Today was the eleventh twelfth installment of the Portland version of Lunch 2.0 and it just keeps getting better.  Although not an official count, I would say that approximately 150 people filled the offices of today’s gracious sponsor Opensourcery to enjoy a tasty feast of Mexican goodness.   Attendees had plenty of space to move around and chat with one another.  In between bites of food, I managed to meet at least a dozen new people, all of which had something interesting to share.   During the short presentation time a few interesting items were discussed that I’d like to share with you:

* OpenSourceBridge.org is putting on an open source conference July 17-19 right here in Portland, Oregon.   They are looking for volunteers, sponsors, talk proposals and registrants.  You can visit their web site for more details (disclosure: I am a volunteer on the Marketing/Sponsorship team)

* Opensourcery (our excellent hosts for today’s event - a big thank you to them) told us about a new application they wrote called “CLOVE”.  This application is planned to be made available under the GPL open source license.  From the really short demo, it appears that the application helps you understand if you are giving your clients the love they deserve. (that was a paraphrase from the demo-dude)  Although not ready just yet, Opensourcery will provide links to the application once it is out there for everyone to use.  I’ll make an update when that information becomes available.  It does however look like a rather interesting way to keep track of all that pesky email that it takes to keep a business relationship moving forward.

* Software Association of Oregon gave us a heads up about their new health care plans that have been able to arrange for even the smallest of organizations.  Visit their website for more information.

For those of you not familiar with Lunch 2.0 - it’s basically a free geek event where you can get out of the office at lunch time and go mingle with others in your industry.   The event was started in Silicon Valley and has spread to other cities.  Here in Portland it was started on February 27th of 2008.  You can follow the location of the next Lunch 2.0 on the Silicon Florist Blog and make sure if you are coming you RSVP on Upcoming.  The next installment of Lunch 2.0 will be on April 8th at the Green Dragon, hosted by my  startup project MioWorks.com