New Resource Details Oakland's 'Innovation Economy'

KQED News Associate Oakland Local has partnered with The Kapor Center for Social Impact to create Live Work Oakland, a map and database of the "Oakland Tech Ecosystem."

The project captures Oaklanders who are building software, web tech, and mobile apps, but also extends its focus to makers, designers, and artisans who are building and using tech tools as a key component of their work, and green tech and solar companies operating in the area.

Live Work Oakland also offers guides to getting started doing business in the city, and profiles and articles about local innovators and leaders.

In announcing the launch of the OTE last month, Oakland Local Publisher Susan Mernit and Kapor Center Managing Partner Cedric Brown said:

OTE is a way to say to the world "Technology companies and innovative tech-focused businesses are alive, well, and growing in Oakland."

We know that too many people stop at Oakland’s crime statistics and look no further; we want those people to understand how many companies — creating a wide range of products and services — choose to operate in Oakland.

Mernit and Brown noted that OTE has over 180 Oakland organizations mapped in the database, plus an annotated directory of almost 100 Oakland bloggers. Anyone in the community can add new companies and organizations.

Database categories include accelerators, community, companies, co-working, education, green tech, investment, legal, media and youth.

Mernit and Brown were particularly struck by how Oakland's diversity played out in its tech ecosystem:

Oakland’s companies have more women, people of color, and openly LBGTQI folks as founders, board members, and senior staff than one typically finds in companies based in San Jose, Palo Alto, or San Francisco. And this diversity at the top means that the ecosystem of workers — so often structured to gloss over diversity as an asset — also has a greater range of perspectives backgrounds, and yes, ethnicities.