We had a small send-off yesterday for the PDX Digital Corps, a digital sprint I launched back at the end of March as a short-term experiment bringing technologists from the community to help local non-profits with digital things like websites or advice on building things online. The response was overwhelming for an effort that I joked would just be me and a few people around a coffee shop table, the Portland Digital Corps turned into far more than that.

I cannot say enough good things about how many people raised their hands to get involved. Most of our projects operated around 8-week sprints, though one was shorter and another one will take a bit longer and will be transferred to our friends at Code PDX, where the PDXDC team will continue to work on it from there.

I want to be a little bit sanguine about how I made this idea up. I got the idea on a Friday. By Saturday I built the site, and we launched it on Monday. I didn’t really expect this thing to be very big. I thought it’d be me and a few people at a table. I thought we’d do it for a few months and tell a story about that.

What it turned into was something much bigger and much more interesting than I thought it could be. I’ve personally met folks I wouldn’t have met otherwise. People have connected to other people. Folks are finding jobs or something like this. I don’t want to overstate its significance, but I do want to say that in a world with so much terminal churn and such change, it’s super important that we connect locally to the things we can impact, to the things we can fix bit by bit.

I don’t have the illusion that building a website is going to change the world, but I do think it can make something better. And all the other things that go into that — all the connection pieces that go into it — made this worthwhile. It wasn’t about building tech. I was explicit about making sure all the meetups were mostly social. We did them pretty regularly. We did them at least once a month.

It was really about being able to foster community, about building trust, about learning from it. I always said at every one of our steering meetings — which was just the direct tag group of us who decided to run this thing together — this is an experiment. It doesn’t matter how it works out. At the end of the day, we’ll have a story to tell.

If we approach it that way, it takes the pressure off. It takes the pressure off having to make it perfect. It takes the pressure off having to try to do all the things. Find folks your community already has who are doing things you can help with. You don’t have to start your own thing.

We’ll have a final report on our website in the next week or so, that’ll have links to our project teams slides & work, along with some after action lessons learned too. This was a rewarding community-centered project that I’m glad I launched without thinking about it too much.