Baltimore City Council’s first hearing on innovation economy; our role in it

The largest event we helped organize during the second annual Baltimore Innovation Week was our opening party that drew 1,000 people to Penn Station Plaza in partnership with the Gathering food trucks and Station North Arts and Entertainment Inc.

The party activated a public space, as seen in the above photo from the event’s beginning, widened the reach of a narrow technology community and brought about other partnerships. It was fun and exciting and big.

But likely the event with bigger direct impact was the small Baltimore City Council hearing we helped launch with District 7 Councilman Nick Mosby, the first ever city council hearing dedicated to the innovation economy in Baltimore.

As a reporter in the past, I would have written an article about the need for Baltimore city tech policy by interviewing 5 technologists and City Council members and hoped they’d do something about. Today, Technically Baltimore helped bring together that city’s first ever Council hearing on the innovation community with those sources giving testimony about their needs. Is that an ethical overstep or exactly what a more community invested news org should do? I tend to think the latter.

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