For practically the entire time Silicon Florist has been around, Calagator has been around. (If you’re not familiar with Calagator, it’s a locally created open source project designed to provide an aggregated calendar for technology events happening in, on, and around Portland.) And when the “startup community” was largely synonymous with the “tech community,” the overlap made it a critical resource for startups in our region to find events and gatherings that helped them connect with other startuppy type folks.
But as the definition of “startup” has continued to evolve to incorporate things like consumer products and other “non-tech” sort of pursuits, the number of startup events increased while the number that were actually appropriate for Calagator began to decline. Still a lot of tech events to fill Calagator. But an awful lot of other events that weren’t the right fit.
So what to do…? Force folks to go back to whack-a-mole on event sits like Cvent, Eventbrite, Luma, and Meetup or come up with a new concept…?
Well, Dominic Kuklawood decided to take the latter path, by leveraging Luma to create a new aggregated calendar focused on the Portland startup community — whether those startups events were tech oriented or not.
Meet the Portland Startup Events calendar.
Like Calagator, anyone can submit events from any platform to be listed on this calendar. Let me double down on that: ANYONE CAN SUBMIT EVENTS. Whether you’re the event organizer or not. Maybe you got invited by someone. Maybe you stumbled upon it. Maybe you’re one of the handful of people who actually reads the newsletter I send out every week and you noticed that the event wasn’t listed.
tl;dr Regardless of how you encounter an event, you can — and should — add it to the calendar. It’s this whole group dynamic of open source calendar creation that makes a project like this work.
And if you’re using Luma as your event platform, it’s even more seamless. Not quite confident you’ve got what it takes? Well, 1) You do. and b) There’s an onboarding doc to help.
Dominic has also created a resource document that highlights a growing number of groups that may be helpful to folks looking to get more engaged in the startup community.
For more information or to submit your events, please visit the Portland Startup Events calendar.
More Portland startup news
