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.

Image courtesy of Rick Turoczy.

Open Source Bridge is 100% volunteer run event and we can’t have a successfull event without you! One of the most direct ways you can make OSBridge a fantastic event is to volunteer on-site, during the conference. We have many volunteer positions available, from dead simple errand-running, to the more complicated registration, speaker lounge, and volunteer coordinator positions. We have something for everyone, and you don’t have to be an uber coder to be a stellar volunteer.

Because we <3 our volunteers, and as we did last year, we’ll be providing a complimentary ticket to those volunteers who commit at least 8 hours of their time at the conference.

To learn more about volunteering on-site, come to one of the following Volunteer Meet & Greets:

Tuesday, May 11th from 6:30 to 8pm – Lucky Labrador Overlook Tap Room
http://calagator.org/events/1250458647

Wednesay, May 19th from Noon to 1:30pm – Lunch 2.0 at the Portland Development Commission
http://calagator.org/events/1250458488

Monday, May 24th from 6:30 to 8pm – Lucky Labrador Brew Pub
http://calagator.org/events/1250458648

You can read a sneak-preview of the on-site volunteer positions on our wiki:
http://opensourcebridge.org/2010/wiki/Volunteer_Positions

If you can’t come to any of the meet and greets, or have questions before then, please contact our volunteer coordinator, Christie Koehler at volunteer@opensourcebridge.org.

We had our first volunteer sprint of 2010 at the Daily Cafe in the Pearl today.

We had about 13 people show up over about four hours, and got off to a great start with the many small and large tasks required as we build up to our call for proposals!

Things that people worked on:

* User group contact spreadsheet update
Jason and Scott started the process of updating our user group database in the google doc! They got though verifying over 50 user groups that were contacted last year.

* Draft #1 to announce the call for proposals to user group participants
Additions, suggestions and revisions are welcome. The URL was posted to the mailing list.

* Processing of audio
Ed worked a bunch on processing the audio from last year’s conference!

* Specification of the workflow for registration
Igal, Eric, Selena and Reid went over requirements that were documented from a meeting last week by Sherri and several people created detailed diagrams.
A group of us then worked through exactly how the registration is going to work, and determined that a newly-discovered third party service would likely meet our needs, as long as we could extract money from it weekly (they currently only offer money extraction *after* the event ). Reid will check in with the service on Monday about this.

* Marketing progress
Christie documented a ton of tasks for the call for proposals release, and helped us refine our processes a bit.

* Sponsorship contacts
I spent a little time following up with sponsors.

* Open Conference Ware
Audrey made fixes to rake tasks and improved the documentation!

Thanks everyone, and look forward to another volunteer sprint announcement in the next day or so!

Photo courtesy of bushtick via a Creative Commons license