So let’s do that, shall we?

The official after party will start with Beer and Blog—Portland’s tech happy hour—starting at 4 PM at Webtrends. (Beer and Blog will also be going on at the Green Dragon, as usual. But the Portland crowd plans to migrate over at Webtrends as the afternoon wears on.)

But wait, there’s more.

The party will continue—around 8 PM-ish—as we move across the street to the Open Source Bridge hacker lounge at the top of the Hilton for more Strange Love Live, the best tech podcast in Portland, if not the world.

If you had the chance to chat with Strange Love Live at the conference, you’ll want to get on the set again. Because this time around, it’s all afterhours, all the time. In other words, no holds barred on the conversations—tech or otherwise.

Both after parties are open to the public, whether you attended Open Source Bridge or not. So come on down and join us in closing out the first Open Source Bridge.

I’m working on visually documenting the people and culture of the open source community. As a long-time programmer and user of free & open source, community-developed software (I’m one of those “11 or more years” veterans that Selena mentioned), I totally see the passion and enthusiasm that’s in the air here. I thought it would be fun to set up a formal portrait studio at Open Source Bridge, somewhat recalling the simplicity and directness of the Victorian-era studios (minus the cast-iron neck braces and corinthian column). I’d love to talk to you about your projects and help portray the face behind the code.

I’ll be shooting with a medium-format camera on black and white film; after I develop & scan the film, I’ll post the images at http://photography.johnlabovitz.com/ with a Creative Commons license (CC-BY-SA).

I’ll be in the Exhibition Hall (B), just to the right of the Starbucks, on Thursday and Friday from noon to 4pm. Please do stop in!

Looking forward to seeing you at day 2 of Open Source Bridge, tomorrow.

Not sure what to do? Well, they have some examples using earthquake data. Or you could check out their guidance on building widgets.

Better yet, you could join Yahoo! Developer Networks Tom Hughes-Croucher and OSU Open Source Labs’ Peter Krenesky to work on the 50 states project:

Sunlight [Foundation] wants to make sure that legislative information for every single state is easily available. Many of the state government websites are hard to navigate, and provide information in formats that aren’t exactly Web 2.0 friendly (CSV anyone?). The 50 States Project aims to rectify that and make important information easily available for anyone who wants to know what’s going on in their state. We’ve built an example of how you can scrape data by building open tables to get the data from the Louisiana legislature. We hope we can inspire you to write many more tables, one for every state. I’m going to be writing in more detail soon about how I did it and what I learned, and how that can be applied to get data from any web form system. If you live in the Portland, Oregon area and are interested in hacking on the 50 States Project, I’ll be up at the Hacker Lounge for OSBridge this week.

Sound interesting? The hacker lounge at the top of the Portland Hilton is open 24-hours. That should give you plenty of time to muck with this new offering.

We’re really looking forward to seeing everyone, hearing your feedback, and seeing your photos. So is everyone else.

First things first. If you’re not already following OSBridge on Twitter or OSBridge on Identica, please do. We’ll use those accounts to keep you up-to-date on changes, retweet astute observations, and announce cool happenings throughout the event.

Or maybe you’re more into the FriendFeed? You’re in luck. We’ve got a FriendFeed room dedicated to Open Source Bridge discussions.

[UPDATE] And of course, who could forget (except me) the #osbridge IRC channel? Thanks to John DeRosa for reminding us.

Now that that’s out of the way, let’s make tracking the Open Source Bridge conversations as easy as possible, shall we? We shall. Here are a few tips for tagging your content.

• When you’re tagging your content on Twitter and Identica, please use the #osb09 hashtag. If you want to use #osbridge that’s fine, too. But it will cost you those precious extra characters.
• We’re hoping a few of you are bringing cameras. Please make sure to tag photos osb09 and osbridge. We’ve also established an OSBridge group on Flickr for your photos, so join and add away
• And of course, we’re likely to see a bunch of blog posts about the conference. Again, using osb09 or osbridge tags and categories would be appreciated.

Thank you for attending and sharing your content. We can’t wait to see what you’re saying—and seeing—at Open Source Bridge.

* Advanced Git tutorial: Not your average VCS.-> moves to Fremont

* Open Source Microblogging with Laconica -> moves to Fremont

* Drizzle, Rethinking MySQL for the Web -> moves to Fremont

* Social network supermarkets and how to defeat them -> moves to Fremont

* Organizing a Volunteer-Driven Open Source Community Project -> moves to
Morrison

* The Scylla and Charybdis of Open Source Legalese -> moves to Marquam

* Virtualize vs Containerize: Fight! -> moves to Marquam

* Become a better programmer by bridging Ousterhout’s Dichotomy -> moves
to Marquam

* What’s New in GCC -> moves to Marquam

No TIMES were changed, so at worst, you’ll have to walk a little further than you thought to get to the talk you wanted to attend.

These changes were made after the program was printed. Sorry for the last minute change! We will do our best to indicate where the changes are on posted placards, and at the registration desk.

My presentation will cover some Drupal basics including history, core concepts, and system structure. From there, we will dig into Drupal’s strengths and weaknesses, finishing off by discussing the types of projects Drupal is best suited for, including specific examples for each case.

My hope is that developers new to the platform will gain a better understanding of when to approach a new project with Drupal, more experienced developers will gain a bit of insight on when not to use it, and non-techies will have some help in choosing a platform for their projects along with an understanding why developers they work with select a given platform. Please note that this talk will not delve deeply into the technical details of Drupal.

Recommendations for other talks? Where to start! I only wish there weren’t so many overlapping talks I’m interested in. Some that caught my eye include the Web Server Shootout, Open Source Tools for Developers, Drizzle, Django, and the keynotes. I basically want to exposure to new topics for me, or a deeper insight into ones I’m already familiar with.

We realize how lucky we are. We’ve been able to attract a wealth of phenomenal open source speakers. We’ve had volunteers dedicate innumerable hours. We’ve had an amazing response from the open source community. And we’ve had all of the Portland tech community rooting us on.

But we wouldn’t be where we are today without our sponsors, those people who believed in a conference for open source citizens and who helped underwrite it.

To all of our sponsors, we’d like to say “Thank you” once again.

Committer Level

• Yahoo! Developer Network
• Cubespace
• Travel Command
• Network Redux

Advocate Level

• Google
• Mozilla
• Webtrends
• Slashdot
• Sourceforge

Citizen Level

• End Point Corporation
• Portland State University
• HP
• Novell (OpenSuSE)
• Reductive Labs
• Monty Program
• Stephouse Networks

Friends Level

• Active State
• Earth Class Mail
• Elevated Code
• emma
• Hockley Photography
• POSSE
• Travel Portland
• SAO
• OTBC
• Stoel Rives
• Cloud Four

Media Sponsors

• Data Portability
• Linux Pro Magazine
• O’Reilly
• ReadWriteWeb
• Silicon Florist

We’re looking forward to seeing all of you, tomorrow.

And while we’d love to have everyone participate in OSBridge for the entire three days, we realize that schedules and budgets don’t always cooperate. Whatever your situation, we want to make the conference as accessible as possible so that you have the chance to participate—even if it’s only for one day.

With that in mind, we’ve established a day pass, allowing would-be attendees to join us for a single day. For $99, you can purchase access to the conference sessions and the hacker lounge for either Wednesday, Thursday, or Friday.

If you’re interested in a day pass, it couldn’t be easier to get one. Just show up at the conference on the day you’d like to attend. We’ll get you registered on the spot.

We sincerely hope the day pass makes the conference accessible to more of you who want to attend. We’re looking forward to seeing you, this week.

(Image courtesy Hryck. Used under Creative Commons.)

And with the ease of sharing photos these days, there’s no better way of capturing the event than taking pictures of anything and everything happening at the show.

We’ll have local photographer (and WordPress guru) Aaron Hockley at the conference on Wednesday and Thursday. If you get a chance, try to get in front of his lens. We guarantee he’ll make you look good. And all of his images from the event will be released under Creative Commons for your use.

But many of us will be wandering around with our own rigs, trying to capture the best shots possible. So we thought it would be valuable to offer you some tips.

One of the best “how to”s on conference shots we’ve ever seen is Kris Krug’s photography tips from Gnomedex (not that Gnome), last year. Take a look. No doubt, you’ll gain some valuable insight into improving your shots.

But what about getting your photo taken? What if you’re speaking? No worries. Duncan Davidson has some great tips for how to come out looking your best—and how to leave a lasting impression on your audience.

Obviously, there is so much more that could be said. And much better formats than just a simple list of twits. But, for now, maybe this will help a few speakers better deliver their message. And, most of all you should remember that your audience wants you to succeed. They’re there to listen to you. Help ’em out a bit and everyone will be happier, including you.

Who knows? Maybe Duncan will even show up to snap a few shots of his own.

Finally, if you’re bringing your camera along to Open Source Bridge, please be sure to tag your uploads with “osbridge” or “osb09.” That way, we’ll be able to share all of your good work.

We’re looking forward to seeing you—and the images you capture—next week.

(Image courtesy soycamo. Used under Creative Commons.)