Thomas King's blog

  • Rose City Resource up and running

    Apr 01, 2009

    This past weekend OpenSourcery hosted the launch party for Portland's Rose City Resource, online version. The Rose City Resource has long been a print booklet containing invaluable information on Portland's resources for persons experiencing homelessness and poverty. One can use the booklet to find hot meals, a place to stay, and other public resources.

    Now the formerly print-only guide is available as a highly interactive, intuitive online resource. The project required the time and effort of countless people, but much of the thanks is due to Sarah Beecroft, Americorp volunteer and website project manager. Some of her words on the project, taken from their About Us page:

    "The development of this website was an entirely volunteer-driven community effort; it didn't cost a physical dollar and was built with the intention of providing an existing organization with a sustainable tool to better do what they already work very hard to do well. The Rose City Resource website is a gift from the community to Street Roots to further enable them to carry out their mission of empowering individuals to find resources appropriate to their situation. This website began as my Americorps project with support from the City of Gresham, where I served a volunteer term with the Maps and Data Services Program, and was then adopted by the Portland Drupal Users Group (which I'm also a member of) as a community project. It was as near a barn-raising as I have ever seen in pixelated format."

    The launch party was a blast, with much pinball, Spy Hunter, and general merrymaking. Please take a few moments and explore the amazing site that is the Rose City Resource.

  • Lunch 2.0 thank you

    Mar 13, 2009

    I want to quickly thank everyone who showed up for OpenSourcery's version of Lunch 2.0 on Wednesday. It was a huge success, with delicious food from Pepino's (thanks, Andy!), good company, and pinball.

    Much has already been said of the event, so I just want to add links to a few photos taken by our own Dan Mitu.

    One more shameless plug: if you haven't seen Clove, which we demoed during lunch, you haven't given you clients the love they deserve. Curious? Just ask.

    Thank you for reading.

  • Open Source Bridge call for proposals

    Mar 13, 2009

    The Open Source Bridge is an all-volunteer, all-awesome conference that will take place in Portland, Oregon this summer, June 17-19 at the Convention Center. When OSCON fled south, did Portland cry itself to sleep? No. It organized across languages, across disciplines, and on both sides of the mighty Willamette to stage an even more impressive event.

    But the success of the conference relies on real people presenting real content. That's where OpenSourcery and other development shops come in. That's right, it's time to submit proposals. We're encouraging our developers, project managers, systems administrators, and business developers to do so.

    A few words about why the Open Source Bridge exists, taken from their website:

    "Our primary objective will be to explore what it means to be a responsible Open Source citizen.

    "Our conference structure is language-agnostic by design, in hopes of facilitating broader community growth by focusing on Open Source development as a discipline–divorcing the techniques of development from the language used for that development. In so doing, the conference will encourage and foster cross-pollination and widespread knowledge sharing, regardless of each developer’s chosen programming language."

    That sounds like the kind of activity Drupal developers should participate in. Please feel free to contact thomas@opensourcery.com if you have further questions about the event or if you would like to volunteer your time as an OSB advocate. We're looking for developers across the country (world?) to visit our fair city during the most beautiful time of year. Come June you'll see why they call us the Rose City.

    Thank you for reading.

  • Thomas King

    OpenSourcery Alumnus