🌲 Portland Digital Corps Weekly Ship – March 29, 2025
We’re still afloat and moving fast. What started as a small idea to rally a few folks around helping Portland-area nonprofits with scoped digital needs has taken on a surprising amount of momentum.
Nearly 200 people from around Portland, the Pacific Northwest, and even the East Coast have expressed interest in volunteering with PDX Digital Corps. I had imagined a dozen people, not an entire fleet.
Because of this groundswell, this week has been all about getting our foundation solid before we start running at full speed, which will be a process.
We're plotting an in-person event in mid-April somewhere in PDX too, stay tuned for that and in time, probably weekly in-person sprints for project teams to talk about what they've been doing once we have several going.
(In case you don't wanna read the rest of this...)Our virtual info session is Monday at 6pm Pacific. It's not require to attend for you to participate, but a first chance for us to chat about what we're up to and where things are headed in the coming weeks. → Sign up here
This week at PDXDC:
- Began building out operational infrastructure to support actual team-based project work
- Talked with folks at U.S. Digital Response and CodePDX to learn from how they’ve supported volunteers
- Drafted a lightweight intake system and early project scoping structure
- Started working on onboarding documentation, templates, and a playbook for running small sprints
- Connected with a few potential project partners to explore engagements
- Prioritized one project to begin staffing as a discovery team to test our workflows in the wild in the next two weeks
Coming up next week:
- Hosting our first Virtual Info Session on Monday, March 31 at 6pm Pacific
→ Sign up here - Working to finalize staffing of our first project team
- Launching more volunteer engagement infrastructure
- Sharing more about how folks can contribute on both projects and operations
- Continuing to connect with orgs who may want to submit projects for future cohorts
🧪 Pilot Project Teams: We’re Staffing Now
We’re actively starting to staff our first pilot project teams. If you’ve got availability right now and are open to jumping into something in the next few weeks, email info@digitalcorpspdx.org and we’ll get back to you
PDX Digital Corps is just one piece of the larger community-building puzzle. Our hope is our lessons can be a replicable model for people who want to stand up similar efforts in their own communities, at the end of this we'll publish a "roll your own digital corps" playbook talking about what we learned in the hopes of helping others stand up their own iterative sprint digital teams too.
With so many people empowered these days to use their tech skills to destroy the public interest, we're hoping to use ours to mend, contribute resilience, and grow in our own backyards.
See you next week,
Ron in HQ