By Andrew Zaleski
Next City
When the Portland Development Commission considered shaking up traditional municipal RFPs two years ago, the city development agency hoped to be able to tap into the city’s early-stage, Portland, Oregon-based startups. Eschewing the customary wait-and-see approach to finding government product and service providers, the PDC decided to go directly to the local software industry and explain what different departments needed.
One product of the outreach effort was a mobile ticketing app developed by GlobeSherpa and currently in use by TriMet, the city bureau in charge of public transit in Portland. This was civic hacking in action: TriMet was interested in creating a mobile ticketing app, but didn’t know who the best provider would be.
“Sometimes these challenges are things government is already aware of, and they just don’t necessarily know what the right solution is,” says Jared Wiener, a project manager with the PDC. “So how can we institutionalize this so we can lower barriers in order to create more opportunities?”
The City of Portland’s answer to that question became the Portland-based Switchboard. Co-founded by Mara Zepeda and Sean Lerner in 2013, the startup builds simple websites that are crosses between Craigslist and the community-organizing site Neighborland. About a dozen universities, nonprofits and high schools across the U.S. use Switchboard. Portland is the first city government client.
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