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The Software Association of Oregon (SAO) is launching a platform for peer discussion groups called the Leadership Exchange. Through an extensive survey of 300 tech professionals in the community, we heard loud and clear that people were looking for ways to grow professionally in their roles by connecting with peers.

With this in mind, I’m leading the Steering Committee for the CEO Leadership Exchange so if you are interested in joining the group which will meet once a month at different software/tech CEOs / GMs company conference rooms (or hopefully more creative places at some point) from around the Portland Metro area, please sign up online on SAO’s site or email me or DM me on Twitter (@ryanbuch). The point of these peer discussion groups is to gather in a relaxed atmosphere and share tough issues / challenges / burning questions with your peers knowing that it is fully confidential and info stays in the room only.

This model has been unbelievably successful for groups like Starve Ups (co-founded 9 years ago), EO, and SAO’s Startup Exchange has gained a lot of traction over the past year. Many of my peers through Starve Ups have become very close personal friends as well as business partners in other ventures. It took months and years to develop these close ties, but I’m optimistic that the CEO Leadership Exchange (for CEOs/GMs of Portland companies that have or expect to have $5m in annual revenue) will have that kind of valuable connecting power and peer learning over the upcoming months and years.

Read more below to find out about the other Leadership Exchange Groups that are all launching the week of Labor Day in less than 2 weeks!

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We just had our Software Association of Oregon (SAO) Membership Committee meeting on Friday (full disclosure: I am on the Board of SAO so I’m a bit biased in favor of the organization). I have to admit, I’m pretty fired up about an important cause we are undertaking. With the help of staffer Bryce Yonker, Vidoop’s Scott Kveton, and ViaWest’s Jim Linkous, we have some serious firepower to get out into the software community in many places where SAO is not (and we know that there are a lot of those places).

Our cause is to engage with software freelancers, engineers, tech entrepreneurs, interactive freelancers, bloggers, mobile app enthusiasts, anyone related to the tech industry in Oregon and let them know that SAO finally has something pretty valuable besides great networking and events – SAO is one of the only associations that now offers Healthcare coverage to single employee companies or organizations – yes, freelancers can finally get affordable medical coverage thru SAO (thanks to Regence Bluecross Blueshield for getting flexible with us to make this happen).  When SAO President Harvey Matthews mentioned a year ago that SAO was looking into having this unique health coverage come to fruition at a Bar Camp, he got a standing ovation.  Let’s hope that kind of goodwill is still there in the software community in today’s economy.  To learn more about the healthcare plan, go to SAO’s site >>.

Here are a few of the events we’ll see you (thanks Scott Kveton for heading the charge on this) – source for these events and more is http://calagator.org:
** Lunch 2.0 – AboutUs
** Ignite Portland 5 – 2/19
* RecentChangesCamp – 2/20 – 2/22
** Lunch 2.0 – OpenSourcery
** Innotech – 4/22 – 4/23
** BarCamp Portland – 5/1 – 5/3
* Webvisions – 5/21 – 5/22
** Open Source Bridge (the OSCON replacement) – 6/17 – 6/19

Also: we will try to make some of the Beer & Blog events that happen every Friday, 4-6pm, at the Green Dragon.