[Pdx-pm] Fwd: Please Distribute: Portland Software Census

[Eric Wilhelm]

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Audrey Eschright
Date: May 12, 2:21 pm
Subject:  Portland Software Census

If you're involved with Portland's software community, you know that
there's an amazing variety and depth of work being created at
companies large and small, in hobby side-projects, and open source
efforts. The City of Portland has selected software as one of its
economic development clusters for the economic plan currently being
written. Agencies like the Portland Development Commission (PDC) are
involved in documenting our software community and developing a plan
for working with it, but they lack accurate data on the types of
software development local organizations are undertaking, and have
limited experience with the kinds of small companies, ad hoc
organizations, and independent work that forms much of our technology
efforts.

We'd like to assist the PDC and City of Portland efforts by initiating
a software community census to:
Gather some basic demographics about Portland's tech community
Flesh out what work people are doing and for whom
Build a baseline so we can quantitatively track the community's
breadth and depth

How can you participate?
Take the survey at http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/KTGSH9Q before May 17
Spread the word to your colleages, coworkers and friends
We will be posting the results online, so check back with Silicon
Florist and your community tech organizations for details.

What do we get out of this? This census will:
Ensure economic development efforts are targeted to what our industry
actually needs
Provide data that can be used to assess the success of economic
development efforts
Create an accurate picture of our amazing tech community (and give us
bragging rights at OSCON).
Market Portland to companies like Involver who are coming to check out
Portland!

How our work fits into the City of Portland's plans:
Software is the of the 5 clusters identified in Portland Economic
Development Plan. It is the cluster that is least well defined in the
plan.
PDC took the first step with their survey.  Now we are helping them
flesh out their results and better target their efforts.
We will be sharing our survey's results directly with the Mayor and
PDC's Urban Development Director, Erin Flynn.

The survey will be open through the end of May, but we strongly
encourage you to complete the survey by May 17th so we can include
your data in the results we share at the next Lunch 2.0.