[portland] Take the Portland software census (please)

[Reid Beels]

Hi Pyhonistas, 

We've noticed that the Python community is somewhat underrepresented in a survey that some local folks have put together about the state of the software sector in Portland, but we're guessing that's because no one ever told this list about it. :) If you have a ~3 minutes to fill out a quick survey, it would be greatly appreciated. http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/KTGSH9Q

Thanks, 
Reid


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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
	• 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