Portland-founded Beer and Blog just keeps getting better and better. They’re now up to 11 regional gatherings with the latest edition de España, Beer and Blog Villamartin.
The new Spanish chapter is the second international gathering after Beer and Blog Tokyo.
Stateside, Beer and Blog features chapters in Arizona, Colorado, Indiana (that’s right, Beer and Blog has secured both the “no daylight savings time” states), Missouri, Nevada, Texas, and, of course, the three locations in Oregon.
Interested in starting a Beer and Blog of your own? (Yes, Omaha, San Francisco, DC, and all of you other spots, I’m looking at you.) Just contact @justinkistner. You’ll get your own space on the Beer and Blog site, a Twitter account, swag, and team support from all of the other chapters.
Speaking of Beer and Blog, this evening’s Beer and Blog Portland will be an “End Awkwardness” field trip to Cubespace featuring karaoke and Open Source Bridge outreach. (And if someone can explain how performing karaoke is supposed to end awkwardness rather than enhance it, I’m all ears.) For more information, see Upcoming or Calagator.
Concerned you’re going to get bored this spring and summer? Worried you’re not going to have enough geektastic events to keep yourself entertained? Worry no longer, my friend. There are a ton of good tech events just around the corner.
“We have secured Keynote Presenter Rahaf Harfoush, New Media Strategist, Member of Obama’s Social Media Team, & Associate Director of the Global Cooperation Initiative at the World Economic Forum, to present on Thursday, April 23, 2009. We have Scott S. Ballantyne, former VP General Manager, Personal Systems Group, Hewlett Packard kicking off this year’s eMarketing Summit @ InnoTech and we have a Windows 7.0 Sneak Peek session at InnoTech as well.”
“BarCampPortland is an unconference for the Portland tech community, produced BY the Portland tech community. Interesting topics, cool people, great networking opportunities, wifi, and more! Building an active tech community in Portland, Oregon.”
“Explore the future of Web design, user experience and business strategy for three days of mind-melding on what’s new in the digital world. Get a glimpse into the future, along with practical information that you can apply to your Web site, company and career.”
“Connecting developers across projects, languages, and backgrounds. Open Source Bridge is a new conference for developers working with open source technologies and for people interested in learning the open source way.”
Take 6 on Ignite Portland. “If you had five minutes on stage what would you say? What if you only got 20 slides and they rotated automatically after 15 seconds? Around the world geeks have been putting together Ignite nights to show their answers.”
“The 6th annual Internet Strategy Forum Summit conference is set for July 23 & 24, 2009. Confirmed presenters so far include Forrester Senior Analyst and Web Strategist blogger Jeremiah Owyang and Web Operations Management guru Lisa Welchman.”
“Inverge brings presenters and attendees together from a variety of professions and disciplines to explore changes and opportunities presented by the increasing digitization of media, the democratization of distribution and the proliferation of connectivity into new areas. The big picture is revealed via the unique integration of disciplines at the event. The presentations are high-level, informative and conceptual, pointing the way toward the future and facilitating advanced professional development.”
“LinuxCon is a new annual technical conference that will provide an unmatched collaboration and education space for all matters Linux. LinuxCon will bring together the best and brightest that the Linux community has to offer, including core developers, administrators, end users, community managers and industry experts. In being the conference for “all matters Linux”, LinuxCon will be informative and educational for a wide range of attendees. We will not only bring together all of the best technical talent but the decision makers and industry experts who are involved in the Linux community.”
“The Linux Plumbers Conference was created to bring together the key developers involved in Linux plumbing – the “Linux plumbers” – and give them an opportunity to discuss problems face-to-face, both within subsystems and across subsystems. Participants include invited attendees, speakers selected through an open, competitive review process, and students. Registration is open to the general public as well.”
And that’s not even counting all the awesome non-techie stuff and all the cool weekly events we have going around here. Not to mention the fact that I probably missed some other interesting tech events. Because I have a tendency to do that.
So don’t worry about getting bored, sugar. There will be plenty for you to do.
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.
Here in Portland, we love the Lunch 2.0. But we can always stand to improve it. So Jake Kuramoto, the Portland Lunch 2.0 guy, has proposed that we take a trip up to Seattle to see how our neighbors to the north handle Seattle Lunch 2.0.
So this Friday, March 6, we’re doing just that.
It’s a diplomatic envoy or something. And it has two goals. The first is partaking in Seattle Lunch 2.0 but the second part? Talking to all the cool open source folks in the Emerald City in hopes of convincing them to come visit us in the Rose City for Open Source Bridge.
Jake, Selena Deckelmann, and I will be heading up for the event. I know that Brian M. Westbrook, who oscillates (wildly, I might add) between Portland and Seattle, will be in attendance, as well.
We’re all looking forward to getting the chance to hang out with our fellow Lunch 2.0 types, like Eric Berto, John DeRosa, Josh Maher, Danielle Morrill, and more. So if you’re from Seattle and debating whether you should be attending or not, hopefully this will be the little push you need to show up.
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.
Portland-founded Beer and Blog just keeps getting better and better. They’re now up to 11 regional gatherings with the latest edition de España, Beer and Blog Villamartin.
Friday, 