Open Source Bridge

Learn how to get started in open source. You can help your favorite open source project, even if you don't think you're "a good enough programmer". You just have to know where to start, and here you'll learn 29 different starting points where you can pitch in and make a difference in the software that you use every day.

What do bananas have to do with censorship? What do polyamorous people have in common with fax machines? How can you help your ideas have cyber-sex? In this far-reaching seminar, join Social Justice Technologist and free software developer maymay as he explains the 101's of how to make keeping your content up easy and taking it down hard. More important than merely a crash-course on tools, learn the fundamentals of how to build anti-censorship techniques directly into your publishing process using nothing more technologically complex than copy-and-paste. Whether you're a non-technical individual or a savvy multi-national organization, you'll discover how you can put data portability, distributed publishing, and censorship circumvention tactics to use right away in order to stay one step ahead of those who would call you "obscene."

We have come to a point where nearly everyone is expected to have at least cursory knowledge of graphics applications, and rather than shell out $650 for a program you’re primarily interested in using for editing screenshots many in the tech community knows to download GIMP and use that $650 to fuel their caffeine and online gaming addictions. Unfortunately this is not the case with artists. From the moment you enter art school you’re chained to proprietary applications and I know I don’t have to proselytize to you lot about that. So we end up with one group of people being paid to use a free program for the most rudimentary of tasks and we have a second group of people who could be exploiting the most bleeding edge features of that program, but who are instead spending money they don’t have on products they may not need. There’s also the option to pirate those applications, but that’s a whole other talk.

"Open Source, in its majestic equality, guarantees both programmers and non-programmers alike the right to alter and recompile their software." The battle for Open Source Legitimacy is largely over: in many sectors, it's actually the preferred alternative. In the task-focused world that most casual computer users inhabit, however, "open-ness" is a meaningless abstraction and the walled gardens of closed source competitors offer compelling advantages. In this session, I'll explore the reasons that people make their choices, point out why "moral arguments" about open source are unlikely to change those choices, and discuss ways that our communities can further the ideals of Open Source without demonizing Grandpa's iPad.

Interested in helping others learn to code? How do you help give them a running start, without throwing roadblocks in their way? Come get better at helping other people get better.

Sumana Harihareswara gave our opening keynote, "Be Bold: An Origin Story".

Beer, cookies, psychopathy, happiness, regret—these are all things the world's greatest scientists have studied in detail. Learn how humans work, and how to get the most out of interacting with them.

Jason Scott, a member of the activist preservation group Archive Team, describes how open source projects and outlook have helped and improved the achieving of the group's goals.

In the 1980s, my grandfather reached onto the bookshelves of his cigar-smoke-seasoned garage laboratory and pulled down a three-ring binder that would change my life. Come hear how a 50-year-old introduction to binary logic has managed to stay relevant after all these decades, and what it means for our own efforts to teach and document technical subjects.

The internet is full of information. Some of this information was made to help people learn. A subset exists under open licenses. These open educational resources (OERs) are used all over the world for learning and teaching. This talk will cover what some of them are and explore ways they have been (and can be) used for mentors and self-learners--both as individuals and in peer-study groups.

In March of 2011 I was named by Drupal project lead Dries Buytaert as lead of an initiative to improve configuration management for the next release. This talk will discuss how I went from lone coder to community leader and some of the lessons I learned along the way.

Meet the pioneers of the new Indie Web, learn what's changed, and how you too can reclaim your content, your data, your online identity. Join our panelists as they debate a variety of different approaches and learn how you too can get started and join the new Indie Web.

How a partnership between the Oregon Department of Education and Oregon State University is using open source technology to help Oregon's K-12 teachers.

Have you ever written a nice friendly email and gotten a reply that seems like they read a whole different email? Textual communication has special problems. This talk will help you mitigate them: ensuring that what you mean to say is what is understood; interpreting messages that seem totally out of whack; and increasing empathic bandwidth.

For centuries we have learned to solve problems with a linear approach. This originated with Isaac Newton in the sevententh century and assumes that everything in the world is connected through cause and effect. Systems thinking throws away that assumption and examines the universe as small pieces connected into a complex network. You will learn how a systems thinking approach can be used to create robust groups that don't have leaders.

The Federated Wiki offers a new form of conversation well suited for charting our collective future.

Yoga returns to Open Source Bridge! Come with your stiff shoulders, sore wrists, tight hips and aching back. Leave with ideas on how to incorporate 5 minutes of practice into your busy day to care for your body and mind.