Category: Bridge
The excitement never stops around here. We’re very pleased to announce our second amazing keynote speaker, Sumana Harihareswara.
Sumana Harihareswara manages projects and people, currently as Volunteer Development Coordinator at the Wikimedia Foundation, where she leads the Technical Liaisons and Developer Relations group (TLDR). She has worked at Collabora, GNOME, QuestionCopyright.org, Fog Creek Software, Behavior, and Salon.com, and contributed to the MediaWiki, AltLaw, Empathy, Miro, and Zeitgeist open source projects. She is a blogger at GeekFeminism and an advisory board member for the Ada Initiative, and was editor and release organizer for GNOME Journal. Harihareswara has presented at Foo Camp, Open Source Bridge 2011, Open Source Bridge 2010, MindCamp Seattle 2008 (“Three Models of Power: A Political Science Lens on Your Organization”), keynoted PICC, led or organized several Wikimedia hackathons, taught several courses at UC Berkeley, and performed at Bay Area stand-up comedy venues. She holds an MS in Technology Management from Columbia University. She also likes dinosaurs.
And don’t forget that we’ve extended our Call for Proposals, so you still have a chance to join what is already an excellent set of proposals, and sure to be an excellent set of speakers. You also have a chance to grab one of a limited number of 5 registrations if you act quickly and register now.
You still have one week left on our Call for Proposals, and there’s still time to apply to be on our Content Selection Committee. But whether you’ve submitted your proposal already or not (or even if you’ve decided not to submit one), we’re looking for input from the entire Open Source Bridge community on the excellent set of proposals for our 2012 event.
Is there a session proposal you’re excited to attend? Be sure to take a minute to leave comments on the proposals you’d like to see at this year’s Open Source Bridge conference, and tell your coworkers, friends, and fellow user group members to comment too.
There are two ways to tell our selection committee what proposals you’re interested in: 1) by marking the ones you like as favorites (using the little stars), and 2) by leaving comments on them (using the form at the end of each proposal). This feedback is very important to us, and tells the Content Selection Committee which sessions the community wants to see.
By marking talks as a favorite, you also provide great assistance to the scheduling process for Open Source Bridge. We try hard to avoid scheduling talks that speak to the same subject, or are marked as favorite by the same people, and so the more people that mark favorite talks, the more our schedule can avoid conflicts.
The list of favorites is publicly visible on your user profile page, so you can share the list of talks you’re excited about with others. The comments are private and only visible to the selection team; this is the place to tell us why the presentation’s topic is important, how well qualified the speaker is, and so on.
Commenting on proposals and marking your favorites is very valuable feedback for us, and allows you to further help set the direction of Open Source Bridge.
You can get started now: http://opensourcebridge.org/events/2012/proposals
Procrastinators rejoice! We’re extending the deadline for our Call for Proposals until 11:59 PDT on Friday, March 30th.
Not sure if you want to speak at Open Source Bridge? Of course you do! We’d love to have you and your ideas be a part of this year’s event, and we have some tips for you:
- 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, 2010 talks, and 2011 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 curiosity 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 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.
And did we mention that if your proposal gets accepted, you get into the conference for free?
We know you’ve been brewing some great ideas for a session or two. Well, now you have an extra fortnight to get your ideas to us!
Our call for presentation proposals is now open and we will be accepting proposals through March 16, 2012. Speaking at Open Source Bridge is a great opportunity to share your knowledge and enthusiasm. Now is the time to submit a proposal to speak at the conference!
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 and engaged open source citizenship.
The conference’s tracks are:
Business: How do you build a successful open source business?
Chemistry: What makes this work? Take the technology apart and teach us about its components.
Cooking: How do you write the script, configure the utility, debug the code, make it work? What are your best recipes?
Culture: What makes open source work? What else does the open source ethic lead us to do?
Hacks: How did you pull that off?
For a little additional inspiration, we encourage you to look through previous years’ archives of sessions presented at Open Source Bridge, but don’t let that limit you, either! We know that certain topic areas have been underrepresented in previous years, and we would very much love a diverse and broad set of proposals for this year’s bridge. We would very much love to see more talks about hardware, security, user experience design and just about everything else related to open source. No idea is too out there. We’d love to see it all.
If you speak at Open Source Bridge, we’ll happily waive the fee for your attendance. Not sure if you should register now, or hold off to see if your talk is accepted? If you wait and your talk is not accepted, we’ll give you a special discount code that will get you a ticket at 0 (that’s off the early-bird rate).
So what are you waiting for? We’d love to hear what you have to say. Begin creating your proposal today.
Attend the conference
Register to attend Open Source Bridge 2012. We offer the following kinds of tickets:
Early bird tickets at 5 until April 30th.
Full price tickets at 0, great for corporate attendees.
As always, we offer a student rate of , available anytime.
Please register soon so you can help give the event some early support.
Interested in volunteering?
We encourage those of you interested in being more involved with Open Source Bridge to sign up for our volunteer list.
Interested in sponsoring?
Let us know by contacting sponsorship@opensourcebridge.org and we’ll send you a prospectus.
We hope that you are as excited as we are about Open Source Bridge 2012. Don’t hesitate to contact us at info@opensourcebridge.org if you have any questions. We thank you very much for your support and hope to see you in Portland in June!
–The Open Source Bridge Team
June may seem so very far away, but we’re already well into planning the next event. We’ve had a few core team meetings recently, and here’s a rundown of things we’ve discussed. As always, if you have any questions, or want to get involved, let us know at info@opensourcebridge.org.
Who is the 2012 Core Planning Team?
The conference core planning team remains largely intact from last year’s event, and we’re adding a few more awesome people to this year’s team to make things even better. We’ll be updating the About Us page on the website soon and if you’re curious as to who we all are, you can check things out there.
Volunteer Outreach
We may not say it often enough, but we love our volunteers. Open Source Bridge could not happen without all of you. We’re planning a volunteer appreciation event at the moment, and will have a separate announcement out about that soon. We’re also looking at more ways to involve volunteers in pre-event planning and organization. And we’re looking at new volunteer management tools to make everything go even smoother this year.
Conference Content
We will be opening up our Call For Proposals in January. Many things will be the same as they’ve been in previous years, but we’re looking at additional topics that we’d like to encourage with this year’s CFP. If there are specific things you’d like to see at Open Source Bridge, please let us know.
Fundraising
We will have a sponsorship prospectus out soon, and are always looking for contributors to help finance Open Source Bridge. Stumptown Syndicate, the Oregon nonprofit behind the event, is also working toward 501(c)3 status and it may change how we handle sponsorship slightly.
Registration
You likely saw our latest reminder about tickets for Open Source Bridge. The 5 ticket price is only available through December 31st. After that, prices go up to 5 (full ticket price being 0).
Thanks for being a part of the Open Source Bridge community. We hope you’re looking forward to the 2012 event as much as we are!
Register for next year’s Open Source Bridge conference at an amazing early bird discount price! Treat yourself or a fellow open source citizen to a pass at http://osb12.eventbrite.com/
As a special bonus, we’ll send Open Source Bridge scarves to the first 10 people who register starting today, December 14th, through the end of the year.
Now in its 4th year, the conference will be in Portland, OR from June 26-29, 2012. The 5 early registration fee is available through December 31st.
The conference includes 3 full days of sessions across multiple tracks, an unconference day, a Hacker Lounge, after parties, code sprints, work parties, and renowned keynote speakers. Also, get ready to submit your talk ideas! Open Source Bridge’s Call for Proposals opens Monday, January 17th.
More information about Open Source Bridge, past conferences, or the track schedule format, is available on this site.
Act now to save over 0 off regular admission!
We’re quite proud of our speakers and want to continue to promote the open source work they are doing. If you didn’t catch any of the following people at Open Source Bridge, you’ll have a chance to see them speak at OSCON next week. And be sure to attend the Event Planning for Geeks talk, presented by three of our organizers!
Lance Albertson: Ganeti Web Manager: Cluster Management Made Simple and **Hands-on Virtualization with Ganeti
Matt Blair: **Cultivating Open Geo-Data in the Real-World: A Guided Tour of Three Portland-based Projects
Roger Bodamer: Building Web Applications with MongoDB and **Not Only SQL: Exploring Alternative Data Stores
Eric Day: **Introduction to OpenStack
Selena Deckelmann: Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger: PostgreSQL 9.1 and Mistakes Were Made
Audrey Eschright: Event Planning for Geeks
Paul Fenwick: **All Your Brains Suck – Known Bugs And Exploits In Wetware
Dawn Foster: **Crunching the numbers: Open Source Community Metrics
Eric Holscher: **A Completely Open Source Django Website
Christie Koehler, co-chair of Open Source Bridge: Event Planning for Geeks and Tools for Spelunking a New-to-You Codebase
Peter Krenesky: Ganeti Web Manager: Cluster Management Made Simple and **Hands-on Virtualization with Ganeti
Shyam Mani: **DNSSEC @ Mozilla
Jeremie Miller: **Your Personal Data Locker
Sherri Montgomery: Event Planning for Geeks
Sarah Novotny, program chair of OSCON: OSCON Town Hall
Noirin Plunkett: How to Win Friends and Write Documentation
Jacinta Richardson: Perl Programming Best Practices 2011 and Teach Your Class to Fish, and They’ll Have Food for a Lifetime
Garrett Serack: **CoApp—An Open Source Package Manager For Windows
Sarah Sharp: **Growing Food with Open Source
Chris Smith: **Transit Appliances: Open Data, Open Hardware and Open Source Software
James Turnbull: **Introduction to OpenStack and Vagrant & Puppet: Deploying Development Environments … Fast
Matt Youell: Wheeler
If you enjoyed these talks, be sure to register for Open Source Bridge 2012 to see more of these great speakers and topics.
[All talks with ** by them are a variation of a presentation given at Open Source Bridge this year.]
Open Source Bridge is a 100% volunteer-run event and we need your help to make it awesome! One of the most direct ways you can help is to volunteer on-site during the conference. We have many volunteer positions available — from simple errand-running, to the more complicated registration, speaker lounge, and assistant volunteer coordinator positions. We have something for everyone, and you don’t have to be an über coder to be a stellar volunteer.
Because we <3 our volunteers, we will provide a complimentary ticket to those who commit at least 8 hours of their time. (Note: we can’t provide refunds to those who have already purchaed their ticket.)
And, for the first time, all volunteers will recieve a special Open Source Bridge volunteer t-shirt. Volunteers will also get their own lounge complete with yummy snacks.
Now is your chance! The volunteer schedule is now open for sign-ups. Visit the How to Sign-Up page on our wiki for full instructions on how to sign-up as a volunteer.
UPCOMING MEET-AND-GREETS
To learn more about volunteering on-site, please come to one of the following meet-and-greets:
- Monday, June 6th from 6:30 to 7:30pm – Lucky Labrador Overlook Tap Room: http://calagator.org/events/1250460674
- Monday, June 13th from 6:30 to 7:30pm – Lucky Labrador Overlook Tap Room: http://calagator.org/events/1250460675
- Tuesday, June 14th, 12:30 to 1:15pm – US Bank Tower, Second Floor lunch area: http://calagator.org/events/1250460676
ORIENTATION SESSIONS
We will also have an on-site volunteer orientation the day before the conference. While not mandatory, it’d be great if you could attend:
- Monday, June 20th at 12pm to 1pm – Orientation/Setup for Open Source Bridge: http://calagator.org/events/1250460677
- Monday, June 20th at 4pm to 5pm – Orientation/Setup for Open Source Bridge: http://calagator.org/events/1250460678
If you can’t come to any of the meet-and-greets or orientations, or just have questions, please contact our volunteer coordinator, Shepherd Griffin, at volunteer@opensourcebridge.org.
Volunteering is the essence of Open Source Bridge and we are excited to work with you!
Hello all,
Open Source Bridge starts today!
Registration opens at 8am each day of the conference, and a Continental Breakfast will be provided for attendees.
We’re kicking off Open Source Bridge today at 9am with the morning keynote “Hacking for Freedom” by Peter Fein.
Speaker sessions begin at 10am.
Lunch will be catered by Nicholas Restaurant at noon.
The day’s sessions continue past the scheduled speakers, with Birds of a Feather (BoFs) talks, which are free and open to the public, and begin at 7pm. Check them out or schedule your own this week.
If you plan on attending the BoFs or join in on hacking sessions in the on-site 24-Hour Hacker Lounge, be sure to register for a Community Pass, which is a free option to attend evening events.
Events
A free and open-to-the-public Opening Reception in the Hacker Lounge (Buchan Hall) begins at 6pm.
Off-site evening activities? Sauce Labs and Yammer are co-sponsoring a late-night party at Someday Lounge from 8pm-late with plenty of free booze, food, and geekery. The Yammer and Sauce crews will be mingling about and would love to share a beer with you!
Citizenship Award
We are recognizing exemplary open source citizens who participate at this conference. If you spot someone who is really making a difference for fellow attendees, we will be collecting nominations at the Registration desk for an award to be presented at the end of the conference.
Hashtag & Flickr Group
The hashtag for this year’s conference is #osb11. We also have a Flickr group and encourge you to take photos and upload them there.
Please review the conference’s Code of Conduct.
Find a volunteer in an Open Source Bridge t-shirt if you have a question. Tweet at @osbridge if you have a less-immediate concern or feedback.
Volunteers, be sure to check your schedule in the Volunteer Lounge. If you’re not volunteering yet, but want to help out, we still have shifts available. It’s a minimum 2-hour commitment, but an essential part of making this conference happen. Stop by the Registration/Info desk to sign up.