Online innovation magazine Flying Kite featured a nice overview of Philly Tech Week, including some background on Technically Philly, written by Salas Sarayia.
Freelance photographer took some nice shots of the three of us who founded TP and organize PTW, even if that light may have helped me look like a zombie.
Thanks for the coverage.
Yesterday, Philadelphia City Councilman Bill Green tweeted something interesting to me:
“Here’s the @TechnicallyPHL article I just referenced during the Police Dept budget hearing http://bit.ly/er1mnf”
The article he referenced was some coverage I did of the Philadelphia Police Department using open source technology for its website and utilizing social media for canvassing communities for tips.
With the passage of Resolution 110218, Philadelphia City Council officially named the last six days of April officially as Philly Tech Week, as celebrated with a reading of the resolution in council chambers Thursday morning.
There, my colleague Sean Blanda and I, two of the three co-founders of Technically Philly and organizers of Philly Tech Week, received an embossed copy of the resolution from Councilman Bill Green, who introduced the legislation, and Councilmen Brian O’Neill and Wilson Goode, who co-sponsored the measure. I addressed council briefly to note two things: that (1) technology and the Digital Philadelphia vision is more than just gadgets and (2) the Philly Tech Week resolution featured two dozen groups and organizations because the technology community is so broad.
These resolutions can be a little silly, but they do serve as validation of the interest and growth of the technology community in Philadelphia. It was an honor to represent the community, even though we’re only a small part of its growth.
Below, watch my brief remarks and see the notes that I should have prepared.
During presentations, we at Technically Media have talked about our failures. We do a lot of speaking (me too), so we’ve also touched on the power of working in threes.
But I think we haven’t touched on what I think is our most innovative reason for sticking together for more than two years: our meeting style. And the power of drag of meetings are important to us.
OK, yah, it sounds pretty boring, and, well, maybe it is, but if you ask about our success (whatever it is) I think it has quite a bit to do with the meetings we’ve almost always held, from the very beginning.
It’s largely a style I’ve advocated for years that has now been further evolved, practiced and cemented into our culture with a lot of follow through from two colleagues who really buy into it and have crafted it on their own. So much do I prefer our meetings over others I often find myself getting into, that I often find myself bringing the style elsewhere.
You can see advice from Google and a startup.
Below, I share a typical agenda from a Technically Philly meeting, some unwritten rules we’ve adopted for these meetings and the phrases you’d be sure to hear at each of our meetings.
Continue reading Technically Media meeting style: effective, productive and professional from home
After a couple years of resisting, we at Technically Philly went ahead with a bit of some April Fools’ Day fun.
Yes, we, the Technically Philly crew, announced we were moving to New York, and then followed that up with hourly news items that were a bit less than real. We put them in an ‘April Fools’ category, colored the post background pink and avoided too negative posts, all in the interest of combating annual newsroom concerns about breaking news trust. We’re also deleting the posts next week, so they don’t get caught in search for the future.
Posts we ran:
The reactions were great. Some were surprised, some weren’t. There was a lot of love from many people, including the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia and Councilman Bill Green.
Below are some headlines I suggested that didn’t make the cut.
The annual national Online News Association conference, to be held this fall in Boston, has launched its 2011 panel picker, in which those interested can vote to support their favorites of a couple hundred suggested sessions.
I am somewhat involved in three. To vote, users just need to sign up with an email. If you’re interested give love to any of these three:
A surprisingly fairly comprehensive take from Net News Check on the Philadelphia media ecosystem, including the William Penn Foundation investment, the WHYY Newsworks initiative, Philly.com and others, like Technically Philly:
To kick off this year, we at Technically Philly ran a weekly Tuesday feature interviewing a technology community member and/or entrepreneur who left Philadelphia. It is called Exit Interview and the weekly portion of the series is winding down, with perhaps one more to run next week.
The three of us who founded TP love Philadelphia, in particular its creative and entrepreneur communities. Journalism aside, we tend to think those whom we cover are going to be a big part of improving Philadelphia, its perception, its government, its taxes and its reputation.
Journalism should uncover truths and push forward dialogue. That can come with important public affairs coverage and institutional oversight, but it can also by highlighting key issues among its audience.
So I felt strongly that to further the conversation among these communities, it was our role to face directly concerns holding it back. To do so, I led the move to bring together nearly a dozen interviews and will now roll back out Exit Interview when new perception comes forward.
Today, on the Technically Media blog, I shared six lessons I took from running the series.
To get a quick sense, here are three example headlines from the series:
The first concerted effort to seek what types of city government data and information Philadelphians want was kicked off last night with an event I helped organize on behalf of Technically Philly with Young Involved Philadelphia.
Partnered with the Code for America fellowship program, I moderated a panel meant to illustrate concrete and simple definitions and needs for city data that was then followed by a half dozen breakout sessions in which moderators had their dozen group members answer two questions:
Read my coverage of the event here, including reference to this Google Doc, in which I tallied the suggestions. This event is one of four big lessons we’re learning while leading this grant project.
More details and video below.
Last month, I kicked off Transparencity, a grant-funded reporting initiative I am leading for Technically Philly focusing on the open data movement within the City of Philadelphia. Not long after, the Sunlight Foundation, the national leader in the space of government transparency, made mention of it, much to my glee.
