Category: Personal Updates

My life

What should your city be in 150 years?

Spinning out of the THRIVING reporting project I’ve led at Technical.ly, I’ve hosted a pair of sessions imagining Philadelphia in 150 years. I hope to do similar longterm future-thinking here and elsewhere.

I’ve found helpful several books on longtermism and other community engagement experience of my past. This week, the Philadelphia Inquirer published an op-ed I wrote with my friend and collaborator Mike O’Bryan on the topic. I wrote this summer on the concept after our first session. (photos below)

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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.

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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:

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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.

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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.

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