Thanks to an introduction by Brian Westbrook (aka @BMW), Sprint is giving us a 4G network card and a 6 month data plan to raffle off this Friday! How flippin' rad is that?!! ♪ Movin' on up / To the East side. ♫

The plan is to collect names in a pitcher and then pull a name from it. We'll choose a name at 6pm and that person will be given the 4G card on the spot with contact details to get the 6 month plan activated. One thing to note, is that we hear this card is not compatible with Macs. Don't whine, it was a free giveaway and we want to encourage more companies to send us goodies that we can pass on to y'all.

Come help with volunteer tasks for Open Source Bridge, likely including technical work, outreach activities, and ...?

Our blog announcement! http://opensourcebridge.org/blog/2010/02/volunteer-sprint-20100227/

See notes from the last sprint at http://opensourcebridge.org/blog/2010/02/volunteer-sprint-1-stuff-we-did/

This week:

Please join us Saturday, February 27, 2010 beginning at 11:00a for a Volunteer Work Sprint and tour of the PAM's Mark Building!

Activities to include:

Help plan Parties and Fun Extras!

• Fun Extras at Open Source Bridge - from Bike Rides to Karaoke to Massage to Rock Star
• Ada Lovelace Day - OSbridge Fundraising Party - March 24 - can we do it?
• Speakers Party
• Hackers Lounge

Getting ready for Open Source Bridge

• Review existing logistics tasks and add missing items
• Preliminary on-site planning, start working on setup checklists, volunteer rotation schedule, onsite registration checklists etc.
• Start talking about AV setup including a plan for streaming, recording and publishing conference content
• Very preliminary draft of Master Conference Schedule

Hope to see you tomorrow!

Come help with volunteer tasks for Open Source Bridge, likely including technical work, outreach activities, and ...?

This week:

Please join us Saturday, March 13, 2010 beginning at 11:00 am for a Volunteer Work Sprint.

Stuff we'll work on:

• Contacting User Groups, potential speakers
• Formulating blog posts for posting audio content
• Strategizing around sponsorships
• Programming improvements for OpenConferenceWare
• Creative ways of using $100 worth of Adwords

Please join us!

The next Open Source Bridge volunteer sprint will be this Saturday, April 10th at the Market Street Pub. We’ll be there from 11am till 5pm, but you can come to as much of it as you’d like. Add this event to your calendar.

Some things we need your help with:

• Audio: We need to process last year’s audio from our sessions and be ready to quickly process this upcoming year’s audio. It would be great if you could download the 2009 event’s audio, familiarize yourself with it, think about how to clean it up so it can be posted, and bring it along with your computer to the sprint.

• Wiki: We want to provide useful information to our attendees and offer structure to help them organize and contribute information through our wiki. There is a lot of useful content on our 2009 wiki that can be used as inspiration for content to add to the 2010 wiki.

• OpenConferenceWare: We have a few branches containing valuable contributions to our open source conference software that we’d like to finish reviewing and testing so we can incorporate them, including security improvements, performance fixes and software upgrades.

• Complimentary ticket issuer: We’d like to make it easier for our volunteer staff to be able to issue complimentary tickets to speakers, raffle winners, and volunteers. We have developed a plan (PDF) for doing this, and need to start development.

• Hacker lounge planning: We have a 24-hour on-site “hacker lounge” this year for attendees to collaborate and hang out at. We need to discuss how to organize events in this room to provide just enough structure to help attendees without stifling their creativity.

• Logistics, venue and activity planning: We’re using the beautiful Portland Art Museum Mark Building as our venue this year. Discuss how to make the best use of this space and incorporate fun activities ranging from mobile donut trucks to on-site massages with our logistics crew.

• Or whatever you think would be helpful.

Thanks and see you at the sprint!

Come help with volunteer tasks for Open Source Bridge, likely including technical work, outreach activities, and ...?

This week:

Please join us Saturday, May 1, 2010 beginning at 11:00 am for a Volunteer Work Sprint.

Stuff we'll work on:

• Planning for contacting attendees and speakers
• Planning around an art display and reception at City Hall
• Writing blog posts to get the word out about our awesome talk lineup!
• Strategizing around sponsorships
• Work on documenting requirements for enhancements to Open Conference Ware around email contact management of speakers

Please join us!

A few of us are getting together to do work sprinting for Open Source Bridge. It's a beautiful day, so our plan is to occupy the patio at http://ristrettoroasters.com - Ristretto (3808 N Williams Ave) until my battery runs out, and then enjoy a pint at the http://www.newoldlompoc.com/5thquadrant_home.html - Fifth Quadrant in the early afternoon.

I'll head over to Ristretto at 11am. Come join us if you'd like to work on a few things for the conference, or if you'd just like to hang out on this fine day. We'll be working on sponsorship-related things, checking over the schedule, writing blog posts about talks we're really looking forward to seeing, and shoring up details for the Hacker Lounge, parties, and generally fun stuff around the conference.

Leslie Hawthorn (formerly program manager for Google Summer of Code), and a few people from the OSU Open Source Lab are also coming out today.

We hope you're having a lovely day and hope to see you!

There is no work sprint this weekend. See you next time!

The Portland Python Users Group is hosting a sprint February 26 at the headquarters of Urban Airship. The space has room for at least 40 people, but be sure to sign up here!

The group plans to spend some time on Fabric's multiprocessing branch, even including a look into a Python 3 port. Eric Holscher, one of the organizers of the sprint, plans to focus on Django features for 1.4, including forms improvements.

Flatland and Alfajor will also get some love and might see some Python 3 work as well. Last, but certainly not least, co-organizer Dan Colish plans to hack on PyPy, from 2.7 compatibility to benchmarking and testing on the platform. Join any of them or bring your own projects -- it's a day of hacking, fun, food, and friends.

On top of all of the third-party projects, they may spend some time on core development topics such as Python 3 features, doc and code bug fixing, and writing new tests. For those interested in starting on core development, we wrote a guide just for you: Beginners Guide to Python Core Development.

If you're interested in joining their sprint, don't forget to sign up. If you have questions, contact Dan and Eric.

The Salt Stack team is very pleased to announce the first multi city Salt development sprint. In true Salt fashion we are hosting a distributed sprint. This, thanks to a generous donation from the Linux Fund and the accomidations generosly donated by C7 datacenters in Salt Lake City Utah, Cars.com in Santa Monica California, and Idealist.org in Portland Oregon.

This development sprint is being conducted with the express hope of adding more complete unit and integration test coverage to Salt, but as always, feature additions and bug fixes are welcome!

The three cities and location sponsors are, I hope, only the first locations where we can gather Salt developers for this sprint. The goal of Salt Stack is to develop something great, powerful, and open. I hope that this is the first of many multi city sprints that will enable Salt to continue pushing forward and becoming an ever more powerful system.

The Sprints will be held all day on the 30th of June. Attendees will get T-shirts and there will be a live video feed from all the cities involved. There will also be food and drink!

Companies who have ‘gone Agile’ often experience several failure modes. We know that Agile brings unprecedented transparency to adopters - but this often exposes organizational dysfunction which has ‘always been there,’ but often neither acknowledged nor addressed. This can result in one of the most disruptive transitions a company can go through. What to do?

-How can we spare ourselves months of what seems like inevitable struggle? -What have some veteran Agile practitioners learned, and done, to accelerate their transition, and reap the rewards that have eluded others? -How have they measured success?

Our panel of Product & Development experts will share their experience and strategies, to help you cross this minefield successfully and faster.

Mark Bednarski has worked with iGrafx since 2007, starting in Germany as a Business Process Consultant and Six-Sigma Black Belt. He transitioned into Product Management in October 2013 when he transferred to iGrafx headquarters in Tualatin, OR. iGrafx goal - to reduce the release cycle from 18 mos. to 6 mos. - required major changes in both Dev & PM processes, which Mark will lead to completion by the end of this year. This goal screamed for an Agile approach, causing Mark to learn and discover on his own – a tough learning curve, which started to pay back just a few months ago.

Tony Aiello has spent 20 years in machine vision / factory automation engineering, and 5 years in the movie business. He's regularly intrigued by how much these disciplines actually have in common from development / production viewpoints, and gratified that the skills are transferable.

We will confirm the remaining two panelists early next week.

Questions? Contact [email protected]

Open Source Bridge is in just a few weeks — June 20-23. Come find out about volunteering positions, including Session Monitor, Hacker Lounge volunteer, Logistics assistant, Party volunteer, and more! Working just 8 hours (spread over 4 days of conference and load-in day) gets you a free ticket.

Open source Bridge is the best regional open source tech conference around! A language-agnostic conference created by developers, designers, hardware hackers, and community leaders for the greater tech industry, OSBridge focuses on the intersection of activism, tech, and culture. Students and those looking for internships and work are always welcome — we have a job board on-site to connect you with companies looking to fill positions.

If you volunteer for 8 hours, you'll get a free ticket to Open Source Bridge! Come to orientation to get details! And sign up for your shift hours at http://volunteer.opensourcebridge.org/welcome/.

OSBridge organizers will show you around the facility, go through roles and some conference best practices, and teach you how to respond to a Code of Conduct report.

If you volunteer for 8 hours, you'll get a free ticket to Open Source Bridge! Come to orientation to get details! And sign up for your shift hours at http://volunteer.opensourcebridge.org/welcome/.

OSBridge organizers will show you around the facility, go through roles and some conference best practices, and teach you how to respond to a Code of Conduct report.

Looking to engage or recruit donors, volunteers, ambassadors, or community partners in person? Want tips on how to make things run more smoothly? Get potential advocates excited to come to your community event.

Join us as Melissa Chavez (core organizer of many nonprofit events over the years, including tech conferences Open Source Bridge, PNSQC, PyDX, and Portland VegFest) shares tools, and how to plan community events.