Think of

as yesterday mashing up with tomorrow.

On the one hand, you have a telethon, as old-school an entertainment event as you can conjure.

On the other hand, you have a day-and-a-quarter of live streaming media sent out from Portland to an audience watching in on computers, smart phones, and iPads all around the world.

The organizers put it this way: “Think Jerry Lewis meets YouTube -- only better.”

You get your traditional mix of music, dance, comedy, and chat along with pleas for charitable donations. And you also get next-generation ideas about how content is marshaled, wrangled and, most of all, shared for charitable endeavors in the age of digital media.

This weekend -- from 4 p.m. on Friday to 10 p.m. on Saturday -- prominent members of the Portland tech and social media scenes will pool their talent, brains, sweat, and staying-up-all-night skills to mount the second 30 Hour Day in less than a year. They’ll spend most of that time on a stage in the northeast corner of

, introducing musicians and other performers, talking with a variety of guests, and urging contributions for the

, the

, and

, a local organization which offers, in its phrase “creative mentoring for homeless youth.”

But at the same time, they’ll be building -- partly by intent, partly by discovering what happens next -- a new model for charitable fundraising that uses the tools of digital technology and the sort of networks that are beginning to arise in a world defined by emerging social media.

30HD is the brainchild of three lynchpins of Portland’s dynamic tech and social media communities:

, producer and host of the weekly videocast

; her husband (and “SLL” co-producer),

, who works as a technical marketing engineer at Intel (one of the many sponsors of 30HD), and

, an independent marketing consultant and editor of the popular

tech news blog.

Last winter, the trio were shooting the breeze in the “SLL” studio one evening and thought out loud, as Turoczy remembers, “The holidays are coming up. We should do something. We’ve got all this talent and all this know-how and all these connections.”

They conceived the telethon -- “a really, really long podcast,” as Kaos recalls -- and within four weeks, they were able to secure a space, predict and prepare for almost every technical problem that they might encounter in the course of 30 uninterrupted hours of streaming live media, and, perhaps most importantly, tap into the energy, ability and eagerness of various Portland communities to put together a technical crew and a day-plus worth of guests and performers.

Kaos and Turoczy hosted on the air, bantering with guests, introducing musicians and other talent, conducting interviews, changing costumes. “We both made it through 30 hours without any sleep,” recalls Kaos. “I tried to sleep. The security guard at the building kept scolding me, telling me to get some sleep. But I was too full of energy.”

That first 30HD, held in mid-December of last, raised nearly $10,000 in cash, food and toys from a global internet audience of 77,000 unique viewers, and it taught the crew a lot about what they needed to know about both their technical and personal capacities. Mostly, perhaps, it taught them what an extraordinary place Portland can be for people who are trying to put together a truly communitarian venture.

“There’s no way we could have done it without the contacts and community aspects of this town,” says Gebhardt. He relates how the well-established network of mutual support in the Portland tech world reaches into other of Portland’s various cultural tribes -- musicians, comedians, radio broadcasters (the folks behind the internet radio network

serve as the tech crew for 30HD), and so on. “It was a really pleasant surprise to see how quickly a community came together around the first one,” Turoczy recalls.

Gebhardt believes that the success of the first 30HD had a lot to do with how far advanced Portland is in bridging the space between online social media and actual physical world interactivity. “Portland is an open-source capital,” he says, referring to the practice of creating software that anyone can contribute to or use for free. “That kind of translates in the real world.”

As he explains, regular in-the-flesh activities such as Portland’s famed weekly Beer & Blog gatherings bring together the tech community, and in meeting in the flesh, people learn about other shared interests: music, food, sports, what have you. That leads to other sorts of collaborations -- such as, for instance, wrangling talent for a project like 30HD.

“There wasn’t one ego on the first show,” Gebhardt says. “It always touched me that people showed up with the gear and said, ‘what do you want me to do?’”

“And when it was over,” adds Turoczy, “the first thing they wanted to know was ‘when are we gonna do this again?’”

The open source ethos carries over into another key innovation of 30HD: all of the content generated at the telethons is made available to charitable fundraisers to use however they wish -- all the musical performances, all the video of conversations, the concept itself, all of it.

“We’re not fundraisers,” Gebhardt explains. “We know media on the web and live events on the web. We create a spectacle, and then we hand the charities the event, and it’s their job to make of it whatever they can.” They can, for example, use footage of bands and comedians to drive traffic to their own web sites, or to mount small internet events of their own, or to pool resources with other organizations in other cities to create even larger fundraisers.

“We tell them,” says Turoczy, “‘Here’s the functionality. Do what you want with it. Use our content however you want to change the world.’”

Meanwhile, back in

this

world, Kaos says that preparations for this weekend’s event are living up to, well, her name.

“We have to consider the weather, and the foot traffic, and the number of people who saw or heard about the first telethon and want to participate,” she says. “I got a call from one of our producers the other day saying, ‘I went to Last Thursday and found three great new bands,’ but we don’t have spaces for them in the show.”

Plus, because of curfew and noise restrictions in Pioneer Courthouse Square, the entire 30HD broadcast will move, mid-broadcast, for a 12-hour overnight stint in space provided by a local tech company.

“It’s gonna be like NASA,” says Gebhardt. “We start at the Kennedy Space Center for the launch, then move to Houston for the mission, then back to Kennedy for the recovery.”

But, Kaos avers, they’re looking forward to the madness. “Last time we discouraged people from coming down because we didn’t know how things would go. This time we want them to come down to the Square and interact with us....”

“....While watching it on their iPhones!” adds Turoczy.