I sent :
(remember this is from a Seattle to Portland point of view)
There are a lot of interesting things happening in Portland.
One of the things that Portland has which Seattle does not seem to have is funded incubators. I suggest that you take a moment to talk to Steve Morris at the Oregon Technology Business Center http://www.otbc.org
And to talk to Carol Mason at the PSU accelerator http://www.psba.pdx.edu/
The Equivilent of the NWEN is the OEN. Linda Weston at http://www.oen.org is a good person to touch base with.
One of the projects that I find very interesting is the Calagator project. It is an open source effort to build an calendar agregator http://www.calagator.org
the Calagator folks can help you find many of the technical Gathering places. Things like the Perl Users group, or the MYSQL users group or the Android programer gathering or .... The list is huge.
In addition, something that I see in Portland that I don't see in Seattle is the Legion of Tech folks http://www.legionoftech.org
They run the Portland BarCamp and the Portland Ignite.
Getting time to visit with Todd Kenefsky or with Dawn Foster would be useful.
Todd ran a Startupalooza last year http://www.startupalooza.org
It was very good. I hope they do it again this year. The website has not been updated for this year.
You might want to track down some of the folks who are part of Starve Ups - http://www.starveups.org
They are a collection of folks who are working to help entrepreneurs, in a more focused way.
In addtion the folks at the POSSE - http://www.possepdx.org/
They are a bunch of Open Source Entrepreneurs.
Brian Jameson at Open Sourcery might be an interesting person to visit with.
http://www.opensourcery.com
The local Software Association of Oregon is a good gathering place for people doing different kinds of businesses. You might talk to Harvey Matthews or Bryce Yonkers at http://www.sao.org
I hope this gives you a starting place for what you are looking for.
If you follow Dawn Foster on http://www.shizzow.com , You will find that Beer and Blog - http://www.beerandblog.org tends to happen at the Green Dragon and you will see that the Linux Users Group tends to meet at the Lucky Lab
If there is any specific introduction that I can help with, please drop me a note.
