In 2007, in the midst of my undergraduate days, I went hitchhiking for the first time.
I first told the story for a 2011 Story Shuffle, and given the opportunity, I tightened the narrative (some) and gave it another go. Watch below. (Thanks Hillary Rea from Tell Me a Story!)
https://vimeo.com/160891268
The panel discussion format at events is so ubiquitous it’s come to feel boring. That’s a mistake. The format can be effective. It’s just routinely done badly.
At its core, a panel is just meant to be a conversation. Nobody hates conversations that are lively, honest and informative. The problem, then, is in execution not format. One of the key features is the moderator.
Continue reading Some friendly advice on moderating panel discussions
The cybersecurity community will need to widen its focus, both for talent attraction, collaborative defense and inclusion.
That was the basic premise of my keynote this morning at the inaugural Cybersecurity in Action, Research and Education conference. Since I am not a cybersecurity executive or academic, my goal was to simply share some interesting examples of the cyber conversations that our team at Technical.ly is dutifully reporting on.
Find my slides and links below.
Continue reading Cybersecurity is about to get a whole lot bigger
In front of an audience of 150 civil servants and economic development executives from throughout the mid-Atlantic, I interviewed last week Philadelphia Mayor Elect Jim Kenney for the second annual Rise conference on civic innovation we at Technical.ly organize.
Find the transcript and write-up here. Below listen to the audio,
Continue reading Here’s the audio from my on-stage interview of Philadelphia Mayor Elect Jim Kenney
To an audience of 100, I gave the keynote at FOSSCON, a one-day, open source conference held in Philadelphia for attendees from around the country this Saturday. (I also covered the event for Technical.ly here).
It was easily the most technical event at which I had a prominent speaker role — usually, I’m a side show to offer reporting background on a related issue. This time, I was closing out the event, which featured prominent open source leaders. But I wasn’t there to offer technical insight — which I don’t have — but instead meant to take reporting perspective and put it through the open source lens.
My title was “How Open Source is Changing the World,” and the argument was that open source software culture has shaped so many other changes happening in local tech communities — how technical recruiting gets done, why governments are pursuing open data, where tech businesses are locating.
I did an OK job at this.
Continue reading How Open Source is Changing the World: my keynote speech at FOSSCON
I moderated a panel in April on diversity in technology at the Emerging Technologies for the Enterprise conference.
Below listen to the audio.
I’m proud to say that the Fox Business School of my alma mater Temple University honored me with their third annual ‘Self-Made and Making Others’ award during the Be Your Own Boss Bowl.
The honor is a recognition for entrepreneurial work that helps others do the same. I gave a keynote address to students and other alumni, which I wrote out and shared below but mostly just used as notes.
I was asked to join a leadership podcast run by Joel Capparella, a marketing executive I know in the Philadelphia area. It’s about a half-hour.
Continue reading I talked about leading Technical.ly on a leadership podcast
I helped organize our first ever live Technical.ly podcast and, in addition to helping to produce the event, I put together one of the main pieces.
My point? We don’t really choose a Place to live. We choose a Time in a Place to live.
Continue reading Choose a time, not a place to live: my piece for our live Technical.ly podcast
I flubbed the current events quiz to be sure but otherwise a worthy appearance on the podcast of Baltimore-based news gamification startup NewsUp.
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