I’ll be chilling as the sponsor contact of the team around, so if you see me around the Oregon Convention Center in sessions, in the speaker lounge, in the expo hall, say hi. If you see me in the Hacker Lounge, say double hi. If you see me on the Max, pretend you don’t know me… Actually, random public transport conversations are some of the best things about Portland.

I say 1.0 because this is the first one, and it’s bound to get better from here.

10 hours, 28 minutes, and 17 seconds. Here we go!

Here’s how I got here:

At the end of September 2008, I moved back to Portland to take a project management job with OpenSourcery. The first weekend that I was here, I started hunting around on Upcoming for ‘places that new friends might be’, and Side Project to Startup at Cubespace came up. The last time I had been in Portland was for OSCON 2007 and 2008, so I knew that it was a sweet place for Open Source development, so I was stoked that I had come back just in time for an unconference. (Little did I realize that this was a normal occurance for Portland and there were unconferences almost every weekend.)

One of the sessions at the unconference was relating to the loss of OSCON from the Portland Tech calendar, and how disappointing that was, and maybe we could do something here with this great community we have. I foolishly chose to go to a session where J-P Voilleque talked about connections between government and open source. (Or maybe that was a different unconference. Can’t remember. )

But this idea of an all-volunteer run conference stuck around, through the work of Audrey, Reid, Jake, Selena and Rick. I dropped into the background from this point, so that’s a different story.

My point is: I’ve never quite seen anything like it. Side Project to Startup spun off two events, CyborgCamp and OpenSourceBridge. CyborgCamp was a ridiculously useful time. We’re working hard to make sure that OpenSourceBridge adds value as well. Sessions are officially announced this week, and we’ll begin a different conversation that brings together speakers and attendees.