Loomio
Sat 18 Mar 2017 1:06AM

PDX Startup Weekend! RCV-OR/Equal Vote presentation and idea pitch opportunity.

SW Sara Wolf Public Seen by 23

We've been invited by my good friend Yu Te, to participate in PDX Startup Weekend, an exciting event in May. This could be a great opportunity to present SRV to a panel of entrepreneurs and local business owners and potentially win support creating a tech tool and building a prototype for a idea or project that can help us with our mission.

Here is our initial fb messenger conversation for those of you who are interested:

SARA: Hi Yu and Mark. I'd like to introduce you guys to eachother. Yu is a good friend organizing an event Portland Startup Weekend and wanted to reach out to us and RCV Oregon to participate.

Yu: hey Mark. Thanks for the intro Sara

Sara: Mark is the founder of Score Runoff Voting and is working with me and RCV Oregon.

Mark: Good to meet you, Yu. When is Portland startup weekend?

Yu: I hope that you guys will participate at PDXSWGOV, to give the acronym. It's on May 19-21, and designed to provide an opportunity for people who want tech help to make a difference in our community. The focus on this weekend is to form teams with tech and business people, to build a prototype and business model, leading up to a demonstration on Sunday night, and beyond the weekend towards a business for social impact.

Mark: Are you having presentations and the like?

Yu: I suggest that one of your members sign up to be a participant at startup weekend, and pitch the idea on Friday night. Probably the person who is the most articulate and telegenic. Other participants vote, and teams are formed, with chance to recruit tech people, hopefully a designer and coder.

Yu: The other team members can participate as volunteers on Saturday on focus group panels, and be available to provide opinions, or help out in other ways.
That way you don't have to pay for every member to pay and participate on a team, but be available to help out your team.

Mark: Sounds like a cool event. Not likely I'll be able to commit a weekend to it, but I'd be great to have some of our Portland team there.

Yu: Mark, would you be available as an expert on Saturday?

SARA: Id be happy to get involved or be a point person, especially with Marks help. I'd love to hear more about what it means to sign up to participate and what an idea pitch would look like. I'm picturing presenting our voting system, Score Runoff Voting, and how it works, how it can be used in both the public and private sector.
And then talking about what Score Runoff Voting would mean for Oregon and the country if it's adopted on a large scale.
Our presentation would probably be in partnership between Equal Vote and RCV-OR.

Yu: So for you Sara if you're pitching, what it means is to talk for 1 min, to get the interest of fellow participants, and get them to vote for you, and join your team. There will be developers and designers in the room who have the skills to create the tech product. You don't want to get too far into the reasons, or the hows. The team that will form and work with you will focus on designing the tech tool, building a prototype

SARA: Oh, cool!

Yu: What this represents is a community coming to the event and saying we have a need, will someone build this for us?

SARA: Prehaps for an online election tool that can be used to run SRV elections and votes for groups and businesses to use.

Yu: Rather than the reverse, which typically happens at startup weekend... A person comes and pitch an idea, they're not sure if there's a need, and they have to go search for confirmation.

Sara: We also need to design the coding for upgrading official voting machines but Mark knows more about that.

Yu: I love that you will (probably) participate Sara!
Let me know when you're ready to get a ticket and I'll get you a special discount code.
Count us in! I'm glad this sounds like a good fit! Thanks again for reaching out!

Yu: Yup!

SARA: How much are we looking at?

Yu: The regular price is $99, early bird $75. I'll get you a code for $45 for the main weekend.

Sara: Ok, I'll bring all of this to our next group meeting on Tuesday.

GHO

George Hayduke Oliver Sun 19 Mar 2017 2:40AM

Interesting. Thanks for posting this convo. I will have to absorb this for a second. Any other thoughts from any members??

SW

Sara Wolf Tue 11 Apr 2017 5:50PM

So things are going ahead with Startup Weekend and the founder Yu Te came and met with us at the last structure committee meeting to iron out the details! The event is May 19th-21st and the point person for our idea pitch is Sara. Mark will be coming up for a bit on Saturday it looks like.

There is still room for tech people, coders and programmers to sign up and participate. The way it works is that paying participants (we get a big discount!) will team up to actually code and create the prototype for our business idea. Teams will be around 6 people with a couple tech people, a couple business people and an idea person per team. If we have multiple people from RCV OR on our team, notably a coder, we will have more ownership over the final product that we produce. Our idea has good potential to actually generate revenue for the cause while getting the ideas out there so this is a great investment of our time and people!

We are also planning a meetup and get together between Startup people and RCV people that are interested. There are some existing events we are invited to!
* Tech solidarity on 4/21: a group of techs that want to do good for the local community.
* Also there is Portland Spring thing on 5/6: An unconference day for yiung leaders wanting to get politically active and network.

I'll edit this post with more info on the meetups as soon as I have it.

I remember from our general meetings that we have ton's of tech people. Who were they again? Can you list the people you know of and tag them below here if they're on Loomio. I'll draft an email and invite them!
@nardopolo, @nathanhunter , @benjaminamos ,