Portland Lunch 2.0 Launches
Yesterday, about 50 geeks and non-geeks gathered at AboutUs.org in their sweet, newly-remodeled space in the Olympic Mills Commerce Center for the inaugural Portland Lunch 2.0. The event felt very Portland with no formal agenda and no presentations, just a good lunch with good people.
Ray King kicked off the lunch with an introduction. Then Ward Cunningham, the wiki-father, took the chair for a few minutes. Finally, Mark Dilley talked about the Portland chapter of Wiki Wednesday, and we were off to mingle, chat and chomp on pesto sandwiches and pasta. Oh yeah, and Josh Bancroft had an Eee PC to show off to the gadget-hungry.
Check out some pictures from Eddie Awad and Aaron Hockley.
One of the few I took was of Web Worker Daily blogger Jason Harris and his classic geeky name tags. Only at a Lunch 2.0 would you have attendees identifying themselves by name and Twitter handle. Portland has embraced Twitter and has a very active group of tweeters, so I guess this makes sense.

Everyone seemed to enjoy the event, and lots of people asked when the next one was. We’re hoping to keep a regular pace, not every week though. This is Portland. We like to take it easy. Maybe every six weeks, maybe more often if we get lots of requests to host.
Speaking of hosts, Andy Van Oostrum wants to bring the next Portland Lunch 2.0 to eROI. We’re ironing out the details now, probably early April.
If you’re in Portland or interested in the scene here, check out these sites:
- Fast Wonder: Dawn Foster has a hand in just about every techie gathering or event in Portland, including Lunch 2.0 which she helped organized, natch.
- Silicon Florist: Rick Turoczy knows all about the startup scene in Portland.
- Portland on Fire: Raven Zachary set out on a quest to profile a Portlander every day in 2008, not just geeks, but anyone. Very cool stuff that highlights the diversity of the Rose City.
Again, big thanks to Ray, Keith, Mark, Ward and the whole AboutUs crew for their hospitality and swag. Everyone knows you can never have too many coffee mugs, and I’m enjoying this morning’s coffee in my brand new AboutUs mug, w00t!
Upcoming Events


February 28th, 2008 at 10:38 am
Congratulations to the team who put this together!
It was a great first event. And I’m looking forward to attending many more (since I can generally get away for lunch).
There was a heavy, heavy Twitter influence on this event. In fact, I’d argue that more than 75% of the folks were avatars I recognized from Twitter.
Of course, that made the top networking line, “Am I following you on Twitter?”
February 28th, 2008 at 10:48 am
It was great to meet up with everybody. The AboutUs team did a wonderful job hosting the lunch, so big thanks to them. And, much love for the organizers of the event; Jake, Dawn, and crew.
February 28th, 2008 at 10:48 am
It was great meeting Rick & the other folks at Lunch 2.0. For the next meeting, I suggest a little more tape be available for people to use as their networking badges :.)
February 28th, 2008 at 5:28 pm
[...] Portland held its first Lunch 2.0 event. The concept was brought to Portland by Jake Kuramoto of Oracle AppsLab and hosted by [...]
February 29th, 2008 at 1:00 am
[...] Lunch 2.0 » Portland Lunch 2.0 Launches Yesterday, about 50 geeks and non-geeks gathered at AboutUs.org in their sweet, newly-remodeled space in the Olympic Mills Commerce Center for the inaugural Portland Lunch 2.0. The event felt very Portland with no formal agenda and no presentations, just a good lunch with good people. [...]
February 29th, 2008 at 12:54 pm
Many thanks to AboutUs.org and the other folks who helped make this event possible! Had a great time getting to meet people in the PDX tech scene. It’s exciting to see this happening. I hope to come join you
March 3rd, 2008 at 11:50 am
[...] Sontag here in Portland, meeting with folks, spreading the good word about Vidoop and generally being in the [...]
March 10th, 2008 at 9:15 pm
[...] about 50 or so people showed up at the first Lunch 2.0 in Portland, we decided ad hoc to keep the ball rolling. So, without further ado, here are the [...]
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April 10th, 2008 at 8:23 am
[...] saw a lot of new faces, in addition to some I’d seen at the first Lunch 2.0 at AboutUs. It helped to have huge name tags, with plenty of room for name, company and most [...]