Open Source Bridge conference - after

The Open Source Bridge conference is concluded (for 2009) and I am back home.

This was a good conference. The sessions were informative and the people were interesting. The best sessions were the in-between, informal conversations with people. While small (about 400 attendees) just about each person I met had an interesting story. There was an interesting mix of skills and knowledge, too. Attendees had more than just programming skills; people were interested in usability, women in tech, and the open source community.

Staying the extra day for the "unconference" was worth the expense. The unconference was a set of sessions proposed by attendees, not planned in advance. On Friday (the unconference day) we started in the ballroom. Individuals proposed topics and scheduled them. Volunteers for the conference handled scheduling conflicts. Attendees picked the sessions they wanted to attend, and then went to them. The sessions were less formal than the "speaker at the front" normal sessions; they tended to be discussions among equals. Sometimes the discussions wandered to other topics. Always something interesting, whether it was "Anticipatory Anthropology" or "How to Start A Business".

I made a number of contacts; some I have already sent messages to on LinkedIn.

The Portland area was nice, as on my previous visits. As I walked around town, I would think to myself "I could live here". The software/tech environment seems vibrant too.