Open Source Bridge

Wednesday Wake-up Call

melissa — Wed, 19 Jun 2013 14:00:43 +0000

Happy Wednesday, Open Source Bridge-goer!

Today’s forecast is for a high of 64F, with rain likely.

Don’t miss this morning’s keynote by Alex “Skud” Bayley. Skud is a social justice activist, software developer, and advocate for open technology and culture beyond the “open source” world.

The Keynote is at 9am. Doors open at 8am, with coffee, tea, and pastries from Black Sheep Bakery.

A friendly reminder: please use tongs, when provided, for food self-service! Also please observe any signage about sharing our favorite snacks with all attendees. Want to know about our catering? More info is on the wiki.

Lunch today will be catered by Nicholas Restaurant, one of our favorite Portland Lebanese restaurants.

See all the sessions for today on our website.

Massage therapy is available in the Hacker Lounge. Domenika Leto, of Niche Massage, is offering 10-minute chair massages, free of charge. Find her station in the northwest section of the Hacker Lounge to sign up. Hours today are noon-2pm, and 3-5pm.

This evening, yoga returns to Open Source Bridge! Sherri Montgomery leads “Smart Asana” at 5:45 in Fuller Hall. BoF sessions are running 7-8:30pm and 8:30-10pm, and the Hacker Lounge stays open until 10.

If you know anyone who would like to attend these evening activities but isn’t registered for the conference, encourage them to sign up for a free Community Pass. This also lets them participate in our unconference day on Friday.

Tweets from the #osb13 tag & @osbridge mentions:

“The NSA needs to make surveillance really convenient for it to be accepted. For example, I’d they could help me find my socks” https://twitter.com/pjf/status/347029607331008512

Git is better with beer https://twitter.com/vmbrasseur/status/347132096826990594

“Hey there, wanna come back to the speakers’ lounge and sniff some coffee with me?” — @brewpony to @vmbrasseur https://twitter.com/pjf/status/347079542067834881

Sharing online? Use #osb13 to tag content about the conference. If you have private feedback, you can stop by the staff/volunteer room, A203, on the 2nd floor and tell us in person, or email info@opensourcebridge.org.

Don’t forget to put in your nominations for the Citizenship Award! This year’s winner will be announced at the party on Thursday.

There’s code, and there’s Code. Please take a moment to review our Code of Conduct.

If at any point you need conference-related help, find a volunteer in a purple Open Source Bridge shirt.

If you’d like to feel what it’s like to be one of our super-hero volunteers, it’s not too late! Come by the volunteer lounge or find Josh, our volunteer coordinator. We’ll put you to work.

Thank you to this year’s sponsors! Hacker Lounge Sponsor: Intel, Committer: Mozilla, Advocate: Rentrak, and other Citizens and Friends.

Have a great day at Open Source Bridge!

Celebrating Five Years of Open Source Bridge

audrey — Tue, 18 Jun 2013 15:20:42 +0000

Five years of open source citizenship has taught us many things.

We have so much to learn from each other, across languages, projects, and other aspects of our work. Our open source work benefits not just from sharing what we’re doing, but from active cross-pollination, and an eager desire to find out what we can learn from others.

When we create an environment where everyone can participate, new and more diverse voices join in. This aids our efforts to share and learn across different backgrounds, perspectives, and groups.

Mentoring, training, and other focused education efforts help new developers and other contributors to join us, by creating defined pathways for learning and participating as a newcomer. We’ve learned that these too are skills we can cultivate and share.

When we continue to encourage and support new people, they take on more responsibility and shape what happens next. This is what keeps our open source work vibrant and alive! That’s why we’re looking forward to our next five years of Open Source Citizenship, and the many more to come after that.

Happy 5th Open Source Bridge!

Let the conference begin!

melissa — Tue, 18 Jun 2013 14:56:41 +0000

Welcome to your first day of Open Source Bridge 2013!

Today’s forecast is for a high of 67F with light drizzle. If that feels a little chilly, consider asking the registration team about our Open Source Citizen scarves.

We’ll be starting our program at 9am this morning, with a keynote from James Vasile of FreedomBox. James directs the Open Internet Tools Project, which supports development of anti-censorship and anti-surveillance tools.

Doors open at 8am, with coffee, tea, and pastries from Dovetail Bakery.

Today’s lunch will be provided by Los Gorditos. Lunch is being served in a different part of the building this year, so look for volunteers in purple volunteer shirts who will show you where to go.

You can find up-to-the-minute schedule updates on our website. It’s not possible to go to more than one session at the same time, and we know this makes you sad. It will be okay. Check the website for slides and speaker notes, or get to work on that time machine tonight in the Hacker Lounge.

We have one schedule change for today: “Fluff: Collaborating to Publish a Fiberarts Magazine Using Open Source Tools” has been cancelled.

Tonight’s evening schedule includes Geek Choir, our Hacker Lounge Community Night, and several great Birds of a Feather sessions. Evening events are also listed on the online schedule.

Thursday night we hope you’ll join us for an exciting 5 Years of Open Citizenship Party at OMSI, the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry. Look for more details as the week progresses.

Citizenship Award nominations are open! We’d like to hear about Open Source Bridge attendees who make an extra effort to help others. This year’s winner will be announced at the party on Thursday.

We like it when you talk about Open Source Bridge. Tag online content with #osb13 if you want others to know what you’re saying. If you have private feedback, you can stop by the staff/volunteer room, A203, on the 2nd floor and tell us in person, or email info@opensourcebridge.org.

Let’s help everyone have an amazing and fun time at this year’s conference. Please take a moment to review our Code of Conduct, and find a volunteer in a purple shirt if you need help at any time.

We also have a recording policy we’re asking everyone to read and follow. And, surprise, this is the first year we will be recording both video and audio of sessions!

Open Source Bridge can only be as great as it is with the help of many, many volunteers. If you’d like to be a part of that, come by the volunteer lounge, or find Josh, our volunteer coordinator. We’ll put you to work.

Thank you to this year’s sponsors! Hacker Lounge Sponsor: Intel, Committer: Mozilla, Advocate: Rentrak, and other Citizens and Friends.

We’re so glad you’re here! Have a great week.

Celebrate Open Source Citizenship at OMSI

melissa — Thu, 13 Jun 2013 20:02:16 +0000

We’re celebrating the 5th anniversary of Open Source Bridge at the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry! There will be 3 separate planetarium showings, access to some exhibits, games and activities set up, catered food with a cash bar, and live music.

Details

Thursday, June 20

Doors open at 7pm

1945 SE Water Ave. Portland, OR 97214

The party is free to anyone with a full-conference pass — including volunteers who’ve donated at least 8 hours of time — and additional tickets for friends and family are $20. A limited supply of tickets are available to purchase in advance.

2013 On-Site Volunteer Registration is Now Open

Chris Freeman — Sat, 08 Jun 2013 18:42:52 +0000

The Open Source Bridge Volunteer App has been launched for 2013.

To sign up as a volunteer for Open Source Bridge 2013, you will need to create an account within the Volunteer App and follow the instructions thereafter.

Don’t forget the Volunteer Orientations on Monday prior to the conference. All  volunteers who wish to work the conference must attend one of the following two sessions:

Volunteer orientations will be held on-site at the Eliot Center (Buchan Building), 1226 SW Salmon St.

To show our appreciation for your efforts, those volunteers who commit at least 8 hours of their time during the conference will be eligible to receive a free pass.

If you have any questions, feel free to contact Josh, our Volunteer Coordinator: volunteer@opensourcebridge.org.

2013 Speakers List is Here

Reid Beels — Thu, 02 May 2013 22:43:31 +0000

We are thrilled to announce the session lineup for this year’s Open Source Bridge conference! These presentations will be given as part of our 4-day event June 18th through the 21st in Portland, Oregon. We received hundreds of excellent proposals, community comments, and other feedback, and our diverse selection committee was very busy carefully reviewing everything.

This year’s conference features knowledgeable speakers covering a broad range of open source topics. So, if you’ve been holding off on registering, now is a great time to do so!

We’re still finalizing the room schedule for Open Source Bridge, and plan to announce that in the very near future as well. But, we need a little help from you. Please indicate talks you’re interested in by marking them as a favorite (click the star icon to the right of the session name). This information helps us schedule rooms appropriately. Please mark talks you think you’ll attend.

Without further ado, the selections for each of our five tracks:

In addition to the schedule for Open Source Bridge 2013, we have two exciting evening events planned so far!

The first is a Community/Project Hack night in the Hacker Lounge on the first evening of the conference. We’re still confirming which groups will participate, but we have a few spots still open. So, if you’d like your project to host a table and run a mini-hack-a-thon, let us know by emailing hackerlounge@opensourcebridge.org.

The other exciting event is the official party on Thursday night! More details to come as we have them. Interested in sponsoring the official party? We still have a spot open, just email sponsor@opensourcebridge.org.

The last day of the conference, Friday, June 21 will be a full day of unconference sessions where you get to suggest and give talks on whatever you’d like!

Also, there are plenty of opportunities to volunteer on-site (and get in free if you contribute 8 or more hours)! Let us know you’d like to volunteer on our Get Involved page or email volunteer@opensourcebridge.org.

Announcing Our Third Keynote Ashe Dryden

melissa — Thu, 18 Apr 2013 20:43:19 +0000

At Open Source Bridge, we strive to let up-and-comers in the tech industry share their voice. We’re excited to announce Ashe Dryden as our third keynote speaker. This will be her first time keynoting a conference, and we’re sure it won’t be her last.

Ashe is an indie developer living in Madison, WI. She’s been involved with the web in some form or another over the past 12 years. Ashe is known for being outspoken about the need for diversity, inclusiveness, and empathy. She’s currently writing a book on increasing diversity within companies. When she isn’t discussing technology or its intersection with culture, Ashe is cycling, tweeting, playing board games, debating the social implications of Star Trek episodes, and waiting for her next burrito fix.

Ashe will be keynoting on Thursday, June 20.

Q: What first got you into open source? And why did you stay?
A: It was completely by accident. From the age of about 7 I knew that I wanted to be involved in the hard sciences, but life circumstances kept me from being able to pursue that. I’d been messing with computers from a youngish age and hadn’t really thought about doing anything with computers as a career until I realized it was actually a marketable skill.

As long as I’ve identified as being a part of the tech community I’ve been in open source. I went to a general tech meetup in Milwaukee almost 10 years ago and learned what open source was, why to use it, and how to get involved. As someone who’s always been really interested in the community aspect of everything, open source was super compelling to me. This was a group of people that were independently passionate about something that came together for a common goal to collaborate on something that was bigger than any one of them alone could have done. That really resonated with me and open source’s ideology is something that I apply to every aspect of my life. You could say I kind of live open source.

Q: How do you think your projects (or open source in general) are changing the way the things have traditionally been done?
A: It’s definitely inspiring people to be more transparent and people-focused. We spend more time talking openly about things and building upon each other’s ideas rather than hunkering down in a room in small groups. It’s allowing us to encourage participation from people who wouldn’t have otherwise been involved, which lends itself more to diversity of participants and solutions. Because open source has the ability to represent and be accessible to a larger portion of the population, it’s changing things at a much quicker pace than it’s more traditional cousins.

Q: What are you most passionate about now?
A: I’m really passionate about encouraging social change through open source and the communities surrounding it. As technologists, we’re in a unique position to empower people who wouldn’t otherwise have the access to education, to medical information, or to other resources that many of us take for granted every day. I’m especially interested in ways we help improve the quality of people’s lives through the flexibility, job satisfaction, and financial stability many of us enjoy.

To that end, I’ve been working on a number of projects that educate our communities about how we can change our modes of thinking to make tech more accessible to people from all backgrounds from all over the world. Things like community-based training, mentoring, conferences, and businesses have much more power in tech than they do other communities. I’m currently working on a book called The Diverse Team which helps businesses and each of us and individuals learn about what we can do to change the culture, interviewing, and outreach practices at our businesses to encourage more diverse applicants for jobs and more importantly keep them. Through empathizing and learning more about each other, as well as the unique problems that each of us faces, I hope to put an end to our dismal attrition rates among women, people of color, people with disabilities, and other marginalized groups and see more people enter the field.

Introducing Keynote James Vasile

melissa — Tue, 16 Apr 2013 21:44:59 +0000

James Vasile will keynote Tuesday, June 18 at Open Source Bridge. We’re excited to hear about all his projects and the work he’s doing with the Software Freedom Law Center.

James of Hacker Visions directs the Open Internet Tools Project, which supports development of anti-censorship and anti-surveillance tools. He is a partner at Open Tech Strategies, which advises organizations and businesses with their open source platforms. He also has a strategic advisory role on free software projects as a Senior Fellow at the Software Freedom Law Center. James has helped boot up free software organizations, including the FreedomBox Foundation, Open Source Matters, and the Software Freedom Conservancy.

Q: What first got you into open source?
A: In 1997, I met Eben Moglen. He was the first person to say the words “Free Software” to me. He also told me about Linux, lent me the Camel book and suggested I give Emacs a try. It’s hard to overstate how much that one conversation changed my life.

Q: Why did you stay?
A: As technical capability is increasingly intertwined with every aspect of our lives, free software is the key to distributing access to technical advantages widely and evenly to every person on Earth.

Q: How do you think your projects (or open source in general) are changing the way the things have traditionally been done?
A: I’ve been working on building infrastructure for free software communities that is bigger than individual projects.

Q: What are you most passionate about now?
A: I care a lot about iterating on the gains we’ve made in the free software movement. How do we grow the community and share the benefits more widely?
I also care a lot about the general invasion of technology overwhelming existing norms on privacy and security. New tech enables privacy and security threats that are hard for lay people to conceptualize and account for. And our frameworks for helping people with these issues are not keeping pace.

Introducing Keynote “Skud” of Infotrope

melissa — Fri, 12 Apr 2013 21:24:05 +0000

We’re pleased to announce our first keynote of 2013′s conference, Alex “Skud” Bayley of Infotrope!

Skud is a social justice activist, software developer, and advocate for open technology and culture beyond the “open source” world. She has worked in the technology industry for 2 decades, in the Internet/dotcom/web development field, and in open source software, most closely with Perl. In 2011, she left the tech industry to become a sound engineer, and in 2012 founded Growstuff, an open source project building a website for food cultivators to record their gardening activity.

Q: What first got you into open source?
A: The Internet.
In 1993 I was an undergrad studying IT — business oriented computing, lots of databases and functional requirements analysis and COBOL. I knew about the Internet and desperately wanted to use it, but our university only offered very limited access to most undergrads: email, usenet, gopher (a precursor to the WWW). However, if you were studying a comp sci subject and had an account on the Unix servers, you could get wider-ranging access: you could telnet to anywhere, for instance, which meant you could use talkers and MUDs, and you could compile your own software to do other things. So, I took a Unix subject, got an account on the Unix server, and revelled in it! My lecturer saw how interested I was. One day I was telling her how sad I would be to have to give up my Unix account at the end of semester. She told me about this guy in Finland who had written a version of Unix that would run on a PC like the 386 I had at home. I spent that whole afternoon and evening downloading an early version of Slackware onto 36 floppy disks, then took it home and installed it. I’m still amazed I managed to make it through the install process, which included compiling the kernel and everything, without knowing what I was doing. From then on, I used Slackware with X and fvwm and kermit to dialup to the university’s modem bank.
All my early encounters with open source software were in my efforts to get more involved in this exciting Internet thing. I learned Perl at first because I wanted to tweak the code for some mailing list software. Then I started building websites with it, and finally got a full time job doing that. It took me a few years to contribute back to the open source community, but over time I got quite involved in a number of projects and wrote some moderately influential Perl modules, and have my name somewhere in the Perl’s core docs.

Q: Why did you stay?
A: I didn’t.
Around 2007 I got fed up building LAMP websites for people and found a new job, working on an open data project called Freebase (now owned by Google). I started to get more involved in open culture projects outside of open source, and I even wrote a blog post called “Why I’m not an open source person any more” talking about how I didn’t feel like I was particularly part of that world any more, and how I’d moved on. I was still using open source software, of course, and I still had a lot of friends in the open source community, but I wasn’t writing much code and I wasn’t really that engaged with the code-centric side of open source. It seemed to me like the battle had been won and the whole “project” of open source was in maintenance mode: everyone was using it, directly or indirectly, and it was an accepted part of the landscape.
In 2011, in a state of serious burnout, I actually quit the tech industry and took some time off. I studied sound engineering and considered doing that full time, but it didn’t pan out. Then about a year ago I got an invitation to speak at GUADEC (a GNOME conference in Europe). I explained to them that I didn’t really do open source any more, but I did do open stuff in general, and would like to talk about that. So I did that, and as a result ended up talking to Federico Mena Quintero (one of the GNOME founders) about community gardens and permaculture and how an “open” mentality exists in fields like that, far away from software. Over lunch we got talking about how you’d build an open data repository about crops and planting times. I said if I were going to build something like that, I’d do it the same way Ravelry (a knitting and crochet website) built its database of patterns and yarns: by collecting information from people worldwide and aggregating it. I slept on the idea, and the next day the idea of Growstuff (my current project) was born.
So now I’m back in open source, as a Ruby on Rails developer, but I come to it with a very different attitude from when I first discovered open source and got involved in the community. I’m coding, obviously, but I’m looking at it from a wider view: how does this open source code fit into an open world? How can we use it to increase openness, or support other related values, in fields outside of the tech industry? And how can open source learn from those other fields in turn?

Q: How do you think your projects (or open source in general) are changing the way the things have traditionally been done?
A: Well, my main project at present is Growstuff, as I said, which is a website for food gardeners to track what they’re growing and connect with other growers in their local area. When you say “the way things have traditionally been done” I think about growing food, and the traditions around that. We’ve been growing food for millennia, and the traditions around it vary from place to place, even from family to family. It could be planting times, the best varieties to grow in an area, how to deal with pests, or whatever. Sadly, a lot of those local traditions have been flattened out by globalisation and large agribusiness. Growstuff, I think, offers us a chance to maintain and renew some of the old traditions, by celebrating local growers and growing practices, and helping people share local knowledge through community connections. And then, Growstuff’s data about those growing practices will be available under an open data license, which is something we don’t really have for individual food-growers. There are open data standards for large-scale crops, or for research into species and varieties, but not much for someone who wants to know “when should I plant these tomatoes on my balcony?” or “what variety of apple tree is best for my backyard?”
On the software side, Growstuff is an unusual open source community in many ways. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that being unfriendly and elitist is a “tradition” of open source, but it’s definitely something you see in a number of projects. We work really hard not to be that sort of project. In particular, we want to make the barrier between users and developers more permeable, and encourage people not only to communicate with and listen to people on the other side, but actually to step across the barrier if they want to. We’ve had gardeners who’ve decided to try their hand at coding, and coders who’ve decided to grow things. We’re using agile software development, and Extreme Programming’s idea of the “on-site customer”, to make sure our devs and growers hang out together and work together, but I think as we get more used to the practice, it’s becoming more natural to us and less formalised. We also use pair programming throughout the project, which means in effect that if you want to get involved, someone will hold your hand and mentor you through your first few sessions. That has some downsides (ugh, scheduling!) but it does make it easy for people to get started if they want.

Q: What are you most passionate about now?
A: I’m passionate about lots of things. Mostly, right now, I keep ranting about how we have to turn the tech industry inside out. The Silicon Valley model is toxic, and we need to find a better way, one that respects and empowers people rather than trying to monetize them. I’m really into sustainable small business models for tech businesses, and I’m a big fan of indie companies that find a way to make money by building something valuable and selling it directly to their customers, not just by making something viral and slapping ads all over it.

Skud will be keynoting on Wednesday, June 19, 3013.

Announcing Keynotes!

melissa — Tue, 02 Apr 2013 18:09:31 +0000

We’re excited to announce our first two keynote presenters for the 2013 conference!

Alex “Skud” Bayley of Infotrope and James Vasile of Hacker Visions will be speaking about their experience in open source communities, from languages to activism, culture to changing industries. We will post long-form interviews with Skud and James next week.

Photo by Rose White

Alex “Skud” Bayley is a social justice activist, software developer, and advocate for open technology and culture beyond the “open source” world. Born and raised in Australia, Skud has also lived and worked in the United States and Canada, for companies ranging from small Linux startups to Fortune 500 behemoths. Although best known for her open source work in the Perl community, she’s recently switched to Ruby on Rails to develop Growstuff, an open source/open data project for food gardeners. Her other recent projects include the Geek Feminism blog and wiki, the pro-pseudonym advocacy site My Name Is Me, Written? Kitten!, and the newly-formed women’s tech group The Disreputable Order of Hopperites. She is a speaker of international repute, having presented at scores of conferences worldwide on tech, culture, and the intersection between the two.

James Vasile directs the Open Internet Tools Project, which supports development of anti-censorship and anti-surveillance tools. He is a partner at Open Tech Strategies, which advises organizations and businesses with their open source platforms. He also has a strategic advisory role on free software projects as a Senior Fellow at the Software Freedom Law Center. James has helped boot up free software organizations, including the FreedomBox Foundation, Open Source Matters, and the Software Freedom Conservancy.

Be sure to see Skud and James speak in June. Our Early Bird Registration deadline with discounted admission ends this Wednesday, April 3.

Open Source Bridge

Wednesday Wake-up Call

Celebrating Five Years of Open Source Bridge

Let the conference begin!

Celebrate Open Source Citizenship at OMSI

2013 On-Site Volunteer Registration is Now Open

2013 Speakers List is Here

Business

Chemistry

Culture

Cooking

Hacks

Announcing Our Third Keynote Ashe Dryden

Introducing Keynote James Vasile

Introducing Keynote “Skud” of Infotrope

Announcing Keynotes!