Personal Updates – Christopher Wink

Wine making with Patrick

I’ve joined and toured distilling processes going back years, and taken an interest in commercial and homebound beer brewing. Yet outside a few winery tours over the years, I haven’t been as close to wine-making. That’s silly because one of my closest friends in the world has taken up his grandfather’s tradition.

Featured speaker @ Sloss Tech in Birmingham, Alabama

I traveled to Birmingham, Alabama to be part of the revival of SlossTech, where I joined a panel discussing how different entrepreneurship ecosystems vary by geography.

Among my favorite pushes: Everyone has projections about why their city is special but spreadsheets are full of hopes and lies.

NRG Philadelphia media flag football tournament: Champions!

Hey that was fun: A goofy annual tradition raised $36k for regional charities last month. It was my second year, and this year we won the championship of the NRG Charity Philadelphia media flag football game.

Some pics and video below.

Technical.ly Builders conference keynote

I was proud of my keynote speech helping to kickoff Technical.ly Builders, the return of our retooled readers conference that welcomed 500 from nearly 20 US states during Philly Tech Week.

The outline of my speech was shared as written pieces in three parts:

How was your pandemic?

This month the U.S. government suspended the health emergency, effectively ending the pandemic.

That doesn’t mean covid-19 is gone (it isn’t); it doesn’t mean it won’t flare back up (it could); it doesn’t mean we won’t have another pandemic someday (we might). But it does mark the end of this nearly 3.5 year period.

Millions of lives were lost, and economic and psychological trauma was enacted, all of which we’re still confronting. As a coping mechanism, a friend and I were talking about the little behavior changes that took root, some of which we may reference for years to come. At the very beginning my Technical.ly newsroom was interested in what and how we would create.

I kept up my resolutions, and they were different than before covid-19. I’ll always reference these few simple behavior changes that now feel entrenched as part of me after so many life changes:

CityCast interview on THRIVING

Prompted by Technical.ly’s year-long THRIVING reporting series, I joined the CityCast podcast. We’re interviewing hundreds of people from a half-dozen other cities, plus following 10 Philadelphians for a full year to help understand: What are the obstacles and opportunities to economically thrive?

Listen here.

After 7 years, I am no longer Generocity.org publisher

This was originally published on Technical.ly. I republished it here because it feels an especially personal update. This post completes a resolution of mine for the year.

After seven years of publishing Generocity.org, Technical.ly’s parent company Technically Media has transitioned the nonprofit-industry news site to Civic Capital, a philanthropic consultancy.

This is personal to me. In 2015, I led the effort to acquire Generocity, which was founded by philanthropist Sandra Baldino years prior. In the ensuing years, I was publisher for both Technical.ly, which expanded its geographic focus, and Generocity, which remained focused in Philadelphia. Both followed a similar playbook: Find an important industry that is typically covered nationally and report obsessively on it with a local lens.

The parenting lifecycle

I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately.

Newborn 0-3 mo
Infant 3-6 mo
Baby 6-12 mo
(Parents are always tired)

Toddler: 1-3 yrs
Pre-schooler: 3-5 yrs
(Parents are always late)

Grade-schooler: 5-13 yrs
Teenager: 13-20
(Parents are apparently always wrong)

My 2023 Resolutions

My 2022 had its challenges and macroeconomic complexity threatens to make 2023 harder still.

Call me naive then but I maintain that it will be difficult to surpass the crush that was 2020, and even the daze that was 2021. I am optimistic that even if 2023 features a recession it will be a painful part of the journey out of this pandemic.

That attitude shines through in my resolutions for next year. I have two kids, new hobbies and a very different business than I had in 2019.

My 2022 in review

Another pandemic year, another year of personal discovery.