Started meeting some folks right away, and exchanging homely business cards. It was nice to see a few ladies there. I got to talk to about half the people. Very friendly and open group. An hour in, all 50 of us sat down with our beers and introduced ourselves. I was a bit surprised how many business folks were there. I guess I was expecting a higher concentration of hackers. Good representation of all the necessary skillsets, though: user experience, graphics, designers, sysadmins, biz-dev, Rails/Django/PHP developers, a business incubator, and even a very capable lawyer.

While introducing ourselves we were given a chance to toss out all our ideas. After the first pass we had spewed ~30 thoughts, some of them off-the-wall, others already been done. There was a lot of trust and openness in sharing of ideas. I hadn’t been in a group like that where precious ideas just get tossed around. Lots of good questions and feedback. After a couple more iterations of voting, discussion, and idea-aggregation we got it narrowed to six major concepts. Each of those was then given 5-10 minutes of pitch to the large group before the final vote.

In the end we settled on five projects, and clustered around those which caught our interest. Except for one group which disbanded for lack of participants (though they had a promising idea), the skillsets seemed to distribute pretty well. Here’s the breakdown of teams/projects/technologies. I’m surely off on some of the details.

• TymPlanner — A system to enable a technologically disparate group of individuals to plan an event, independent their native calendaring system. PHP or Rails still not settled.
• Resource-to-Needs Portal — Intelligently matching the needy with the endowed. Possibly a non-profit. Rails or Django still not settled.
• Junk-Swap — A service to match the wanted section with the please-take-this-off-my-hands section. PHP.
• DJ Indexer — Sounded kind of interesting but I didn’t know the domain well enough to fully understand (or explain) it. PHP.
• Streamlined Incubator — Automating and streamlining the whole startup process, from conception to launch. Not sure which framework they’ll use.

It was an exciting start. Can’t wait to see how the teams jell, and how long it will be before hacking commences. My team of seven (the Portal) is a friendly and capable group. I hope our ideas aren’t overly ambitious. The challenge of a weekend project is being able to really focus on the essence of a simple idea, avoiding scope-creep.

You can get the stream of weekend pictures on my swpdx flickr tag.

Blogger doesn’t appear to allow me to attach anything here, so I’m including a link to my manually generated, hacked up OPML file that contains the 15 SWPDX attendee bloggers. You should be able to just import this swpdx.xml file into your reader. Enjoy these Portlander blogs!