I was pretty excited about the PDX Digital Corps when I first heard about it. The brainchild of Ron Bronson, the former Director of Design & Strategic Initiatives at 18F, an innovative government organization that was unceremoniously shuttered by DOGE. But it was never meant to last. By design.
I want to be a little bit sanguine about how I made this idea up. I got the idea on a Friday. By Saturday I built the site, and we launched it on Monday. I didn’t really expect this thing to be very big. I thought it’d be me and a few people at a table. I thought we’d do it for a few months and tell a story about that.
What it turned into was something much bigger and much more interesting than I thought it could be. I’ve personally met folks I wouldn’t have met otherwise. People have connected to other people. Folks are finding jobs or something like this. I don’t want to overstate its significance, but I do want to say that in a world with so much terminal churn and such change, it’s super important that we connect locally to the things we can impact, to the things we can fix bit by bit.
Code PDX — which has actively worked with a similar ethos over the years — will take over the activities started by PDX Digital Corps.
For more on the project and transition, visit “Wrapped up the PDX Digital Corps experiment this week.”
More Oregon startup news
