Starting the rodeo rumors now...

We’re kicking off the planning for Open Source Bridge 2010, old school. We’ve got a mailing list that you should subscribe to:

http://groups.google.com/group/osbridge

Last year’s organizing team was very structured. I like to think that we managed things well, and our attendees were pleased with the results.

But, this time – we’re changing how we manage things.

We’re letting everyone in on our planning process! So, if you enjoyed Open Source Bridge last year, and want to see it be a success this year, join our mailing list now, and see if you can lend us a hand.

Thanks!

Photo courtesy of FirstBaptistNashville, via a Creative Commons license

Open Source Bridge ended yesterday at midnight. We wrapped things up at the Hacker Lounge, with interviews courtesy of Strange Love Live, and tons of hackers still coding through the evening. My head was just buzzing from all of the great conversations I’ve had over the last three days.

Thank you to all of the speakers, volunteers and my fellow board members, Audrey Eschright and Jake Kuramoto. Thank you to the core organizing committee, designers and hackers – Reid, Igal, Rick, Adam, Bram and osbridgebot. Thank you to Christie Koehler who did an amazing job with managing volunteers these last three days.

Thank you especially to Peter Eschright, who swooped in and made sure that all of our Logistical issues were solved. Thank you Cami and Dr. Normal from Strange Love Live, and Kelly for all your advocacy work on behalf of the conference. Thank you Steph for your last minute awesome work on the speaker party. Thank you to Beer and Blog and WebTrends for hosting our evening party on Friday *and* our speaker party.

Thank you Amber Case, Kurt von Finck, Mayor Sam Adams and Ward Cunningham for giving entertaining and inspiring keynotes each day. Thanks to Chris Messina for helping kick off our unconference on Friday.

Thank you everyone who came and participated in the conference. Your enthusiasm and passion was inspiring. I appreciated all of the encouragement you gave me and all the other volunteers throughout the time we were there together. All those kind words add up, and so many people were just glowing from the praise.

If you attended the conference, respond to our survey! Also, comments are open on sessions, so please leave comments about the specific sessions you attended. We’ll forward the feedback to the speakers.

I’m still smiling, and soaking it all in. But we’re definitely doing this again next year.

Igal just posted to the osbridge-technology list:

Join us to work on one or more of these for Open Source Bridge this weekend:

1. Code: Add features and specs to the OpenConferenceWare conference
app. Join in if you’ve got Ruby on Rails coding experience, such as
contributing code to Calagator.

2. Text: Compose documents for outreach to user groups, educational
institutions, open source projects, and the like.

3. Outreach: Contact user group leaders, educators, open source
projects, mailing lists, etc to encourage them to spread the word about
the conference and submit proposals.

We’ll meet up at Ristretto[1] at 10am, then move on to a working lunch
nearby at the Lompoc 5th Quadrant[2]. Some members will leave as soon as
2pm, but others will stay on later. Join us for however much of this you
can.

Thanks!

-igal

[1] Ristretto Coffee: 3808 N Williams Ave, Portland, OR 97213 –
[2] Lompoc, 5th Quadrant: 3901 N Williams Ave, Portland, OR

Join us! First three people to make it to Ristretto in the morning get one of these open source nerd merit badges.

Audrey just wrote a fantastic blog entry about Open Source Bridge, her thoughts about citizenship, and what it means to be a responsible open source citizen.

Yesterday, Forbes published a piece talking about the “open source collaboration gap” and waxed poetic about why it is that corporate IT doesn’t contribute back to open source projects the way that individuals do.

One possible explanation from the article is that there is really a gratitude gap – institutions just can’t feel gratitude or express gratitude the way that individuals can. I kinda like that idea. But paradoxically, Dan Woods then suggests that if we were to just measure the tangible benefits of open source, we’d have our argument for IT contributing back. Well, if the problem is gratitude.. I can’t say that I agree that more metrics are going to fix the collaboration gap.

So, I would try to solve this problem differently. I think that changing collaboration patterns happens one person at a time – with individuals deciding to pursue hobbies and work that interest them, hopefully doing work that matters. To make institutions better open source citizens, they have to change their policies and behaviors so that they encourage, rather than discourage individual contributions.

Encourage individuals to contribute to open source projects from inside large companies, and let individual interest and creativity guide those contributions. The Free Software Foundation was created by a guy who just wanted to solve a problem with a printer. If you run a company, let your employees solve their problems!

That freedom to think, be creative and do something that matters are the parts of my community and my work I most value.

So, if there’s something about free and open source software, your development community, your personal project that inspires you, please submit a proposal to our conference. We want to hear from you!

Photo courtesy of flickr user kalandrakas, under a Creative Commons license.

My waffles will probably not look as good as this.

People often ask me for advice on how to motivate and get people excited about coming to meetings, participating in user groups and contributing to projects. I’m going to try to blog more about the things I do that work.

Friends in Portland know that I often use food (and sometimes alcohol) bribes to get them to come over to my house to hang out, and then do work that is best done with a group (recall a major weeding project in my front yard).

We needed a few good folks to help out with the next phase of our Open Conference Ware application, and so I decided to reuse this “get house chores done” trick to hopefully motivate a few hungry developers to work with us on the next phase of the project.

When I sent out the message, I got both an enthusiastic “Hell yes, I’ll come for waffles”, and an “Oh man, I already had plans — which, if they fall through, I will totally be there for the waffles.”

I’m sure that the good people who stepped up to help us would have done so anyway. But, if I can provide a warm breakfast while we hack away on wireframes, why not? And, after I tweeted what we were up to, I got another volunteer!

Image courtesy of rizkapb, Creative Commons 2.0 generic license.