PDX Digital Corps — Weekly Update (April 11, 2025)
A quick update from the PDX Digital Corps this week — thank you again to everyone who’s jumped in, shared interest, or just followed along.
Have you joined our Discord? It’s where to interact and find other volunteers and the fastest way to figure out ways to dive in and help.
📅 Upcoming
April 16, 6–8pm – In-Person Meetup @ Steeplejack Brewing
Mostly social, partly organizational. Come meet other volunteers, learn about projects, and find your way into the work. Bring a friend!
🛠 What We've Been Working On
✅ Built Oregon: Kickoff scheduled
✅ Cape Perpetua Collaborative: Discovery call underway
✅ Intakes calls scheduled with prospective partners
✅ Volunteer Tasks: We’ve started adding grab-and-go items in GitHub Projects so folks can help with onboarding, documentation, and project scoping.
✅ Steering Team Ops: We’re working hard on the operations layer via the steering team, to make it easier for people who are joining to be able to 1) get onboarded 2) know where to find things and 3) join projects. If you’re interested in helping out in this way, ping us in Discord at #steering-general or email us and we’ll get you going.
The wild deal about creating something like this, especially when it gets bigger than anticipated, is ensuring that we’re creating resilient processes and documentation. We’re also working in the open as much as possible.
Ideally, we’ll be able to set things up for folks to really engage. One other idea I’ve been kicking around is not project-based at all, but developing resilient patterns online like the 18F Methods, but scaled to local communities. The other thing is many people want to learn from our model — in real time - and it could be worthwhile to start aggregating a document in real time that others can learn from, as they consider rolling their own local short-term Digital Corps sprint.
We’ll hopefully see you next week in-person, but if not, thanks for being engaged with this project we’re building in real time. Community matters and your willingness to help is what makes Portland rad.
Until next week,
Ron