Month: October 2012

Great Post by Tony Bacigalupo

brooklynrob Uncategorized

The NY Tech community is mobilizing very fast. Great post by Tony Bacigalupo here – http://happymonster.co/2012/10/30/ny-tech-community-now-is-your-time-to-shine/. Tony puts it very well, “In the face of tremendous challenges in the days and weeks and months ahead, we have an opportunity to contribute our unique capabilities to help those who need assistance with their technology needs, and to build better ways to assist those who are coordinating relief efforts.”

Financial services and (“old”) media were the traditional leaders of NYC industry. Now that the technology sector has become such a vital component to the economy and city as a whole, we have a responsibility to be leaders and in turn help New York get even stronger in the wake of Sandy. Many of us embrace the ethos of “making” and what I think that’s really about is that we want to DO something and make a difference. Now is the time.

NY Tech Meetup Steps Up

brooklynrob Uncategorized

From Jessica (@jessicalawrence) at NYTM (NY Tech Meetup) re the response to Sandy:

NY Tech Meetup and New Work City are organizing volunteers with technology skills to help with relief efforts and help New York-area businesses and organizations get their technology back up and running after Hurricane Sandy. For now, we are starting with creating a database so that we have a group of people who have already raised their hands and are ready to go as it becomes more evident which organizations and businesses in the city need help.

If you have skills to offer, please sign up here: http://bit.ly/hurricanetechvolunteers

Sandy: NY Tech’s Time to Lead and Step Up

brooklynrob Uncategorized

Over the last few years, and driven by an amazing array of people, the NY technology sector (by which I broadly mean technology companies as well as digital media, interactive agencies, VCs, and startups, along with various attendent professional service firms that work with these companies) has “blown up.”

Sandy has now delivered a serious blow to our home city. We, the NY tech community, now must step up to help lead and drive the recovery. NYC has given us much, we now must give back.

I have spoken with a number of people today active in the tech sector in NYC. The good news is there are a lot of people who are already getting going on the response and the different ways in which the tech sector can help out. Some specific ideas I had include:

  • Blood drives at the various shared work spaces / incubators. Many of them are centrally located and have lots of foot traffic. Obviously this is dependent on both the state of the actual buildings in which these work spaces exist (I understand at least two were flooded) and the availability of transit, but there is always a need for blood, and the need will remain.
  • Some form of hackathon/fundraiser to both raise funds and develop some solutions to help drive the recovery. Ask for donations for every hour people code, and then have folks work to code/develop various platforms that can be used to lead and coordinate the response.

These are just a couple quick ideas. I’d like to hear what others think are ways for us to best respond. This is the time to crowdsource great ideas.

I understand groups such as NYTM will be sending out info soon on what they are doing to lead the response. Stay tuned.

Rob Underwood
@brooklynrob
runderwood5@gmail.com

A Nourishing Dinner at General Assembly

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A Nourishing Dinner at General Assembly

On October 3rd General Assembly (“GA”) and Deloitte hosted a dinner at GA’s NYC campus with about 30 leaders from Fortune 100 media and tech companies, NYC-based start-ups, venture capital firms, academic institutions, governmental agencies, and professional services organizations. The theme of the evening was education and "businesses’ role in preparing the workforce for the ‘Big Shift’“. Four main topics were at the core of our discussion:

  • "Corporate to Corporate” Learning. How do corporations best learn from each other? Share best practices? How do we create opportunities for large companies to learn from start-ups, and for emerging companies to learn from established?
  • Re-training, Continuous Learning, and “Just in Time” Learning. How do we continue to grow and develop a technology and business literate workforce?
  • Undergrad and post-grad. How can we encourage people to focus on engineering, business, and media in school? What is the role of initiatives such as the New York City Applied Science Campus?
  • K-12 education. What can the business community do to better support technology and business learning in K-12? 

A Nourishing Dinner at General Assembly

brooklynrob Uncategorized

On October 3rd General Assembly (“GA”) and Deloitte hosted a dinner at GA’s NYC campus with about 30 leaders from Fortune 100 media and tech companies, NYC-based start-ups, venture capital firms, academic institutions, governmental agencies, and professional services organizations. The theme of the evening was education and “businesses’ role in preparing the workforce for the ‘Big Shift'”. Four main topics were at the core of our discussion:

  • “Corporate to Corporate” Learning. How do corporations best learn from each other? Share best practices? How do we create opportunities for large companies to learn from start-ups, and for emerging companies to learn from established?
  • Re-training, Continuous Learning, and “Just in Time” Learning. How do we continue to grow and develop a technology and business literate workforce?
  • Undergrad and post-grad. How can we encourage people to focus on engineering, business, and media in school? What is the role of initiatives such as the New York City Applied Science Campus?
  • K-12 education. What can the business community do to better support technology and business learning in K-12? 
I co-moderated the dinner discussion with Anand Chopra-McGowan (@achopramcgowan) of GA. Here’s a sampling of the questions we posed to the dinner participants. 
  • In an article in The Atlantic two weeks ago entitled “How Liberal Arts Colleges are Failing America”, Scott Gerber argues that the classic Liberal Arts education’s de-emphasis on building marketable skills, and in particular the absence of programs on entrepreneurship, are resulting in college undergraduates coming out ill-prepared for today’s job market and economy. What are your thoughts on this? Is Liberal Arts a thing of the past? Can vocational educational live side by side with a classical curriculum? 
  • Today’s junior high school students will in 10 years be our next wave of entrepreneurs and software developers. It’s in businesses’ interest for these kids to get well educated in “STEM” (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math). What is the role of business in education, especially public education? How do you think businesses can best support and advocate for STEM education in schools?
  • Some economists argue that a significant portion of the current US unemployment rate is structural, not cyclical. As such, it’s believed that retraining of much of the workforce is essential to getting re-energizing the US economy. How important do you think re-training is? Who do you think should pay for it – Businesses? Government? Individuals? And perhaps most importantly, what type of re-training do you think is most essential?
  • There is a lot of discussion that “everyone” needs to learn to code – that everyone needs at least some technical background to compete in today’s economy. What do you think of this assertion? How important is knowing how to code, and more broadly being technical, do you think? Does everyone really need to know how to code? 
  • New York has many great strengths. One is its role as the media and finance capital of world, with the many large media companies and financial institutions headquartered here. Another strength is its vibrant start-up community, many of which operate in the areas of media and tech. How do we create opportunities for large companies to learn from the innovation happening at small? And how can we help smaller companies to be better positioned to benefits from the “lessons learned” of large companies?
  • What do you think should be the role of the respective levels of government in promoting technology education and, more broadly, investment in the technology and digital media sectors? 
  • Looking out 3-5 years, how do you think technology will have changed education? To what degree do you think technology is evolutionary vs. revolutionary?
  • What more, if anything, do you think can and should be done to help children from disadvantaged backgrounds get access to technology and technology education? 
  • What’s the greatest asset for NYC as it continues to expand its digital media, technology, and entrepreneurship ecosystem? What is its greatest liability? Why?
After a welcome by GA co-founder Matt Brimer (@brimer) and some opening remarks and observations from featured participants such as Mitch Resnick of the MIT Media Lab, Kathleen Warner (@kathleendwarner) of Startup America, and Lyel Resner (@lyelr) of Startup Box: South Bronx, the discussion became very interactive as the whole room got involved. Some of the interesting points made during the discussion included:

  • More diversity is needed at the table itself to develop the solutions to a number of the problems discussed in the room. Further discussions like those we had Wednesday night should include students and teachers on the “front lines,” including and especially those from disadvantaged backgrounds
  • Comments from several of the founders in the room about the importance of being able to code, even “code badly” in order to build prototypes and have meaningful discussions about the technology at the heart of most start-ups. Lots of debate about whether or not “everyone” needs to be able code, even a little
  • A general view that retraining is needed within the workforce, but concerns that government sponsorship of such retraining could result in the wrong priorities (as I heard it a concern about “skating to the puck” rather than “skating to where the puck will be”)
  • An acknowledgment that we don’t presently have an education system as a whole that’s properly preparing students for the careers of tomorrow, despite the hard work of teachers and administrator
  • Youth from disadvantaged communities need to be exposed to role models from their communities and/or of similar backgrounds that have made careers for themselves as technology entrepreneurs
What do you think? How do we encourage and promote more dialogue between emerging companies (i.e., start-ups) and large global organizations? Does post-secondary education need to change to better promote and teach entrepreneurship? If so, how? How do we promote STEM education in public schools, especially those that serve disadvantaged communities? What do you think about the importance of retraining? How do we best support and pay for it? Do you think everyone needs to learn to code?
(A Google group to explore each of these questions as discrete topics also exists. Request an invite to the Google Group https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups#!forum/educationdiscussion if you’d like to join our discussion there).
I look forward to your thoughts and comments.