FeedsPromoting Portland and strutting our stuff
We live in a great area. It's great enough that we have two rival groups competing to promote it, partially inspired by Scott Kveton's Silicon Florist guest post on promoting Portland. While the Portvangelistas are currently outpacing the Portvangelists in terms of, well, everything, I would like to pull the two sides together for a moment to discuss something that I think Portland is lacking. Portland needs a festival.
But wait. We have a festival. We have lots of festivals. We even had our own SXSNW (titled, appropriate enough, NXNW) until it was put down for whatever reasons. But even with that (entirely music) festival gone, we still have too many to list. We have an incredibly vibrant community, with great music, beer, art - hell, we even celebrate flowers in this damn town. And yet we're still lacking a critical component.
The Silicon Forest is becoming more and more relevant; the torrential sucking of investor money that Silicon Valley has inflicted upon the rest of the nation is fading as more and more startups are popping up in other places - and yes, Portland is one of them. We're doing good things here, and the pace is increasing. The community is finding itself which is only increasing the momentum. We need to show off this talent. We need an interactive festival.
But, wait. Stop. Hold on a second. This can in no way be a traditional festival. Traditional festivals often suck and it's not what Portland needs. We need decentralized events.
Let me explain.
Let's pick, say, a month. Say, July. July is a good month. We have OSCON, my birthday, the Brewers Festival, great weather, and probably a ton of other stuff that I'm missing. Now, we've already got a decent influx of non-Portlanders coming into town, so let's shine. During July, start throwing down a ton of tech events - product launches, open demos, blogging sessions, tech talks - let the booze and food flow and just throw open the doors. Open house on the Portland tech scene. People are already coming for OSCON - let's get them to stay. Let's make July be the month where Portland tech shows it's stuff.
Of course, this idea isn't restricted to the tech scene - we might as well try and pull in as many people and groups and businesses and organizations as we can. But the tech scene is where we're hurting most.
But we can't have it be a festival. Have a central website where people can post their events and print out pretty schedules for people or marketing material, maybe a couple of central gatherings, but don't charge people for it, don't make it adhere to strict standards, and just have it be.. well... like Portland.
Stumble It!We use Markdown to style our comments. **This is bolded.** *This is italic.* [This is a link](url)
For more options,
try reading the
wikipedia article or the
official style guide.
Comments
Comments from site editors have a darker background than comments from everybody else.I really like where you're going here. And, believe me, you're not in any way alone in this line of thinking.
Exciting stuff. Let's make it happen.
We use Markdown to style our comments. **This is bolded.** *This is italic.* [This is a link](url)
For more options, try reading the wikipedia article or the official style guide.
How about a Silicon Florist meet-and-greet? Get a lot of sponsors and kick off a run of events.
We use Markdown to style our comments. **This is bolded.** *This is italic.* [This is a link](url)
For more options, try reading the wikipedia article or the official style guide.
An open source event? I like it.
We use Markdown to style our comments. **This is bolded.** *This is italic.* [This is a link](url)
For more options, try reading the wikipedia article or the official style guide.
Not that I don't think this is a great idea but...
Having grown up in a smaller town that had about 2-3 HUGE events a year (Spokane WA - Bloomsday, Hoopfest, Pig Out in the Park) I feel like Portland's biggest challenge is the diversity and frequency of social gatherings available. Any given day there is SOMETHING happening. So much in fact, that unless you belong to a specific segment of the population, you may never even hear about it.
How will this "decentralization" concept overcome the decentralization that already exists (and in my opinion, obstructs) the success of a major Portland "festival"?
We use Markdown to style our comments. **This is bolded.** *This is italic.* [This is a link](url)
For more options, try reading the wikipedia article or the official style guide.
That's actually one of the reasons I heard that NXNW sucked - so many good artists on one night crowding out the space.
By stretching it out and having a central listing of events (nothing more than just a listing), I think we help prevent that.
In the end though, that's a problem I would welcome. I don't think every event needs to or even should be packed, require the entire night, or be huge - something more First Thursday than SXSW would be great.
We use Markdown to style our comments. **This is bolded.** *This is italic.* [This is a link](url)
For more options, try reading the wikipedia article or the official style guide.
PDX.rb (the Portland Ruby Brigade) has already been doing this for 3 years with our FOSCON event that takes place concurrently with OSCON. I helped with the organization of it the last two years and have been thinking about folding in a DorkbotPDX event to the mix, too. It's a lot of fun to bring together all the cool and interesting Portland techies with the out-of-towners who come to Portland for OSCON (UbuntuConf also takes place then, too, so even more geeks and techies will be in town).
We use Markdown to style our comments. **This is bolded.** *This is italic.* [This is a link](url)
For more options, try reading the wikipedia article or the official style guide.
This is exactly the kind of stuff I'm talking about. YES.
We use Markdown to style our comments. **This is bolded.** *This is italic.* [This is a link](url)
For more options, try reading the wikipedia article or the official style guide.
How about getting Portland companies to perform better first and let Corporate America decide for itself. Trying to snag one or two people in July seems like a mismanaged idea (money-wise). Wouldn't it make sense to invest in R&D and get real talent to consider moving to our companies first? Then do all of the creative marketing later? This worked for Seattle and Boston... The PDX buzz may be in the air of the hipster cities like Austin and Memphis, but Wall St. still doesn't put much faith into Oregon companies...Take some notes from Seattle and mimic what they were doing and where they were at 10-15 years ago and you should be ok....
We use Markdown to style our comments. **This is bolded.** *This is italic.* [This is a link](url)
For more options, try reading the wikipedia article or the official style guide.
Your ignorance is really cute.
We use Markdown to style our comments. **This is bolded.** *This is italic.* [This is a link](url)
For more options, try reading the wikipedia article or the official style guide.
My ignoriance? Or Portlands ignorance? I don't think either one is cute. I ignore Portlanders and Portlanders ignore the real world.
We use Markdown to style our comments. **This is bolded.** *This is italic.* [This is a link](url)
For more options, try reading the wikipedia article or the official style guide.
The Portvangelistas support this line of thinking. I'd rather see PDX find it's own way than try to attract Wall St. Remember Wall St? That place where all the people jumped out the windows?
We use Markdown to style our comments. **This is bolded.** *This is italic.* [This is a link](url)
For more options, try reading the wikipedia article or the official style guide.
I am so into this. I do think something focused to a point would be better than an anything goes sort of "month of events". Why not emulate the new media portion of sxsw but make it a free event ranging over a few days. Sort of a block party for techies? Hell how about a twitter based scavenger mob? I don't know all the ideas but I think maybe a weeklong "portland Ignite" with a healthy dose of beer and sunshine will be as portland as you can get.
Also to the guy who said "be more like Seattle" You are aware that Seattle became a tech haven due to all of the Microsoft spinoffs right? Big Money is a decidedly unPortland thing. Profits for all and happiness with work is more Portland (and a little bit socialist now that I think about it).
We use Markdown to style our comments. **This is bolded.** *This is italic.* [This is a link](url)
For more options, try reading the wikipedia article or the official style guide.
I really like the "First Thursday" style of events, myself.
We use Markdown to style our comments. **This is bolded.** *This is italic.* [This is a link](url)
For more options, try reading the wikipedia article or the official style guide.
I'd love to see people schedule things for the week before and after OSCON as well as during. I've also been involved in planning the PDX.rb FOSCON event the last two years, and that week gets very crowded fast.
Also: Calagator (http://calagator.org) has OSCON as its planned official release date. It's intended to be a very Portland-y event calendar tool, and I hope we can start collecting things for this festival there.
We use Markdown to style our comments. **This is bolded.** *This is italic.* [This is a link](url)
For more options, try reading the wikipedia article or the official style guide.