Entries categorized as ‘technology’
Since some folks geek out on this sort of thing:
I’ve been using Twitter exclusively on the iPad this week. It has the advantage that I can’t be distracted by it while I’m working on other things, and the screen is big enough to be comfortable viewing links and pictures. I clip any interesting articles to Instapaper unless I have time to read them right now, which is an improvement over my previous tendency to leave them open in yet another Firefox tab which just gets in the way later. When the iPad gets threaded email this fall, I might see if I can handle mail the same way (Gmail in the iPad browser is nice, but I have more than one account to keep track of).
I’m using Tumblr as a kind of public notebook. Altered photos and screengrabs, snippets of commentary or rant, quotes from something I’m reading. For notes I don’t want to share, I’m using Evernote. Still getting the hang of what sorts of folders are useful, and trying to remind myself to move iPhone photos into there when relevant.
My todo list still lives in The Hit List even though development appears to be completely stalled. I like the interface and how it handles recurring items too much to switch unless forced. Most of the time it doesn’t matter that I can’t sync it with my phone—the only reminder I seem to miss is a result is my twice-a-month contact lens switch, and being a day late isn’t terribly fatal. If I really need to track a errand or grocery list while out and about, I put it in Evernote.
One of my consistent goals with all of this is to have a system that’s so calm and easy to maintain I don’t think about it. When I’m working, I want to minimize distractions and have everything I need easy to access. When I’m reading or browsing information, I want it to be so easy to clip and track I can find the good parts again later. So on and so forth.
Categories: life · technology
I went to the OpenGovWest meetup last night, which I sort of flubbed by arriving 40 minutes late (I thought the meeting started at 7pm, not 6). But I got there in time for most of the discussion, which ranged from “what does this group want to be doing?” to “why is the city/county RFP process so obtuse?”
A recurring theme was the need for hubs, info centers, central communication points. I said something about needing a telephone tree, which led one of those “this is too simple to work” insights: if the lowest common denominator of government technology usage is email, and we need a contact point for government to talk to the indie tech community, why don’t we give them an email address to cc, and filter or redistribute it on our side? I mean, the PDC sent out notes from the meeting at w+k, and how did they distribute that? Email. How visible is email to people not on the list? Right. But that gap, that’s just tech stuff, filtering and rebroadcasting and we totally know how to do that. So Reid will set up an email alias to use and we’ll start tinkering.
I’m also thinking about creating a tumblr for CivicApps. There’s a communication/visibility problem for the project, because they’re on Twitter, but Twitter posts are transient. They scroll off the screen and cease to exist (in our immediate consciousness). There’s a mailing list now which is great for discussion, and a news page on the site, but it’s all press releases and the link is buried at the bottom of the page. One of the things I like about Tumblr is that it makes it easy to combine content from a variety of sources, and you can configure it so other people can submit posts.
Yeah, why not. I can always delete it if it’s not useful. If you’re working on something CivicApps related you want to see posted/linked, send it to me.
One of the other things I’ve been trying to do it sort out the various needs and pieces of this. There’s the “how does the tech community talk to the government” piece. The “how do we address the business needs of small businesses and startups” piece. A professional development / community-building piece that often comes back to “we want a community collaboration space” and “getting sponsors & volunteers for events”. And some things that stretch outside of Portland or the region, like “connecting our CivicApps and OpenGov activities with the global government transparency effort”. Each one might need different tools, have different people involved.
And now I’m at the end of my lunch break, and the MEX/FRA game is over, so I’ll post this.
Categories: portland · technology
The meeting was two weeks ago, and while we had a small group I think it went well. I’ve been trying to organize these notes into some sort of coherent narrative, but it’s not working, so I’m just posting what I have in semi-raw form. I edited down a lot of the discussion to focus on what I thought were the key points. Much thanks to Addie for taking the notes I’ve edited and annotated below.
Here’s what I wrote down for follow-up from our discussion:
- We need metrics (still)
- Figure out economic impact of open source, community meetups
- How can we build community structures that can help represent us?
- PDC is experienced in real estate development, so… how do we make what we need have a structure they can work with?
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Categories: portland · technology
Tagged: economic development, pdc, software cluster
May 31, 2010 · Comments Off
I went through the answers to two more questions from the first PDC survey to provide a summary of responses. These involved things respondents wanted in order to improve their business’s relationship with Portland, and infrastructure needs that weren’t explicitly covered in a previous question.
The answers seem to reflect a similar sense of disenfranchisement among some respondents to that which was described in answers to the initial survey question. Requests for local government actions make up the largest group, and a large number of others relate to general attitudes and planning approaches.
Please note that not all survey-takers answered these two questions, only those who said they had a less-than-satisfactory Portland relationship (for the first question), and those with infrastructure needs not otherwise noted in previous questions about transportation, work spaces, telecommunications, and so on (for the second).
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Categories: portland · technology
Tagged: business, data, economic development, pdc, survey
At the PDC meeting on Wednesday, I asked for access to the raw survey data they collected. I’m primarily interested in doing qualitative analysis of the free-form responses. Below is my breakdown of answers to the first question (How do you feel about your business’ relationship to the city of Portland?).
To aid the tl;dr crowd, I put my summary and comments at the top, and the breakdown of what sorts of things people said below.
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Categories: portland · technology
This is a bit off-the-cuff, since I didn’t take notes during the meeting, and ended up writing down what stuck in my head afterward. I’d appreciate if any other attendees want to leave comments with their own impressions and major topics to point out.
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Categories: portland · technology
Tagged: planning, economic development, pdc, city of portland, software cluster
Brain dump ahead. I have a bunch of commentary on what’s going on with the PDC software cluster study (and the SAO’s involvement) that’s been floating around in my head, and I’d like to get it out on the page.
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Categories: portland · technology
Tagged: software, economic development, pdc, sao, city of portland
May 19, 2010 · Comments Off
In addition to the economic planning activities I talked about in my previous post, there’s another area where local government is trying to engage with software developers, open source ones in particular. That’s through the CivicApps project. I’ve talked about it before, in bits and pieces, but with two big events coming up, this is a good time to look over what’s happening.
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Categories: portland · technology
Tagged: data, programming, code, civicapps, open data, gov2.0, opengov
During the process that led up to creating Calagator, I participated in at least a year of conversations, often one-on-one, about Portland’s growing user group communities and technology events, and how those of us organizing and participating in them wanted a way to know what was going on outside our immediate social network. But even though we were talking about it individually, we couldn’t fix the problem without creating a public forum where everyone could discuss and contribute to a solution.
The other day, a friend helped me realize that something else I’ve been poking at over the last year is in a similar state. The things going on with this project seem so obvious to me, because I’ve been talking with different people about it for months and months, but really there isn’t much transparency to people who haven’t been involved in those particular conversations. That’s really bad, because this project is about all of you in my local technology community. So let me explain what’s been happening, and what this “civic engagement” thing is about.
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Categories: portland · technology
Tagged: community, business, open source, organizing, microbusiness, civics
Cross-posted from the official announcement:
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.
Categories: portland · technology
Tagged: community, economic development, pdc, software, survey
