Big day for Open Source Bridge

The word of the day for the Open Source Bridge team? Serendipity. Or maybe serendipitous.

Either way, it was quite an interesting day for the volunteers working to bring an open source conference to fruition here in Portland in June.

We were excited to get a mention from Dawn Foster in Web Worker Daily as she interviewed Audrey Eschright on community organized conferences:

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. There’s a lot of extra planning involved in doing a 1,000-person conference compared to a 300 person BarCamp. You can pull off an unconference in a short period of time, with fairly limited resources, but a big conference requires more structure.

Then the folks at OpenSourcery were kind enough to give us a few minutes to talk about the conference during a packed Lunch 2.0. Unfortunately for me, Jake Kuramoto successfully threw me under the bus again, much like Seattle Lunch 2.0.

Then, little did we know that, while we were enjoying OpenSourcery’s hospitality, something incredibly—well serendipitous—was happening at the same time.

Dave Winer tweeted:

And then he found Open Source Bridge. And then he wrote a post called “An Alternate OSCON?” offering:

Then someone sent me a pointer to http://opensourcebridge.org/ which is in Portland on June 17-19. Now I have an incentive to see if people want to go there. San Jose is closer to Berkeley, so I’d rather go there, but a really open OSCON would be something that’s worth supporting. There are other new projects that don’t have space at OSCON, so maybe we could all get together in Portland and see what happens.

(If you’re not familiar with Dave Winer, you should be. According to Wikipedia, he is “generally credited with the exposition of RSS as ‘Really Simple Syndication,’ now a world-wide phenomenon, and the first to implement the feed ‘enclosure‘ feature, one of several necessary ingredients for podcasting at the time it first emerged.”)

Whoof. That’s a big unplanned day of serendipity.

It’s incredibly gratifying to see the momentum continue to build for this entirely volunteer run conference. It’s good for Portland. And it’s good for the open source community.

If you’re interested in helping bring open source citizens to Portland in June, we’d love to have your help.

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Published by Rick Turoczy

More than mildly obsessed with the Portland startup community. Founder and editor at Silicon Florist. Cofounder and general manager at PIE. Follow me on Twitter: @turoczy View all posts by Rick Turoczy