PDX Digital Corps - May 21st update
Hello from PDX Digital Corps! If we’ve been quiet, it’s because we’re working and staying busy in the margins on some interesting work, all while planning towards the sunsetting of this first-ever cohort of the PDX Digital Corps. Our Discord is a bit noisier though!
We met IRL again at Side Eye in Northwest Portland last Tuesday. Around 20 of us showed up to talk about our existing projects, broadly about civic tech and meeting new folks who are expressing interest in volunteering.
One of the best things about this project is conncting people across the city who didn’t know each other before, but are finding a bevy of common interests across our work. It’s why it was so important for us to not only work on projects, but bring people together who are working at home, between roles, or just starting out professionally or looking to pivot.
Projects continue including with the Cape Perpetua Collaborative, Built Oregon, Families for Safe Streets and a new engagement with the Oregon State University Uplift Lab which is working on a project that focuses on maternal health outcomes and we’re going to help them with a web-based MVP.
We’re talking with a few other community groups on some smaller projects we can help with, along with some one-off “strategy” type engagements but the logistics of those are still tbd.
Lessons learned! It’s been important to communicate that we’re not only helping as volunteers, but that this entire project itself is a learning opporunity. Folks from around the country have reached out to PDXDC to find out how we’re doing this, because they’re interested in their own cohort-style efforts. We’ve also had some really good conversations with various civic & AI-related tech folks in town on a wide array of ways that we can support their efforts or engage with their work. Ultimately, it’s been refreshing to be part of the wider conversations in the city and even as this cohort dissipates for the summer, it’ll be worthwhile to have alumni involved in those dialogues through their other work.
Final show: After Memorial Day - the steering team isn’t going to meet next week - we’re going to start plotting a June event which will serve as the last IRL event for this cohort, and it’ll be more of a report-out of what we’ve learned and also sharing from our various projects.
As mentioned in the past, any existing projects that haven’t sunset by the end of June or so, will transfer over to CODE PDX, the longtime civic tech brigade in the city.
Thanks for continuing to support this endeavor, we’re learning a lot and looking forward to sharing more soon. You can send folks our way or contact us via email info@digitalcorpspdx.org.
Until then,
PDX Digital Corps Team