Tag: Technical.ly

Technical.ly is honored for its “journalistic impact”

I’m proud to share Technical.ly was awarded the “Journalistic Impact” award (in the large tier no less!) last night in Chicago by the well-regarded LION: Local Independent Online News Publishers!

The leading driver was our big THRIVING reporting project on economic mobility, and I’m so proud that our other multi-local reporting was honored too. Best I can remember, this is our first proper journalism award, and it’s a big one — even though our communities have often kindly honored our work!

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Burn Book by Kara Swisher

Thirty years of tech journalism faces similar challenges to other beat reporters, like getting too close to sources and missing broader trends. Other characteristics are unique to tech-savvy journos: having an entrepreneurial bent, relying on live events, both for news and for revenue, and being especially entrenched in a community you help grow but also report critically on.

Among tech reporting’s founding disciples is Kara Swisher, who published earlier this year a memoir called Burn Book: A Tech Love Story, and knows these challenges well.

The influential, if controversial, veteran went from Washington Post to Wall Street Journal, before launching with her mentor Walt Mossberg a conference series and then an independent news site All Things Digital. She went on to a series of ventures and editorial posts. She’s among the longest-running Silicon Valley insider-journalists — and in that way, the godmother of the journalism I’ve brought to second-wave geographies with Technical.ly.

She’s navigated extended disclosures and been called both overly boosterish and too critical. In my far smaller way, it’s all familiar to me. I enjoyed the book for that reason, though it grated on me in other ways. Even for someone as accomplished as she, the book reads as self-aggrandizing — very few mentions of her staff, and even fewer expressions of where she had fallen short. Nearly everyone she introduces appears to have failed to take her sound counsel.

Yet I do respect what she did for our craft, and I appreciate her in contrast to the longer-running Silicon Valley insider publication TechCrunch, founded in 2005 by investor Mike Arrington. She defines herself as a teller-of-truths to power, calling Silicon Valley “assisted living for millennials.”

I, too, have navigated cheering on good, dynamic parts of our economy with its frequent misuse. Big tech wants to be regulated lightly like media companies but they want to be blameless for how their platforms are used, like a telephone company. The age of the internet and software has meant near infinite scaling, resulting in untested boy kings like Mark Zuckerberg, whom Kara has long criticized.

As she writes: “The innovators and executives ignored issues of safety not because they were necessarily awful, but because they had never felt unsafe a day in their lives.”

That much has influenced how I balance my work. Below I share my notes for future reference.

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My Technical.ly Builders Conference keynote May 2024

Well the video crew somehow damaged the file of my speech, but I gave the keynote at Technical.ly’s annual Builders Conference back on May 8.

I published the themes on Technical.ly here, here and here. I wanted to share the full video here, but no luck. I do have my full notes below.

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I got hit in the face and escorted a protestor from an event. What happened?

About 20 minutes left in the evening reception, and a 20-something fella came running up to me: “You got a big problem, and you better come with me,” he said, and turning.

What first crossed my mind was someone was having a health emergency. Instead, I walked into the emptying main ballroom, where perhaps 100 people so remained. A half-dozen technology exhibitors were there, including a high-school robotics demo and a chocolate 3D printer. This was the tail-end of the closing reception of my news organization Technically’s annual conference, which itself was the close of Philly Tech Week, an open-calendar of community events we founded.

It got weird.

Continue reading I got hit in the face and escorted a protestor from an event. What happened?

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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How we evolved the Technical.ly mission over time

Mission statements are a post-war business phenomenon now considered a must.

A 1994 Wall Street Journal story reported “fifty percent of big companies have mission statements now, twice as many as five years ago,” saying they are “fast becoming the latest management mania.”

Update: I wrote about how to put mission into action here, and we’ve covered the importance here too.

What must have first been our closest attempt at a mission statement was “Covering the community of people who use technology in Philadelphia,” which we sometimes shortened as a tagline to “A better Philadelphia through technology.”

When we expanded to Baltimore in 2012, we widened our scope to “Better cities through technology,” which adorned our site for the next several years. It also spoke to the very wide scope we took in those early days, when there was limited formal engagement between fledgling tech communities and wider cities. We hosted computer trainings and coding bootcamps; We facilitated early city council hearings in both Philadelphia and Baltimore on the issues of entrepreneurial engagement, and we hosted early civic hacking and tech, data and innovation policy events. We were very deep in the subject matter.

Over time then our lean mission statement got bulky. Here’s language we used by 2015, when we hosted a big team onsite about the topic:

Technical.ly is a sustainable community acceleration organization focused on how technology makes cities better. We value entrepreneurship, creativity, inclusion, flexibility, transparency and those who do, act and create, whom we highlight through news and events. Our team members are public community leaders who pursue new thinking, cherish local communities and are willing to ask challenging questions in order to get better answers. We use communication as a means for conflict resolution and community betterment. We have high standards for ourselves and others and consider professional goals to be personal ones as well.

That resulted in this mission statement we used for Technically Media, as we were publishing both Techncial.ly and Generocity: We convene the smartest people and organizations in industries that matter to help local communities thrive in the future.

We updated it in 2017 with this:

  • Mission: Technical.ly grows local technology communities by connecting organizations and people through reporting, events and services.
  • What we do: We provide original editorial, expert programming and tools which improve recruitment, marketing, community cultivation and economic development. We serve technologists, entrepreneurs and people who care about technology’s local impact.
  • Company: Our team members are public community leaders who pursue new thinking, cherish local communities and are willing to ask challenging questions in order to get better answers.

In 2018, we fashioned a mission statement for our event series Philly Tech Week, and that resulted in tweaking our vision: “We believe in better workplaces that create more equitable communities.”

Then following pandemic disruption and refinement in our first strategic vision in 2021, we came to this:

  • Mission: Technical.ly is a news organization that connects and challenges a community of technologists and entrepreneurs invested in where they live.
  • Vision: We believe innovation should come from anyone anywhere — to ensure all communities thrive.
  • Values: Welcoming, Connective and Challenging