If you’ve been looking for an excuse to visit Portland, Oregon, look no further!

I recently volunteered to help the Open Source Bridge marketing team with project management.  I’m not sure what all that will entail yet, but Rick Turoczy assures me I can help so I’m sure before long I’ll have plenty to  do.  I’m looking forward to working with people in the local tech scene, several of which I met last week at Lunch 2.0.  Open Source Bridge is already listed on the Fedora Events page too so maybe I’ll get the opportunity to meet some new Fedorans.  It even looks like Paul Frields is hoping to come.

When I first read the early blog posts about creating a conference to replace OSCON in Portland (it has relocated to San Jose, California) I thought it might be overly ambitious, if not impossible.  I’m changing my mind. The full purpose of the conference is  described at http://opensourcebridge.org/about/.  First, the conference is being organized by a group of Portland all-stars that have pulled off similar feats.  Second, the word is starting to get out in different places that this conference is being recognized as an alternative to OSCON.

A call for papers is still open and lots of interesting proposals have been submitted.  In an open source sort of way you can see all the proposals that have been submitted.  It is RSS enabled so you can set a  watch and see it continue to evolve.

The only proposal currently missing is yours. Time is running out. The opportunity to submit a paper ends very soon—seven days from now on March 31, 2009.  Hope to see you there.