now maintains this resource. They are a small community and activist newspaper success story in a time where many newspapers are going away. We can’t wait for this panel, both to be inspired, and to find out how they did it — so that our own projects can be better in the future.

We hope to see you all in June!

P.S. Don’t see your favorite topic? Make sure to comment on your favorite Open Source Bridge proposals to ensure that your favorite gets picked!