[Full disclosure: I’m volunteering to help the Open Source Bridge team with marketing efforts.]
Open Source Bridge—a gathering of open source citizens and open source curious taking place in Portland, June 17-19—has been a labor of love for a number of members of our community. And for that reason, it’s really great to see the final pieces of the event begin to fall into place.
WebVisions is quickly approaching. It’s coming up next week already, May 20-22 at the OCC.
Time to stop procrastinating and register. Better yet, take advantage of the package deal WebVisions and Open Source Bridge are offering, i.e. full access passes to both events for $300. Jump on that deal before May 18, and you’ll save $200.
Look at it this way. If you have an interest in either conference, you’ll get the other for a song, i.e. $50. Or maybe you’re a Web designer who wants to attend WebVisions who has a Web developer buddy who wants to attend Open Source Bridge. That’s a pretty sweet split cost. (Hint, hint)
Have you seen the speaker lineup for WebVisions? It’s jam-packed with local and international talent, assembling to talk about the future of the Web design, business strategy and user experience.
Oh, and Silicon Florist is a sponsor so the turoczybot commands that you attend.
Back when David and I were talking about this week’s Lunch 2.0, which will be hosted by David’s new startup, MioWorks, at the Green Dragon, we mused about how nice it would be to have a warm Spring day to break in the Dragon’s patio.
Well, today it’s supposed to hit 70, and according to our friends at KGW, tomorrow will be equally spectacular.
Wednesday, not so much, at least not in the shorts and t-shirt department.
Maybe we’ll catch a break, and the warming trend will continue.
Anyway, rain or shine, we’ll be at the Green Dragon on Wednesday, that’s April 8, to hear about MioWorks from David and his merry startup band. MioWorks launched a private beta at Ignite Portland 5 back in February, and they’ve since moved into public beta, offering a free 30-day trial.
You’ll probably get your fill of Open Source Bridge chatter as well, since David is also volunteering with many of us on that effort. MioWorks will be offering OSB attendees free service for six months, in case you needed another reason to attend.
So, come on down to the Green Dragon, even though it’s not Friday, and hang out with your favorite Portland geeks and meet some new people too, for good measure.
As always, please make sure you RSVP over on Upcoming so they know how much food to get and drop a comment there if you’re a vegan or vegetarian.
Finally, a quick announcement about the ISITE Design Lunch 2.0 in June. The date has changed to June 24. Please plan accordingly.
As always, big thanks to all the hosts who have hosted or plan to host Lunch 2.0. Drop a comment (or tweet @jkuramot) if you want information about hosting one. It’s easy.
Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace was born on 10th December 1815, the only child of Lord Byron and his wife, Annabella. Born Augusta Ada Byron, but now known simply as Ada Lovelace, she wrote the world’s first computer programmes for the Analytical Engine, a general-purpose machine that Charles Babbage had invented.
That got me to thinking. I’m incredibly lucky to get the chance to work with a number of extremely talented and technically adept women. And I get the chance to work with many of them on a weekly basis, which is awesome. Many of you are just as lucky as me.
So I thought I’d list some of the cool female geeks in Portland whom I am proud to know:
She’s the co-founder of Open Source Bridge, has had code committed to PostgreSQL, attends and speaks at any number of conferences, served as one of the original board members for Legion of Tech, and provides some exemplary guidance on killing chickens.
She’s the other co-founder of Open Source Bridge, a founding member of Legion of Tech, a celebrated Rubyist, the driving force behind Calagator, and one of the most creative thinkers in the Northwest.
She’s a wizard with Yahoo! Pipes, a sage with community development, a hardworking startup type with Shizzow, one of the founders of Legion of Tech, and from what I understand, one mean werewolf player.
All of these women have been an absolute inspiration for me. And I’m truly honored that I get the chance to work with them on a regular basis.
But for as much as I love the local scene, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention two other incredibly inspiring women in the tech scene who have gained—and will continue to have—my utmost admiration.
She’s an incredible speaker and thought-provoking writer whose Creating Passionate Users completely changed the way I thought about marketing and writing—and was a direct inspiration for Silicon Florist.
She’s taught me how to think about the power and the promise technology holds for doing good. And her Gnomedex performance, last year, remains one of the coolest technological experiments I’ve ever seen—even though it had very little to do with technology and everything to do with people.
Which women are excelling in technology in your world?
If there are women in technology who inspire you, I’d love to hear about—and I’m sure they would, too. Who are the other women in Portland technology or Silicon Forest technology who deserve some recognition? Why not take a few minutes to write something up? There’s still time.
Update: Thomas collected some shots of the lunch. This one of Rick pointing, presumably at the bus as it bears down on him, is a hoot. Thanks Thomas.
OpenSourcey graciously opened the doors of its newish office yesterday to about 150 people for the 12th iteration of Portland Lunch 2.0.
Thomas King handled the hosting duties for OpenSourcery. Their open workspace was perfect for a large crowd, mingling and eating. I heard from several people that this was a really good event, and we’re on a roll because I heard the same thing after AboutUs last month. Large open spaces seem to be very conducive to fluid chatting.
Or maybe the format is evolving.
Nah, it was pretty much the same formula. Thomas did his welcome opening. I stumbled through the brief schedule of upcoming events; I’ve given up on explaining what Lunch 2.0 is, which is for the best. We are putting a Portland stamp on it after all.
Then, I got to throw Rick under the bus, a recurring meme, to talk about our pet project, the Open Source Bridge conference. Then back to Thomas for the unveiling of an OpenSourcery project, CLOVE. David Abramowski, our host for the next Lunch 2.0 on April 8, summarized it nicely:
Opensourcery (our excellent hosts for today’s event – a big thank you to them) told us about a new application they wrote called “CLOVE”. This application is planned to be made available under the GPL open source license. From the really short demo, it appears that the application helps you understand if you are giving your clients the love they deserve. (that was a paraphrase from the demo-dude) Although not ready just yet, Opensourcery will provide links to the application once it is out there for everyone to use. I’ll make an update when that information becomes available. It does however look like a rather interesting way to keep track of all that pesky email that it takes to keep a business relationship moving forward.
Finally, Bryce Yonker from the Software Association of Oregon (SAO) talked about the new healthcare program they are offering members for any size company, even single person shops.
A lot of good information, crammed into a short amount of time, and then, we were back to mixing and mingling. Everyone seemed to have a good time, at least, Twitter search for “lunch 2.0” said so. Apparently, the leftovers were donated to a soup kitchen too. Good on ya OpenSourcery!
Unfortunately, a large crowd is not so conducive to writing code; some of OpenSoucery’s developers bailed to find nearby wi-fi spots to GSD. Sorry to displace you all, and thanks for letting us take over your workspace.
Among those not in attendance was Amye Scavarda of OpenSourcery, who helped plan the event. She was home sick. Get better soon, and thanks for helping put on the lunch.
I’d love to share pictures of the gathering, and I know they’re out there. There were a bunch of people shooting stills and video, but alas, my tweet for help garnered nada. I think everyone is either off to SxSW or on some other mission. Twitter has been a bit quiet today.
May 20 hosted by WebVisions at the Oregon Convention Center
Big thanks to all the hosts who have hosted or plan to host Lunch 2.0. Drop a comment (or tweet @jkuramot) if you want information about hosting one. It’s easy.
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.
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.
Rick was kind enough to handle the driving duties, which left the rest of us free to chatter and OH all the pearls of wisdom on Twitter. After about 20 minutes, Rick went into shock from being surrounded by people tweeting, but unable to do so himself.
This spawned a discussion about a steering wheel keypad with a heads-up display that would finally allow Rick to see all his TweetDeck columns without scrolling.
But you already knew that because you were following our road trip on Twitter.
What? Oh.
Even though we started off a bit slow, we arrived with plenty of time to spare and then quickly wasted it looking for a coffee shop with a restroom.
Josh Maher, the organizer of the Seattle Lunch 2.0 chapter, holds happy hours as well as lunches, and Friday’s was a happy hour. Since we were on a diplomatic mission, and it was a happy hour, Rick brought a gift, Portland beer. He’s such a thoughtful guy, and that’s such a Portland thing to do.
Axios Law Group hosted the happy hour at their offices in downtown Seattle, and TalentSpring, whose office is in the same building, co-sponsored the event. Dawn wasn’t there to get a count, but I think there were about 30 to 40 people spread throughout the office. Then again, I’m not very good at counting, so it could have been more.
In classic Portland style, we included our Twitter handles on our name tags, which drew attention from several Seattleites, many of whom were just making the jump into Twitter. There were also funny references to how happy were were to get out of depressing Portland, alluding to that recent Business Week article.
We mixed and mingled, and as always, Kelly’s LED name badge garnered a lot of attention. I’m pretty sure John DeRosa wants one of his own. I chatted with John, Matt Woodward and several other people. My pea brain doesn’t do well with names, so apologies for not calling out all the good people who chatted with me.
After about an hour of mixing, Josh introduced the gracious hosts, Adam from Axios and Bryan from TalentSpring. Then I stumbled through a “hello from Portland” and threw Rick under the bus to talk about Open Source Bridge, the other reason we headed up there. As usual, he did a great job despite the tire tracks.
Brian Westbrook and Danielle Morrill streamed the event live to Seattle 2.0, and I’m hoping to get the recordings of the interviews he did with Selena and Rick. If/when I get those, they’ll be added to this post.
Unfortunately, we didn’t get many pictures of the event. All we had were our iPhone cameras, and Rick’s nice camera took a header into the CubeSpace parking lot before we even got on the road. In hindsight, I guess we should have brought Aaron or Mark along to snap photos.
After the happy hour ended, it was back on the road; six hours in the car for a two-hour event. That’s dedication.
May 20 hosted by WebVisions at the Oregon Convention Center
As always, big thanks to all the hosts who have hosted or plan to host Lunch 2.0. Drop a comment (or tweet @jkuramot) if you want information about hosting one. It’s easy.
Last night at the Portland Web Innovators presentation, I got the chance to laud compliments on Beer and Blog, an event that has really helped solidify the Web and Open Source startup community in Portland—and now Corvallis. A little later, I got the chance to share some of the early thinking on what will be the biggest volunteer event for Portland in 2009, Open Source Bridge.
Hi friends! Rick Turoczy asked me if he and the Open Source Bridge crew could lead some discussion tomorrow @beerandblog. I think what they are up to is valuable to the Portland community and her tech scene, so I said yes. If you’re not yet familiar with Open Source Bridge, they are a group of local techies that want to continue OSCON now that they are not coming back to Portland. But, they’re growing into much more than that.
So why not take some time out of your busy schedule of attending holiday parties to hang out with the Open Source Bridge team at Beer and Blog? Not interested in Open Source Bridge? Come on over anyway. You might find yourself having such a good time that you wind up wending your way over to the CyborgCamp pre-party at Vidoop.
Back when 
Maybe we’ll catch a break, and the warming trend will continue.
Friday, 