In a classic case of one step forward, two steps back the City of Portland is now proposing a design contest to redesign PortlandOnline. And it’s spec work.
Aside from being the first publicly recognized Portland economic development strategy in 15 years, it’s the first time that Portland has formally recognized the open source, mobile, coworking, and startup community.
[HTML2]While the news coming out of yesterday’s Portland City Council meeting will likely be mired in heated he-said she-said debates about the fate of the 39th Avenue / Cesar Chavez hoopla, something very important happened late in the day: Portland’s City Council unanimously passed the Portland Economic Development Strategy.
Why is this so momentous? Well, aside from being the first publicly recognized economic strategy for Portland in 15 years, it’s the first time that Portland has formally recognized the open source, mobile, coworking, and startup community. And that’s a big step forward. As Eva Schweber says, we should be proud. Read More
Communities need campfires around which to gather. Whether they be meeting places to tell stories, warm safe places to meet friends, or roaring bonfires to celebrate our victories. Or even—at times—simply a place to Camp. CubeSpace was the campfire of the Portland tech community. And now its flame is out.
I was dreading writing this post. But somehow, given the state of things, it seemed—barring a miracle—that it was inevitable. And so it was, this evening, that the story we’ve all be following and anxiously awaiting, finally came to its unfortunate conclusion: CubeSpace is no more.
Communities need campfires around which to gather. Whether they be meeting places to tell stories, warm safe places to meet friends, or roaring bonfires to celebrate our victories. Or even—at times—simply a place to Camp.
CubeSpace was the campfire of the Portland tech community. And now its flame is out. Read More
And today, I was completely blown away when I caught up on a series of posts by Portland-based Platial’s Di-Ann Eisnor, documenting her thoughts on “How neogeography will change the way we live.” After reading the series, you’ll never look at mapping the same way again.
I always wish companies took time to blog a little bit more. Share a little insight. Blow off some steam. Or even just tell us what they’re thinking.
Sometimes I think the folks running startups forget that they’ve got a great deal to share. That their experience or their failures or even just their focusing on a singular topic in excruciating detail gives them a unique vantage for which many of us mere mortals yearn.
A number of us have recently had the opportunity to sit down with Amanda Hess. Amanda is working on a chapter for a larger piece on the Portland entrepreneurial scene, ranging from bikes to beer to restaurants to tech.
During the interviews, she’s been asking folks to describe the Portland tech scene in their own words. When she posed the question to me, I started to stutter through a fumbling response, when I suddenly realized I could do something better.
“Why don’t we ask the community?” I said. Read More
It never fails. All it takes is the first glimpse of that burning orb up in the sky and the first warm spell. And suddenly every Oregonian is sprinting to the local garden store, grabbing their shovels, and frantically tilling their backyard beds or their local community gardens.
But come summer and early fall, what happens? That’s right: too many zucchini.
Enter Portland-based Veggie Trader, a social swapping site that uses the Web to help overbearing gardeners… err gardens share their bounty with others—and get vegetables they can use in return. Read More
I’ve worked on FOSCON (a free Ruby event that took place during OSCON in previous years), BarCamp Portland, Ignite Portland, WhereCamp Portland, and now Open Source Bridge. The camps (unconferences) were all quite similar to each other to organize, but Open Source Bridge is much bigger than anything else I’ve worked on. There’s a lot of extra planning involved in doing a 1,000-person conference compared to a 300 person BarCamp. You can pull off an unconference in a short period of time, with fairly limited resources, but a big conference requires more structure.
Then the folks at OpenSourcery were kind enough to give us a few minutes to talk about the conference during a packed Lunch 2.0. Unfortunately for me, Jake Kuramoto successfully threw me under the bus again, much like Seattle Lunch 2.0.
Then, little did we know that, while we were enjoying OpenSourcery’s hospitality, something incredibly—well serendipitous—was happening at the same time.
And then he found Open Source Bridge. And then he wrote a post called “An Alternate OSCON?” offering:
Then someone sent me a pointer to http://opensourcebridge.org/ which is in Portland on June 17-19. Now I have an incentive to see if people want to go there. San Jose is closer to Berkeley, so I’d rather go there, but a really open OSCON would be something that’s worth supporting. There are other new projects that don’t have space at OSCON, so maybe we could all get together in Portland and see what happens.
(If you’re not familiar with Dave Winer, you should be. According to Wikipedia, he is “generally credited with the exposition of RSS as ‘Really Simple Syndication,’ now a world-wide phenomenon, and the first to implement the feed ‘enclosure‘ feature, one of several necessary ingredients for podcasting at the time it first emerged.”)
Whoof. That’s a big unplanned day of serendipity.
It’s incredibly gratifying to see the momentum continue to build for this entirely volunteer run conference. It’s good for Portland. And it’s good for the open source community.
This evening, I had the honor to take a little walk down memory lane with the folks at Portland Web Innovators as we took a little time to reflect of the cool accomplishments of the Portland Web and Open Source startup community over the last 12 months.
It was kind of like signing yearbooks. A lot of nostalgia and a lot of kind words. And—of course—a lot of tweets.
I wanted to thank everyone who took time out of their schedules to come hang out and chat about our past and our future. And to those who took the opportunity to hang out online.
Here’s a quick round-up of what I’ve got at this point. I’ll add more as it rolls in, and as always, your comments are welcome.
Slides
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Video
Thanks so much to Bram Pitoyo for streaming this video and moderating the chat room. (NOTE: There’s a bit of a hiccup at about 90 seconds into the presentation. If you wait, it comes back. Or you can click into the timeline to kickstart the video again.)
I’m holding a contest. Count how many times I say “amazing” during this presentation and post it in the comments. You could win… um… I don’t know. Something.
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Twitter stream
We managed to accumulate quite a few tweets. You’ll be happy to hear that I managed to resist the urge to tweet during the presentation.
Portland Tech Community
“Over the last year, I’ve written several emails to people moving here describing different events to attend and at those events introduced people new to the area to others in the Portland Tech Community. Despite the fact that I had found myself doing that multiple times, I never really thought about it as a need. I just considered it some ways part of being a good host for the town I grew up in…. But there is a clear need. If someone doesn’t know to ask or whom to ask, they may never find their connection.”
The Year in Retrospect, the Year to Come
“One of the things Rick declined to do was talk much about the ‘why’ – what’s the secret sauce that makes the Portland tech community a community and not some loose aggregation of companies and coders? Why is there such a drive to connect here, while other communities with equal opportunities just don’t work as hard? And most importantly, why is community so important to Portlanders, and what are local companies of all types and from all industries doing to connect and generate a sustainable economics through close attention to community members, the locality, the exigent needs of the people? What does innovation look like in tough circumstances?”
Today, creating a vibrant and interactive community around your product or organization can be the difference between unheralded success and unimaginable failure. And no one knows that better than Portland’s Dawn Foster, one of the leading authorities on the subject.
Dawn has just completed a series of posts on corporate communities that is a must read for anyone attempting to work online with customers.
What’s a corporate community, you ask?
Corporate communities refer to any custom community created by an organization for the purpose of engaging with customers or other people who may be interested in the organization’s products and services. For the purpose of this post, custom corporate communities include communities created by corporations, non-profit organizations, educational institutions and similar organizations. These corporate communities can take many different forms: support communities, developer communities to help developers work with your products, customer and enthusiast communities, and many others.
See? I told you. How could you not fit in there?
So grab a cup of coffee (or some bubble tea if you want to be even more like Dawn) and dive into this great series of posts:
Custom Corporate Communities: Planning and Getting Started
Before jumping in to create a new community, you should think carefully about the purpose of this new community including your goals and objectives, fitting your community efforts into your organization’s overall strategy, measuring success, and committing the resources required to make your community flourish.
Maintaining a Successful Corporate Community
I decided to follow up my post on Monday about Custom Corporate Communities: Planning and Getting Started with this post containing tips about what to do and what to avoid doing if you want to have a successful corporate community. While some of these tips are specific to corporate communities, most of them also apply to other types of communities as well.
A Structure for Your Corporate Community
I thought that it would be a good idea to also spend a little time on the things that you should be thinking about when coming up with a structure for your community. It is important to keep in mind that every community software package is likely to have unique strengths and limitations when it comes to configuring your community. From a design and architecture perspective, I strongly recommend looking at this strengths and limitations of the platform and taking them into account before starting any design or architecture work.
Promoting Your Community Efforts the Right Way
In this final post for the corporate community series, we will spend some time on the right and wrong ways to promote your community efforts. Some of this advice also applies more broadly to promotion of other social media efforts as well.
