Portland startups, open source, and tech news, jobs, and events #pdx
[Editor: This is a guest post by Audrey Eschright, the co-maintainer of the Calagator project, Portland’s collaborative tech calendar. tl;dr Calagator is turning 10. There’s a party.]
Next week we’ll be celebrating the 10th birthday of Calagator, Portland’s technology calendar. As time passes, you might not know who created it, who maintains it, or how it came to be. I admit we haven’t always done the best at communicating that—so read on.
We can always use more voices talking about tech, making it more approachable, and helping folks feel welcome and involved. And when those publications are startups in their own right? All the better. That’s why I’m happy to see local community builder and developer Audrey Eschright taking to Indiegogo to underwrite the development of a new tech publication called The Recompiler. Read More
A incredibly insightful woman once said, “Encourage your community to take time to step back and enjoy their work.” And since I just read her saying that today, I thought I would stop for a second to emphasize just how lucky we are to have the community we do. We’ve got events going every night and practically every weekend. We’ve got good chatter online and off. And we’re creating and building a lot of cool stuff—sometimes purely through volunteer efforts.
Two of those amazing volunteer projects are Calagator and Open Source Bridge. And two of the awesome people behind those efforts are Selena Deckelmann and Audrey Eschright. Read More
Tonight, everyone’s favorite Portland tech podcast will be featuring everyone’s favorite Portland open source conference. That’s right. Strange Love Live is chatting with the co-founders of Open Source Bridge.
“What’s Open Source Bridge, you ask?” he said with the full disclosure that he was acting as a marketing volunteer and that Silicon Florist was a media sponsor.
Why, it’s an entirely volunteer run conference for open source citizens being help June 17 – 19, 2009 at the Oregon Convention Center. Read More
Last Sunday, a group of folks representing the Portland open source, mobile, and coworking community got the chance to sit down and chat with Portland Mayor Sam Adams. Among those in attendance were Rubyist and Calagator lead Audrey Eschright, CubeSpace’s David Komisky, Software Association of Oregon Interim President Scott Kveton, the Mayor’s Economic Development Policy Advisor Skip Newberry, CubeSpace’s Eva Schweber, General Counsel at Extreme Arts & Sciences J-P Voilleque, and Small Society’s Raven Zachary.
Eva has a great recap of how the meeting played out, including insight on the topics we covered from telecommuting to open source to mobile. [UPDATE] And Skip Newberry from the Mayor’s Office has posted his recap, as well. So I wanted to take a different tact. I wanted to find out how the attendees perceived the meeting and the Mayor’s willingness to engage this group in conversation.
Here’s what they had to say. Read More
Portland’s entirely volunteer run Open Source Bridge conference—which just closed its call for proposals—got some recent airtime on FLOSS Weekly portion of Twit.tv with Leo Laporte.
Selena Deckelmann and Audrey Eschright spent some time chatting with Leo Laporte and our fellow Portlander Randal Schwartz.
Legion of Tech, unconferences, no self-service gas, Portland and—of course—the 24-hour hacker lounge all get their fair share of love.
To listen for yourself, tune into the Open Source Bridge episode of FLOSS Weekly.
Today is Ada Lovelace Day, a day to celebrate women who are excelling in the world of technology.
Who was Ada Lovelace, you ask?
Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace was born on 10th December 1815, the only child of Lord Byron and his wife, Annabella. Born Augusta Ada Byron, but now known simply as Ada Lovelace, she wrote the world’s first computer programmes for the Analytical Engine, a general-purpose machine that Charles Babbage had invented.
That got me to thinking. I’m incredibly lucky to get the chance to work with a number of extremely talented and technically adept women. And I get the chance to work with many of them on a weekly basis, which is awesome. Many of you are just as lucky as me.
So I thought I’d list some of the cool female geeks in Portland whom I am proud to know:
She’s the co-founder of Open Source Bridge, has had code committed to PostgreSQL, attends and speaks at any number of conferences, served as one of the original board members for Legion of Tech, and provides some exemplary guidance on killing chickens.
She’s the other co-founder of Open Source Bridge, a founding member of Legion of Tech, a celebrated Rubyist, the driving force behind Calagator, and one of the most creative thinkers in the Northwest.
She’s a wizard with Yahoo! Pipes, a sage with community development, a hardworking startup type with Shizzow, one of the founders of Legion of Tech, and from what I understand, one mean werewolf player.
All of these women have been an absolute inspiration for me. And I’m truly honored that I get the chance to work with them on a regular basis.
And just as I’m in the midst of writing this post, I see a tweet come across from Steven Walling, validating my choices—and adding Amber Case, who is amazing in her own right.
But for as much as I love the local scene, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention two other incredibly inspiring women in the tech scene who have gained—and will continue to have—my utmost admiration.
She’s an incredible speaker and thought-provoking writer whose Creating Passionate Users completely changed the way I thought about marketing and writing—and was a direct inspiration for Silicon Florist.
She’s taught me how to think about the power and the promise technology holds for doing good. And her Gnomedex performance, last year, remains one of the coolest technological experiments I’ve ever seen—even though it had very little to do with technology and everything to do with people.
If there are women in technology who inspire you, I’d love to hear about—and I’m sure they would, too. Who are the other women in Portland technology or Silicon Forest technology who deserve some recognition? Why not take a few minutes to write something up? There’s still time.
(Image courtesy Anyaka. Used under Creative Commons)
If I had to describe 2009 thus far, I would dub it the “Year of the User Group.” And that would also make Audrey Eschright’s prediction right—already.
What is it with you people? I mean, it’s a totally good thing. But man, there are new user groups springing up left and right. First Portland Data Plumbing, then Portland WordPress, and now Portland Concrete5. And since I promised Igal Koshevoy that I would do a better job of highlighting what’s happening in the user groups and development groups in town, I’m simply trying to keep up.
What’s Concrete5? It’s an elegant open source content management system developed right here in Portland, Oregon, that rivals some other more popular content management systems out there in terms of functionality—and downright crushes them in terms of ease-of-use.
Well, something as good as C5 is sure to develop a legion of fans. And now, those fans and users have the opportunity to meet one another with the newly launched Concrete5 Portland User Group:
Earlier this summer we released our previously commercial CMS as fully “Free Beer” under the MIT open source license. The second half of 2008 was a whirlwind for us as we were named project of the month on SourceForge and saw traffic go through the roof.
As part of running what promises to be the next Drupal, local user groups are going to be a huge component to our success. We have several starting around the states and Europe this month, with the Portland one obviously being super keen as this is our home turf.
Meetings will be held the second Thursday of every month, beginning with the inaugural meeting this Thursday, January 8 at Hopworks. For more information, see the Calagator entry. To RSVP, visit the Concrete5 Portland community.