The Community

A number of community leaders, business and group organizers, open source developers, and other interested representatives from the public and private sectors, and academia are already involved in helping grow open source software development in the Portland area. A volunteer citizen advisory board was formed based on specific resource needs of the project in addition to a pool of people encountered through meetings with community groups and their representatives. See the Data Providers and Sponsors page for a full list.

The Portland region enjoys a long history of incubating, attracting and sustaining a very large talent pool for open source development. The Portland region is home to many of the premier providers of open source technology and related activities, including: dozens of user groups; top companies; top development projects and labs; nationally recognized programs at Portland State and Oregon State universities; both large and small software conference and "unconference" events such as OSCon, LinuxCon, Open Source Bridge and BarCamp, WhereCamp, DrupalCamp, and WordCamp.

Support of open source, open data, and open standards is the first step to attaining more open and transparent government. A number of them are working with regional public, private, and non-profit organizations to provide a data platform to enable the good will of others in the community to contribute the best ideas and innovations to address civic needs and solutions to problems. The Design Challenge will help to incentivize the development of applications using the open datasets.