Updates to my zines

I tabled at the Portland Zine Symposium earlier this month. The event went well, and also provided me with an excuse to update several of my zines. They’re listed below, as well as a two new zine I’ve made recently. One is based on an article I wrote a few years ago about unreinforced masonry buildings in Portland and the other is a version of the mini-zine I made for the PDX Jewish Zine Fest popup I hosted in August.

Jewish zines

While I published Towards a New Tu B’Shvat less than a year ago, I’ve found a few errors since then. I also wanted to tweak the information architecture a bit. So I cleaned up those typos and made some changes to the design. I’ve updated the files available here (which includes a PDF for printing, a PDF for screens, and an EPUB).

My set of eight Hanukkah zines needed updating even more, given that I wrote them in 2018. Hanukkah at the White House has the most changes, because the White House has hosted several Hanukkah parties in the past four years. I’ve updated the files available here.

I also now have a one-page zine of resources for folks interested in Jewish zine in Portland, Oregon. The file is available to print or share.

Political zines

I’ve also updated two zines that I routinely share around election time: this one-page zine covering registering to vote in Oregon (including how to deal with common concerns) and this one-page zine on how to claim the Oregon political contribution tax credit (and get $50 off your tax bill).

A new zine, sort of

A few years ago, I wrote an article about unreinforced masonry buildings here in Portland, Oregon. That might sound like an extremely niche topic, but URM buildings are a major risk factor for earthquakes — folks living and working in these buildings face higher risks. In the time since I wrote my original article, the City of Portland has actually managed to go from doing as little as possible to doing absolutely nothing about these buildings. I updated material from my original article to create this zine.

This zine covers the risks, how to recognize URM buildings, and what we can do about them. This new zine is available to download and share in multiple formats, and if you live or work in a URM building, you have my blessing to run off copies for everyone in your building. Laundry rooms are a great place to leave reading material for your neighbors.

PDX.Vote: Officially launching a news site covering Portland-area elections in 2022

I’ve launched a new project that I’m excited to share with all of you.

TL;DR

PDX.Vote rounds up news related to the 2022 elections taking place here in Portland, Oregon. It also publishes long-form articles about specific aspects of Portland’s politics. Please support this work financially.

If you’re interested in my thoughts behind this site and my plans for its future, keep reading!

Why a news site focused on elections?

I’ve always followed local politics pretty closely. One of my first paid blogging gigs was covering the 2008 presidential election, which really helped me understand that local politics impact our day-to-day lives more than most things happening in Washington, D.C. I was also an election judge in Maryland and saw first hand how hard voting was for some folks.

Since moving to Portland, I’ve made zines about our local elections, as well as writing articles, massive Twitter threads, and even a newsletter for a specific election. Folks seem to find these resources useful and I always wind up with far more research than will fit in just one article or one update. I’ve been thinking about ways to share more of what I find and the idea of a website has been in the back of my mind for a while.

I also think that a lot of the media covering local news just aren’t covering local elections in any real depth. That’s partially due to the financial constraints on a lot of news media. But there’s also a sense that nonpartisan groups like the League of Women Voters write great voters guides that provide enough information for most voters to make their decisions. Now, I read the Portland League of Women Voters’ guides cover to cover and think they’re a great resource — but those guides are put together by folks who are trying hard not to influence the outcome of the races they’re covering.

Local elections decide matters of life and death importance here in Oregon, from the oversight of police forces and the violence they enact to the budgets for supportive services for folks without stable housing. But a nonpartisan report doesn’t tell voters whose policies are likely to increase deaths or save lives. We deserve better information.

Furthermore, we deserve a wider variety of perspectives on our elections. Nonpartisan guides are generally written by volunteers, who can afford to donate their time and often have a certain amount of privilege. News media tend to employ folks with privilege, as well — as of 2018 about half of all newsroom staff are white men. The only way to change which perspectives we’re hearing about political candidates is to actively seek out people with different experiences and then pay them for their reporting.

What are my short-term plans?

I’ve already soft-launched PDX.Vote with three key types of coverage:

  • Digests of news related to the current election cycle
  • Weekly calendars rounding up important meetings, deadlines, and other dates relevant to local politics
  • Articles that go deeper into specific races, as well as important context for upcoming elections

At the moment, I’m doing all of the writing for the site. But with the official launch of PDX.Vote, I’m accepting pitches for articles. I’m also actively reaching out to people who are able to talk about political issues in ways I can’t. I’m privileged enough to be able to fund my startup costs and an initial writers budget so that I can pay for these contributions. My goal is to share election coverage from as diverse a group of contributors as possible. In terms of numbers, the first metric I’m measuring is the percentage of contributors from different racial backgrounds than my own, which I plan to report back on quarterly. It’s not a perfect metric, of course, but it’s one that I’m confident I can track as the only administrative staff for the site, as well as one that will give a top-level view of how well I’m doing at recruiting writers with different experiences. If you’re interested in writing for PDX.Vote, please contact me.

While I can cover the initial costs of setting up the site, I do need community support to publish this coverage. My first financial priority is covering the expenses of running the site, including the media insurance policy I needed to feel safe doing this work. My second financial priority is paying contributors. It would be nice to be eventually rewarded for my labor, but that’s much farther down the list.

So how can you support PDX.Vote? Currently, you can give us direct financial support. The current options are a one-time payment of $10 or a recurring monthly payment of $10. I’ll be making other options, such as printed voter guides, available later on. However, I will neither be accepting advertising on the site for the foreseeable future nor putting up a paywall in front of content. Both options make me feel uncomfortable when we’re talking about election coverage: Every resident (including non-voters) should be able to access information about the governments under which they must live, without paying for that information. And advertising tends to affect what news media publish, even without any explicit expectations. While I’m happy to discuss financial support in larger amounts, I do want the site to be primarily funded by the people I hope will most benefit from having free coverage available — people who can afford to throw $10 towards PDX.Vote, rather than people who can afford to spend thousands of dollars a year on multiple newspaper subscriptions.

Because I’m talking about elections and political power, I think it’s important to be as transparent as possible, especially about finances. I’m making the site’s financials available on a monthly basis. I’ve also included a transparency section on the ‘About’ page, including my own donations to candidates and political committees. I’ll be asking contributors about their connections to candidates and political committees and adding that information as I deem appropriate and safe. I’m also explicitly talking about my own biases and the site’s slant as a whole: I’m a leftist and you should expect PDX.Vote’s coverage to lean left as well. Furthermore, I am critical of even leftist elected officials — rather than being invested in maintaining a status quo, I want us to rethink what governance looks like and limit the harm the state can cause to each of us.

What are my long-term plans?

Well, a lot depends on how many folks find PDX.Vote a useful resource. While I’m confident I can put together regular updates through the November 2022 election, I’m not yet sure if I’ll continue the site after that time. Financial sustainability and reader interest will probably be the determining factors.

I would love to continue to build on the site’s coverage long-term if I can. I’m already working with a few contributors for one-off pieces and I want the opportunity to bring in some folks as regular contributors if I can afford to pay them for their work. I see two key areas of expansion: first, geographic coverage and, second, linguistic coverage. Currently, PDX.Vote covers Multnomah County elections, because that’s the county that covers the largest chunk of the city of Portland. It’s also the county I live in. I’m working on coverage of Washington and Clackamas Counties because they’re part of Metro, along with Multnomah County. It’s hard to cover Metro races without having at least a working knowledge of Washington and Clackamas Counties. I’d like to eventually cover all seven counties that include Portland and its suburbs, but that’s beyond what I can do without regular contributors. Bringing on folks to cover these additional counties will require finding reporters already living in each county, so that we can read coverage from folks actually impacted by county politics. And I have to admit that expanding coverage to Clark County (and Vancouver, Washington) will probably be low on the list. Clark County is important to understanding Portland politics, but it’s in Washington State and therefore plays by a different set of rules. Adding Clark County coverage to PDX.Vote will take more work than adding another Oregon county.

I also believe that expanding coverage outside of the English language is crucial. Portland residents speak a wealth of languages and deserve news in languages they understand. Translation is expensive and I don’t expect to be able to publish every article in multiple languages right away, but that’s my ultimate goal. Currently, I see Spanish, Vietnamese, and Chinuk Wawa translations as priorities. While the community of Chinuk Wawa speakers in Portland is smaller than the communities that speak several other languages, Portland sits on land that rightfully belongs to Indigenous tribes, including Chinookan tribes. Chinuk Wawa is a jargon used by many tribes. While I’m not Indigenous, I believe in the Land Back movement. Providing news in Chinuk Wawa seems like a tangible step towards respecting Indigenous sovereignty that goes deeper than a simple land acknowledgement.

I’m not sure how much I’ll be able to accomplish until I see what sort of financial support community members are prepared to provide. But I will do everything I can afford to do that will make local political information more widely available here in Portland. I’ll keep y’all updated.

Towards a new Tu B’Shvat (a new zine)

Content warnings: Discussions of death, genocide, state violence

The cover of a zine with black text and a drawing of a tree on the cover. The text reads "Towards a New Tu B'Shvat"
The cover of “Towards a New Tu B’Shvat”

I made a short zine exploring new ways to observe Tu B’Shvat, which you can read on my Twitter or grab as a PDF. There are both print and screen-friendly copies of the PDF at that link. Please note that I wrote this recently enough that I have not been able to run it past a sensitivity reader yet — all errors are my own and I fully expect to have a new version in time for Tu B’Shvat 5783.

If you’re interested in reading further on the topics I mention in the zine, here is a list of websites, articles, and videos that I recommend, broken down by topics. The sources I used to create my zine are included here, along with those covering details I couldn’t fit into just eight pages.

​What is Tu B’Shvat? History and origins

New and evolving ways to observe Tu B’shvat

  • “Shvat: Moon of Interdependence” (article) — This article from Dori Midnight discusses historical connections to communities of care. It also includes practices for connecting with trees for the month of Shvat and links to a playlist of Tu B’Shvat songs.
  • “Tu B’Shvat? Why Not?” (article) — Linda Gritz, from the Boston Workmen’s Circle, documented the process of creating a secular observance of Tu B’Shvat.
  • “Tu B’Shevat in the Age of Ecofeminism” (article) — This article includes several ways to observe Tu B’Shevat while considering both climate change and feminism. Writer Steph Black highlights options like a Reverse Tashlich ceremony to clean up rivers.
  • “Tu Bi’Shevat” (website) — Ritualwell has an entire section of their website devoted to meditations, liturgy, and other suggestions for observing Tu B’Shvat.

Resources on Indigenous land return

  • “Remothering the Land” (video) — Patagonia produced this 10-minute film to discuss the concept of ‘rematriation’ (or ‘remothering’ the land) using sustainable agriculture techniques with William Smith, land steward of the Village of Huchiun, and Nazshonnii Brown-Almaweri, land team member of the Sogorea Te’ Land Trust.
  • “#LandBack is Climate Justice” (article) — Restoring stolen lands to Indigenous sovereignty counteracts climate change, as documented by the Lakota People’s Law Project.
  • Braiding Sweatgrass (book) — Robin Wall Kimmerer’s collection of essays on Indigenous ecological knowledge provides a foundational guide. At the time of compiling this list, I haven’t finished reading Braiding Sweatgrass but I already find it informative enough to recommend.
  • Landback U (website) — The Landback Movement created a series of courses on land struggles in different locations to build a foundation of knowledge about Indigenous sovereignty. The organization accepts donations to continue their work.
  • Land Reparations and Indigenous Solidarity Toolkit (guide) — This guide from Resource Generation goes through methods for paying land reparations and returning land to tribes.
  • Native Land Digital (website) — You can look up the Indigenous tribes native to specific places on the Native Land Digital map.
  • “The Myth of a Wilderness Without Humans” (article) — This piece is actually a chapter from Mark Dowie’s book, Conservation Refugees: The Hundred-Year Conflict Between Global Conservation and Native Peoples, which looks at the harm inflicted on Indigenous people by many conservation efforts to date and showcases the importance for following Indigenous leadership.

Resources on Jewish relationships with Indigenous sovereignty

  • “How to Come Correct” (article) — This guide from the Sogorea Te’ Land Trust clarifies how non-Indigenous people can respectfully support Indigenous movements and listen to Indigenous leadership.
  • Jews on Ohlone Land (website) — Jews on Ohlone Land is an organization building Jewish community solidarity on on traditional Chochenyo and Karkin Ohlone lands. The organization directly supports the Sogorea Te’ Land Trust.
  • “Tu Bishvat: Dish with One Spoon” (article) — Mazon Canada published this article on the Haudenosaunee concept of ‘the Dish with One Spoon,’ a way to discuss the interconnected relationship between humans and land. The article also links to a video where historian Richard Hill covers some aspects of Haudenosaunee culture and history that’s worth watching.
  • “Being Jewish and Owning Privilege” (article) — Rabbi Dev Noily writes about balancing their experiences as a white Jew unpacking personal privilege.
  • “How Tokenism Affects Jews of Color and 5 Ways Allies Can Interrupt It” (article) — The Jews of Color Initiative works for racial equality in Jewish communities, including for Indigenous Jews. This article is an important reminder to avoid tokenizing Jews of Color in our communities and includes steps we can take.

Resources for planting trees

Resources for working in nature, including agriculture

  • Cultivating Culture 2022 (conference) — This upcoming conference includes sessions on Jewish relationships to agriculture and food. Tickets start at $36.
  • “Crops of African Origin of African Diffusion in the Americas” (article) — Michael W. Twitty has long influenced my thoughts on what Jewish food is. He wrote this article to highlight the use of crops native to Africa in American cuisine. Twitty’s book, The Cooking Gene, goes deeper into the creation of Southern food culture, including the impacts of slavery.
  • National River Cleanup Organizer Handbook (guide, PDF) — If you’re interested in organizing a river cleanup in your area, American Rivers provides a step-by-step guide to creating a successful event.

Portland-specific resources

A review of The Next Supper with a side of Portland context

Content notes: Discussions of deaths due to COVID-19, abusive behavior (including sexual abuse), racism

I read The Next Supper by Corey Mintz recently and it’s been stuck in my brain. I tweeted about the book, hoping that someone would write a review of The Next Supper, contextualizing the information it contains for Portland, Oregon. And then I remembered that sometimes you just have to write the article you want to see out in the world. So this review is kind of that, with the caveat that I’m not a food journalist and haven’t really set foot in a restaurant in almost two years. Another caveat worth noting is that I received a free copy of the book through NetGalley. I don’t think that influenced this review — but if you are at all worried, please note that the link above goes to the WorldCat entry for The Next Supper. You should be able to find a library near you with a copy rather than spending money based on my potentially biased opinion.

Readability

I found The Next Supper very readable, especially for a book telling me that everything about how we eat is probably bad. Mintz shares anecdotes showing that he’s not judging other eaters. He has committed the same sins as the rest of us — including eating at Taco Bell.

It’s comforting to know that none of us are alone in struggling to eat in a way that goes beyond stuffing the nearest calories down our gullets. I know I have terrible eating habits, but I’m not the only one. I’m trying to cut back on takeout after basically living on it for the last few years. I’ve been wondering how other people eat without relying on picking up prepared food from restaurants. Turns out that I’m part of a trend! The Next Supper documents a massive trend in relying on restaurants (as well as other sources of prepared foods, like supermarkets) — in 2018, US consumers spent more money on dining out than on groceries.

In The Next Supper, Mintz planned to cover the future of restaurants — and he did so, but not in the way he planned. Mintz began writing the book before the COVID-19 pandemic, during which the restaurant industry crumbled. From Mintz’s research, it’s clear that key trends around staffing, sustainability, and finances were dramatically escalated by pandemic lockdowns.

Key Topics in Context

Mintz covers a lot of ground in The Next Supper and I certainly don’t want to just repeat what he’s written. But Mintz wrote about national numbers (and international in many cases, given that he covers the restaurant industry in both Canada and the US). Since I live in Portland, Oregon, a city known for its food culture and wealth of local restaurants, I’m interested in what The Next Supper implies for the restaurants around here. To that end, I’m going to cover a couple of key topics from the book.

One fact stood out to me: Mintz says that there are far more restaurants in the US than can be supported by the number of diners. Partially due to big brands constantly pushing growth, the US had roughly one restaurant per 500 people before COVID. There’s just no way that consumers can support that many restaurants based on math Mintz presents. Portland’s restaurants tend to be independent, but the numbers are even more extreme here. I’m not sure how many restaurants are in Portland, but OpenTable currently lists over 5,000 restaurants in this city. That number is definitely low since there are plenty of restaurants that don’t use that site. Portland’s metro-area population in the last census was roughly 2.5 million. With just the 5,000 restaurants on Open Table, we already hit the level of one restaurant per 500 people. If we had a comprehensive list of restaurants in the Portland metro area, I bet we’d actually find that Portland’s ratio is closer to one restaurant per 300 people. That’s unsustainable unless we dramatically transform the relationship between consumers and restaurants.

Wages and Tipping

Staffing is a thread that runs throughout The Next Supper through sections on tipping, wages, abuse, and immigration. Portland-area restaurant staffing is a little different than what you may see in other cities. Oregon requires that restaurants pay full minimum wage of $12 per hour to servers, rather than allowing bullshit like paying a server $2.13 and counting on tips to bring that rate up to something someone might be able to live on. Furthermore, Portland itself has a higher minimum wage than surrounding areas, with a rate of $14 per hour.

Tipping is still common here (although I think it’s past time for us to find a way to eliminate tipping and actually pay everyone a fair wage). Mintz’s inclusion of Michael Lynn’s research on tipping caught my eye, especially given the racism built into Oregon’s governance from the first state constitution onward. Lynn’s research has demonstrated racial disparities in the tips diners give to servers. The disparity hits the point that forcing servers to rely on tips feels like an actionable civil rights violation. I’m not a lawyer, of course, but I doubt we’ll see substantial changes to tipping culture without that kind of in-depth examination and refutation.

Of course, tipping is only one way restaurant employees are compensated for their labor. As I browsed through job listings for restaurant staff here in Portland, I noticed that the listings didn’t quite match up with Mintz’s discussion. Many of these jobs list benefits like paid-time off and offer hourly rates above minimum wage. That’s a good sign for local food culture, although what job listings offer often doesn’t match the reality of working for a given restaurant. It’s easy to find lots of posts like this one about applying to multiple jobs offering one wage and then actually offering significantly less to new hires. Bait-and-switch techniques are common in hiring restaurant staff right now. There’s also a long history of wage theft in the form of unpaid training, paying day rates (rather than hourly wages), unpaid overtime, etc. in the restaurant industry, which Mintz goes into in more depth.

Mintz doesn’t touch on one factor in restaurant hiring that I think is crucial: line cooks had the highest COVID mortality level in 2020 of any profession. No fault to Mintz — I doubt that this information was available before The Next Supper’s content was finalized — but the reality is that an almost incomprehensible number of skilled servers and cooks died or became disabled since early 2020. When we see claims that restaurants are understaffed, we need to push back. We need to talk about the many reasons why restaurant staff aren’t prepared to work for businesses that exploit and endanger them.

Employee Abuse

When discussing staffing, Mintz also covers a wide variety of abuses that are commonplace in the restaurant industry. Portland’s restaurants are no exception. During the summer of 2020, many restaurant owners and chefs faced calls for accountability for sexual harassment, abusive work environments, and other types of harm. In Portland, many of those calls were channeled through an Instagram account operated by Maya Lovelace, who owns Yonder. They were later cataloged by Eater PDX, including concerns about Yonder. While some of the people responsible for these harms are no longer running restaurants, there are still plenty of similar problems in the kitchens around town.

These problems are compounded by a variety of larger social issues. There’s an underlying misogyny that enables business owners to sexually assault staff members, an underlying racism that allows business owners to take advantage of undocumented workers, and an underlying devotion to capitalism that makes wage theft a standard business practice.

Personally, I’m unconvinced that call-out posts will reform these problems at an industry-level. Collective action, such as unionization, is the only strategy that I’ve seen work. Unionizing both independent restaurants and local chains is likely the most useful strategy, and one that Portland may be able to rely on. With the recognition of the Burgerville Workers Union, we have the first unionized fast food chain in the country. We just need to build on that success.

Third-Party Delivery Apps

Third-party delivery apps — which around here includes Uber Eats, Postmates (owned by Uber), DoorDash, and Caviar (owned by DoorDash) — are notoriously bad for restaurants and delivery drivers alike. There are plenty of examples, from pocketing delivery drivers’ tips to charging fees to restaurants for orders that don’t go through the apps. Independent restaurants get the worst deals, as big brands like Applebees negotiate with delivery providers to keep costs down. The Next Supper points out venture capitalists with long-term plans fund these apps. They subsidize the cost of destroying other delivery options as well as keeping prices down long enough to get consumers reliant on these apps. Third-party apps can afford lobbying efforts or they can punish users with local fees when local governments are willing to push back against their practices.

Communities (including restaurants, delivery staff, and diners) need to plan for the long term. We need plans for both minimizing how capitalistic interests can mix extra costs into our food budgets and for building better systems for getting food in the hands of hungry people. I see organizations like CCC PDX as a start to that discussion. Local bicyclists formed a collective to deliver food and other products in partnerships with local restaurants and retailers. A logical next step might be building an app that handles handles local deliveries for local brands. It could offer equitable splits of both expenses and profits without sending money outside the Portland ecosystem. I don’t think that’s enough, long term, but the conversation has to start somewhere. Only once we’re actively talking about these issues will we be able to bring up options like collective purchasing, neighborhood-based food systems, and other options that move us towards radical change.                  

Sourcing

Portland does make an appearance in The Next Supper, or rather there’s a discussion of the Portlandia sketch during which two restaurant diners learn about their locally sourced chicken, Colin. There is, of course, plenty of truth in Portlandia’s comedy. Many Portland restaurants make a point of discussing where they get meat, produce, and other supplies from. But Mintz points out that we don’t have a system for confirming those claims, especially for independent restaurants.

McDonald’s — which I learned is the world’s largest buyer of beef, pork, potatoes, lettuce, and tomatoes during my reading — has a variety of mechanisms for auditing their supply chain for reducing harm. There are also a variety of NGOs that work to hold McDonald’s and other large chains accountable. But there’s virtually nothing in place for smaller businesses. Mintz catalogues different ways restaurants can lie or stretch the truth about the sources of their ingredients. As we look at our local dining options, we are responsible for deciding who we trust. But, frankly, none of us have the resources to check whether a given restaurant might be lying. There’s no easy solution to this problem and it will only grow as climate change advances and diminishes the quality of certain crops.

Ownership

Ultimately, many of the problems with the restaurant industry grow out of problems with ownership, especially of large chains that can make decisions that move the market for everyone else. It’s tempting to ignore problems with big chains if you live inside Portland’s city limits: Red Lobster and Outback Steakhouse are only in the suburbs (due in part to minimum wage laws), so there’s a sense that their problems are better dealt with by the residents and governments of Beaverton, Lake Oswego, or Vancouver. But these big companies make plenty of decisions that impact folks inside city limits and we need to pay attention.

The National Restaurant Association (or, as Mintz calls them, the “other NRA”) is a major lobby in Washington DC. The “other NRA” is one of the chief lobbyers preventing paid sick leave legislation from passing at a federal level. They don’t just harm restaurant employees with their political goals, but every employee in the country. Paid sick leave should be a right for every employee. The state of Oregon has legislation granting paid sick leave, but only for full-time employees of companies with more than 10 full-time employees.

Taking Action

While the problems Mintz discusses are national or even international, few of us have the resources to work on that level. But we can work on those issues on a local level, improving Portland’s share of the restaurant industry. One key step is encouraging local food journalism that goes beyond restaurant reviews. If we have local food media that covers supply chains, staffing, and other facets of the restaurant business, individuals don’t need to try to figure out those details on our own. Of course, local journalism has issues of its own. Eater PDX’s staff works hard, as do the writers in charge of covering food at publications like the Portland Mercury and Portland Monthly, but those publications all have clear goals that don’t prioritize critiquing the restaurant industry. We need something closer to the Racist Sandwich podcast, with a more explicit focus on Portland. (Fingers crossed for another season of Racist Sandwich soon.)

Getting good information is only part of the equation. We need to act on that information. We all want to make good choices about what we eat, including choosing restaurants that minimize harm. Mintz sees the need for more action, telling us “Don’t just vote with your fork, vote with your vote.” We need collective action, which can include voting for local candidates as well as unionization drives at restaurants, getting off of third-party delivery apps, and believing folks about sexual harassment and other abuses they’ve experienced. The problems within the restaurant industry are the same problems we see throughout society — perhaps written small enough that we can create real change on a practical timeline.

In closing, I found The Next Supper to provide a good lens on the restaurant industry, including some of the changes wrought by COVID. I’ve only covered a small chunk of the material in the book and how it relates to Portland’s restaurants — to cover it all would take, well, a full book.

​Formally ending The Portland Prospectus

Some of you may remember that in the before times, I ran an email list covering sponsorship opportunities around tech conferences and other events related to tech here in Portland. I haven’t updated it since 2019, given the large number of cancellations and postponements in the last two years.

Both running and sponsoring events look dramatically different today than they did in 2017, when I started the newsletter. Personally, I don’t feel comfortable attending big events in person and I don’t see that changing any time soon. My work has also moved away from the tech industry, so I’m not really tracking tech events very closely at this point.

As a result, I’ve decided to formally shut down the mailing list. After this post goes live, I’ll delete the mailing list, including subscriber emails. If someone wants to start something similar in the future, you have my blessing. And if you want my templates and notes, let me know — we can work out an equitable arrangement.

Since I’ll be deleting the content that went out to the Portland Prospectus mailing list, I’m also sharing the PDFs of the different iterations of the Portland Prospectus here as a sort of archive.

The Portland Charter Review Process: A Resource Roundup

I’ve been following the Portland Charter Review process closely since it started in 2020 and have done what I can to make the process a little more understandable. Those efforts have included Twitter threads, explainers, and even ideas for folks interested in submitting public comments. I’m collecting all the materials I’ve made here and will continue to add additional items as I make or find them.

Materials I’ve Created (Arranged By Topic)

Charter Overview

Public Testimony to the Charter Review Commission

Applying to Join the Charter Review Commission (Application Now Closed)

  • Application Explainer — During the process of selecting commissioners for the Charter Review commission, I created this explainer to help more people apply for the commission.
  • Twitter Threads on Applying — This thread covers material included in the explainer adapted to social media. The threads are on Twitter, but there’s also a PDF of the tweets included in the threads, because finding old tweets is difficult.

Additional Resources From Other Sources

Sharing Guidelines

If you are interested in sharing or repurposing any of the materials I’ve created around the Portland Charter Review, you’re welcome to do so. I’ve licensed the materials I’ve created under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, meaning that I just ask you to keep my name on things I’ve written as you share them. I’m not necessarily worried about credit so much as making sure that folks understand that these are materials produced in my spare time and are not reviewed by anyone who is officially part of the charter review process.

Please let me know if you do repurpose or share any of these materials in a way that I can help promote. Examples include:

A Preview of the Conference I’ve Been Planning for the Last Year

pydx-color-logo-blue

I’ve been working on PyDX for over a year. So have my phenomenal co-organizers, Rachel Kelly, Georgia Reh, Melissa Chavez, and Christopher Swenson. This weekend — October 10th and 11th — all of that hard work is going to pay off.

PyDX, by the way, is a community conference for Python programmers in the Pacific Northwest.

Our Schedule Rocks

I’ve already said that I sort of wish I wasn’t organizing PyDX, because I want to attend it. We’re filming all of the talks, in part because I would cry if I didn’t get to hear at least a few. Here are the talks that I’m particularly thrilled about:

  • Melissa Lewis’ keynote (Saturday AM) — I’ve had the pleasure of hearing Meli speak at PyLadies events and she is going to blow away the PyDX crowd.
  • Terian Koscik’s Build a Bot workshop (Saturday AM) — Terian has an impressive array of Twitter bots that do some cool tricks. She inspired me to start working on my own Twitter bot, but I need some help (I’ll probably watch the video of this talk repeatedly).
  • Evan Palmer’s Making MIDI Music with Python talk — I admit that I actually got to hear Evan practice this talk, but I’m still excited for the final version. He’s making music programmatically!

You can see the whole schedule here as a PDF. I’m biased, of course, but I think we’ve got a great line up across the board.

I’m incredibly grateful to our speakers for putting in proposals and agreeing to speak at PyDX. Many are traveling to Portland on their own dime to do so and I’m a little in awe of the group of people we’re bringing together.

A Conference for Everyone

One of our commitments from the start of organizing this thing was to create a welcoming conference where everyone feels comfortable. Every PyDX organizer has been to tech conferences where we’ve felt like we don’t belong and we’re willing to go to extreme lengths to avoid anyone feeling that way this weekend. A lot of these decisions, by the way, didn’t take all that much time or money to implement.

A Dry Conference: Tech conferences tend to be boozefests, even though many people either don’t drink at all or would prefer not to drink around people they know professionally. So we’re not providing alcohol as part of the conference (though attendees are welcome to meet up after hours for drinks if that’s their thing).

A Code of Conduct: I’ve reached the point where I just won’t deal with events and organizations that don’t have a code of conduct (as well as a way to enforce their CoC). It’s a matter of safety.

Scholarships: Our tickets are priced at $100, which isn’t cheap. The value is more than there (especially when you consider we’re providing food, childcare, great speakers, and more) but we are aware that it’s out of reach for many of the people who might benefit from attending PyDX. So we’re offering scholarships. And if you want to sponsor someone else’s scholarship, you can sponsor for any amount through this payment form. A full scholarship costs us $200 to provide, because we offer stipends for travel and other expenses, depending on the recipient’s need.

We had a good business case for diversity, by the way, which helped us explain the importance of these steps when fundraising and marketing. PyCon North America is taking place in Portland in 2016. We’re making sure that anyone who is considering learning Python before that point has an easy way to get started and to join the local community (which desperately needs more programmers).

Plenty of Pythonic Personality

Community conferences are great because they have more personality. When a conference hosts several thousand attendees, everything has to run like a well-oiled machine. But since PyDX is a smaller community conference, we can have a little fun.

Our entire vibe is a weird mix of hipster jokes and Monty Python references. I’m still not sure I’ve found all the jokes on our website, but I did have a great time writing our sponsorship prospectus (I did have to spend some time researching synonyms for ‘artisanal’).

And I’ve dared the community to help us sell out. If we sell out of tickets (and yes, scholarships count), I’m going to get the PyDX logo (the snake at the top of this post!) as a tattoo. I was originally threatening to get that tattoo on my butt. However, since I want to be able to show it off without violating the code of conduct, I’m thinking my leg is a better bet. Last time I checked, we still needed to sell about 40 tickets for me to get that tattoo. Want to make it happen? Buy a ticket (use FRIENDOFPYDX for 10% off) or sponsor a scholarship (same payment form as before). You know you want to see me all inked up.