Coming out of the last downturn, OSCON was a regular fixture in Portland. Leading many to consider Portland — plus its locals like Linus Torvalds and Ward Cunningham — as a bastion of the open-source community. It’s been noticeably quiet over the last few years on that front. So it’s really nice to see the Free and Open Source Software Yearly (FOSSY) conference selecting Portland for its 2023 event.
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No single one of us is as smart as a bunch of us. That was my thinking when I originally threw together this cheat sheet on Github to help document resources in the Portland startup community. The idea was that it would make it easier for folks to understand what was happening in Portland, what organizations supported startup activity, and potentially serve as a way to finally capture and quantify the actual startup activity around these parts — that allowed everyone to contribute.
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It’s not just proprietary technology that’s entering the space race. Open source has a spot, too. Like the Portland State Aerospace Society. And recent Portland transplant Kubos, a company that manages an open source framework for satellites, which just landed another round of funding bringing its total raised to $5.3 million, according to Crunchbase.
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While the team building this startup is distributed, CEO Evan “@rabble” Henshaw-Plath spends a good deal of time in Portland. So it seemed worth a mentioning that Planetary, a new decentralized entrant in the social media realm, officially launched today.
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I don’t have much detail beyond the Mozilla blog post announcing the layoffs, but given that Mozilla has a substantial Portland footprint — they only mention closing an operation in Taipei, Taiwan, specifically — I’m concerned this will affect the office here and the Portland startup community. So I wanted to give you a heads up.
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When the pandemic isolation began, many tried and true ways of building connection and community — most notably, meeting face to face with people — disappeared, instantaneously. But the need for community didn’t. If anything, in fact, that need increased. Exponentially. But how are we to maintain and strengthen community in this new normal of self distancing?
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If you were part of the Portland startup or open source community a decade ago—or if you were a startup type who visited Portland during that time period—you probably had the chance to attend Beer and Blog once or twice. If you weren’t around Portland then, you’ve no doubt heard me wax nostalgic dozens of times about the event, a weekly happy hour that served as the point of connection for our fledgling community.
It’s no secret that the world of online advertising has devolved into a means of using any and every accessible data point to convince consumers to purchase products. But it wasn’t always that way. There was a time when online advertising was far more simple and less invasive. And it still worked. But it was difficult. Portland startup Read the Docs has spent time building an ad platform that provides simple, ethical advertising. But in a world of ad blockers, that can be more difficult that one would think.
Ten years ago, the current Portland startup community was just starting to coalesce. And it’s no secret that many of the connections, gatherings, and events that made that possible were very much due to a substantially larger and more well connected tech community—the open source community—whose activity served as the foundation for the growing community of tech entrepreneurs.
