Pack up the babies and grab the old ladies and everyone go!

The City Council is bringing together the community partners, businesses, activists, experts and multiple City Bureaus to work on the Portland Broadband Strategic Plan.

The “Connecting Our Future” kick-off event will feature national and local presenters, including two nationally known speakers, Anthony Townsend of The Institute for the Future (www.iftf.org) and Joanne Hovis, CEO Columbia Telecommunications Corp. Locally, Steven Bass, CEO Oregon Public Broadcasting and Lew Frederick, Oregon State Representative will also be amongst the presenters.

The plan is sponsored by Commissioner Amanda Fritz, who stresses that the Council and the City must develop a broadband communications infrastructure as well as connectivity strategies to increase business vitality and job creation, enhance government services, promote sustainability, transportation, health care and regulatory policies; and to improve accessibility and responsiveness of government to citizens through connectivity.

Quite a mouthful, but come at 10 am for a brief coffee mingle to engage your fellow constituents, representatives and thought leaders for some plain talk.

For complete information, including the full kick off agenda and plan charter see PortlandonLine, the Office of Cable Management

At last year's Tech Day we had over 35 tech executives from around Oregon help us to raise awareness about Oregon's technology industry and move forward key legislative initiatives relating to STEM education at the K-12 level and the Oregon Growth Board.

This year Tech Day will focus on factors that impact growth and innovation in Oregon's technology industry. We will leverage the findings of the recently completed TAO-TECNA CEO Survey and economic data and recommendations from the Oregon Technology Industry Report.

Topics will include:

Growing the talent pipeline Enhancing research & commercialization at Oregon's universities Effects of state tax policy on capital formation and access to c-level talent.

Public infrastructure investments and land use policy
This event offers an unparalleled opportunity to meet with Oregon's key policymakers about the needs of your company and the broader tech industry.

Oregon Capital Location Agenda (tentative): - 10:30 am - Check-in/Registration - 11 am - Orientation/Recognition by legislature - Noon to 1 pm - Lunch/Presentations - 1 pm to 4 pm - Meetings with legislators

The Cloud’s business model allows your organization to leverage existing infrastructure and platform investments for greater convenience, but developing a secure Cloud strategy involves numerous considerations and planning. Join us for this free webinar on October 29th, 2014 at 11am PT where we we will explore Microsoft Azure and Cloud Security.

The Internet-of-Things (IoT), Big Data and Smart Cities

› Please RSVP via Eventbrite HERE

Portland is participating in the Global City Teams Challenge, which is a year-long initiative designed to advance the deployment of Internet-of-Things (IoT) technologies within a smart city environment. The presentation will explore some of the ways in which cities are leveraging technology as infrastructure and developing platforms that foster innovation and enable widespread adoption of applications. In particular, we will discuss the Global City Teams Project that is underway here in Portland, including ways in which the region can utilize the Internet-of-Things (IoT) and Big Data to create intelligent transportation systems and improve air quality.

Smart cities do not include humans being smart.

Skip Newberry is the President of the Technology Association of Oregon, one of the nation’s fastest-growing trade associations dedicated to supporting technology, innovation, and entrepreneurship at a regional level. Before joining the TAO, Skip served as an economic development policy advisor to Portland Mayor Sam Adams, where he helped create Portland’s first comprehensive economic development strategy in 16 years, recognizing software as a key industry cluster. While at the City of Portland, Skip’s projects included the adoption of the nation’s first open source software procurement policy at the municipal level, a regional open data initiative, and the development of resources to support entrepreneurship, like the Portland Seed Fund. Previously, Skip was a corporate and IP attorney and entrepreneur. Skip is the incoming Chairman of the Board of Directors of TECNA, Technology Councils of North America, which is a global network of technology and entrepreneurship associations, and he serves on Worksystems Inc.’s Workforce Investment Board and the Advisory Board of Oregon FIRST Robotics. Skip is also a 2012 recipient of the Portland Business Journal’s 40 Under 40 award.

Wilfred Pinfold is computational and data scientist who has used computers to model some of the most interesting engineering and scientific challenges of our time. After completing his PhD in computational fluid dynamics he applied computer simulation to engineering challenges in aerospace, automotive and offshore strictures, scientific challenges in climate modeling, astrophysics, chemistry, and genomics and control challenges in power grid, and smart cities. He is an accomplished innovator and entrepreneur having studied business at Stanford he launched numerous business initiatives including in bioinformatics and analytic software. Dr. Pinfold teaches innovation and entrepreneurship at Portland State University and has severed on numerous commercial and non-profit boards.

Mike Reich is the founder and CEO of Seabourne, with more than 10 years of experience building technology businesses. Mike has a passion for technology that solves tough, data-driven business challenges. A skilled technical architect and facilitator, he has developed innovative information solutions and strategies for the US Federal Communications Commission, Olympus, GNIP, NBC Sports, World Resources Institute, Cogstate Ltd, US General Services Administration, the US Department of Energy, the US Department of Commerce, the US Environmental Protection Agency, the US Centers for Disease Control, and the Cascade Land Conservancy.

› Doors will open at 5:30 for a 30-minute networking happy half-hour! The food, beer and drinks are provided by Bellagios and New Relic. The presentation will begin right at 6p.

› Stay tuned for the latest developments and updates on this and upcoming events by joining our Meetup group, New Relic FutureTalks PDX, and following us on Twitter @newrelic.

› FutureTalk is brought to you by New Relic in collaboration with TAO

The inaugural meeting of the Portland Inter-planetary File System (IPFS) Enthusiasts. IPFS (http://ipfs.io/) is a "new peer-to-peer hypermedia protocol" that has great promise for creating an open, distributed web.

Let's meet up, talk and learn about IPFS, and do some coding!

A meeting of the Portland Inter-planetary File System (IPFS) Enthusiasts. IPFS (http://ipfs.io/) is a "new peer-to-peer hypermedia protocol" that has great promise for creating an open, distributed web.

Let's meet up, talk and learn about IPFS, and do some coding!

Please join us for an evening of Puppet talks!

We hope you'll join us for the next Puppet User Group meeting. We'll have a talk on Upgrading Puppet Agents with Less Magic (puppetlabs-puppet_agent).

More about the talk: Upgrading the version of a Puppet agent can be simple: create a package resource with the desired version. However, that only works with a few package managers, and you have to find the package repositories hosting those packages. Then there’s Puppet 4; upgrading to Puppet 4 comes with a lot of changes. It can be daunting to find the changes necessary to ensure your agent will talk to your Puppet master after upgrading to Puppet 4. The puppetlabs-puppet_agent module aims to address those problems and makes use of many new language features in Puppet 4 while doing so. This talk will walk through how it works.

Speaker Bio: Michael Smith has been writing software in C++ for 10 years, with an obsession for avoiding preventable mistakes. He’s currently a Sr. Software Engineer on the Open Source Client team at Puppet Labs. https://github.com/MikaelSmith

Agenda:

• 6:00-6:30 Pizza & salad, including vegan & gluten free options

• 6:30-7:15 Upgrading Puppet Agents with Less Magic - Michael Smith, Puppet Labs

• 7:15-7:45 Discussion about challenges that you've experienced upgrading

• 7:45-8:15 Mingle & plan for the next meeting

Extra Details: The office is wheelchair accessible, and has an elevator. There is bike parking on the street and just inside the parking garage at the corner of SW Stark and SW 1st Ave. Parking is available on the street or at one of the many pay to park lots near the office

Please join us for an evening of Puppet talks!

We hope you'll join us for the next Puppet User Group meeting. We'll have a talk a special security addition this month with Puppet engineers Ben Ford and Adrien Thebo.

Agenda:

• 6:00-6:30 Pizza & salad, including vegan & gluten free options

• 6:30-7:15 Talk on configuring and using hiera-yaml and node_encrypt by Ben Ford, Software Engineer (Puppet)

• 7:15-7:45 Discussion with Ben, Software Engineer (Puppet) and Adrien, Software Engineer (Puppet)

• 7:45-8:15 Mingle & plan for the next meeting

Extra Details: The office is wheelchair accessible, and has an elevator. There is bike parking on the street and just inside the parking garage at the corner of SW Stark and SW 1st Ave. Parking is available on the street or at one of the many pay to park lots near the office

Join us this month for an informal hack night. Bring your questions, your modules, your ideas, your tools and lets work together on something fun and exciting.

We will split into small teams based on suggestions from you and either hack on something or just discuss the topic at hand. Think of this as an extreme pair programming experience. At the end of the meeting each group will give a brief summary of what they hacked on.

Agenda:

6:00-6:30 Pizza & salad, including vegan & gluten free options

6:30-6:45 News and Announcements

6:45-8:15 Break into small groups, hack, discuss, and learn

8:15-8:45 Lightning presentations from breakout groups

Please RSVP so we can know how much pizza to order:http://www.meetup.com/Portland-Puppet-User-Group/events/231018672/

Extra Details: The office is wheelchair accessible, and has an elevator. There is bike parking on the street and just inside the parking garage at the corner of SW Stark and SW 1st Ave. Parking is available on the street or at one of the many pay to park lots near the office

We're excited to have the chance to sit down with Kate Ertmann for a question and answer session.

Her life's work has been focusing on building from scratch — or rebuilding and reorganizing — the operational infrastructure for sustainable businesses. That includes everything from the elements of a business plan, the importance of Mission and Purpose and Values, the how-to of defining Roles and Responsibilities, and when to hire and how to best structure that management org chart — as well as the finance that runs in parallel with all of that.

Her distinct rallying cry through all of that work is the necessity of embedding equity and inclusion in all processes, procedures, and culture of an organization, and as a guiding principle in all leaders with whom she works — especially when it is "hard" or if there are uncomfortable conversations to be had.

Kate constantly seeks to leverage her privilege and position: applying constant pressure to the systemic structure of 20th century practices so there can be systemic changes that will define 21st century practices.

RSVP: https://www.crowdcast.io/e/kate-ertmann-ama