Hi all, Your participation in this survey will help the City of Portland get a better sense of the local software community. More details can be found below, and here is a direct link to the survey:
http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/KTGSH9Q Scott -------- Original Message -------- Subject: [pdx-groups] Please Distribute: Portland Software Census Date: Wed, 12 May 2010 14:21:56 -0700 From: Audrey Eschright Hi everyone, Some of you may already have seen this on Twitter, but a group of us have been working on a PDX Software Community Census for the city's economic development efforts. We have an announcement we'd like you to share with your user groups and post on blogs. It's important that we get the widest response we can, and we're trying to get people to take it ASAP so we can share it before the PDC's next round of "software cluster" meetings. Thanks! Here's the text: 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 <http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/KTGSH9Q%20> 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 <http://www.involver.com/start> who are coming to check out Portland <http://portland.beerandblog.com/>! 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. _______________________________________________ PLUG mailing list [email protected] http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug
