Because I like to Be Prepared, I will be showing up with two Polaroid cameras, chic sunglasses, and the all-essential pocket computer iPhone loaded with both Foursquare and Gowalla (to stalk my friends as efficiently as possible).

I hope I have enough film.

Last Wednesday I attended the Open Source Bridge 2010 Town Hall meeting. This year’s conference will be happening June 1-4, at a Portland location that should be announced shortly. You can see a full recap on the OSBridge Blog. Ed Borasky also recorded a video of the main presentation.

Speaking of, here’s Ed doing his best Nixon V-for-victory impression.

More highlights:

The call for proposals will be open shortly (“early February”), so stay tuned for the announcement by following @osbridge on Twitter and joining the mailing list.

I am thrilled to announce our sessions for this year’s Open Source Bridge conference. Thank you so much to everyone who submitted a proposal and gave us an awesome set of talks to choose from.

You can browse the full list of sessions on our site.

And don’t forget to register. You want to be there for this. Trust me.

We’re also still accepting proposals. Current submissions include putting the cloud in the clouds, how and when to fork a project to do your own thing, and RubySpec (filed under hacks!). We’re interested in a wide range of topics, including advanced material, as long as it’s open source.

There’s going to be a new conference in Portland next July.

We’re calling it Open Source Bridge.

Our goal is this:

Create a completely volunteer-run, community conference to connect developers working with open source.

I am excited to be co-chairing this event. Portland is a fabulous place to be working on open source projects, and we’re the ideal community to build an inclusive, diverse conference that focuses on developers’ interests and needs.

Tomorrow night (10/30) we’re having a town hall meeting to talk about our plans for the conference, and what you can do to help. We’ll be meeting at 7:30 PM at Cubespace. Please RSVP if you’ll be there. If you can’t attend but want to get involved, let Selena or myself know, and we’ll get in touch with you. We’re also planning a second daytime meeting for west-siders next week.

P.S.: The event still needs sponsors. Sponsors help us keep these events free to the public so everyone can participate and learn.

So here’s some of the fun from the week.

Schwern’s People for Geeks tutorial had everything from introductory etiquette to manager-speak to running a user group. I think I’ll be using the concept of tact filters frequently, to explain where geek / everyone else communications go wrong.

One of the presenters, Kirrily Roberts of the Geek Etiquette blog, has also just started a Geek Feminism wiki to track information related to women in technology/gaming/sf. This, combined with Geek Speakr make great starting points for anyone wondering how to get more women involved with their conference or tech events.

Ben Bleything’s Ruby and electronics projects always make me wonder why I still don’t have an Arduino. There’s links to most of what he talked about on his blog.

Selena and Gabrielle gave an intro to running a user group, complete with a short illustrated handbook for attendees (you can download it at the link above). I liked that they had us model some of the techniques discussed as we went.

I really enjoyed leading the panel on Tools for Local Communities. Thanks to Selena Deckelmann, Sulamita Garcia, and Michael Dexter for participating. If you missed it, you can download an audio recording.

This year’s FOSCON, Cooking with Ruby, was entertaining as always. Reid, Igal, and I gave a lightning talk on the Calagator development process. Notes here. The Rails team won the coding competition, with PHP/Symphony coming in second.

I gave a lightning talk on anarchy during the Art of Community session on Thursday.

Emma Jane Hogbin‘s “Form an orderly queue, ladies” blew me away. There were so many things in there that I’ve been trying to formulate into coherent thoughts—now I can just tell you to check out her talk and join in the quest for open source world domination. Slides here and video from the version she did at LUGRadio Live.

Finally, on Friday morning I spoke on OPB Radio’s Think Out Loud, as part of an entire hour on open source. You can download the podcast if you’d like to listen. I’m on about 40 minutes in, but Raven Zachary and Rick Turoczy participated throughout the hour. Reading the comments on Twitter afterward was pretty entertaining.