Today I wanted to give you a few more details about what we at Lanyap Creative have been working on in our very limited free time to support the NOLAtech community. But first, I’d like to announce the creation of the NOLAtech Facebook group, a place we can call our own, a place that will be managed and curated by all of us. The value and purpose of this group will be determined by our individual contributions… the more you share your knowledge about tech and entrepreneurship, the better our group will be. The more we focus our conversations, the easier it will be to learn from each other and meet new people we may have missed at the last NOLA Meetup or Hack Night. If you visit this group over the next few weeks and you find it lacking… make it better. Invite your friends to it. Spark a conversation, and teach us something.
So what are the action items? What are “my” good ideas? Well, we’ve got some decent stuff in the hopper over here at Lanyap Creative, but to tell you the truth, our strategy is far from complete because we haven’t yet had enough open conversation with the movers and shakers that have been building the NOLAtech community for the last 5+ years. However, we are working on it and we are having more of those conversations everyday. We need everyone’s support, input, and enthusiasm to capitalize on the opportunity we have in front of us if we’re going keep our city on the tech map for years to come. If you feel like you have something to contribute, please join the Facebook group and start kicking around ideas with people there, or call up your best buds and have a cocktail down at your corner bar and talk about what you can do to get us to the next milestone on our journey, and then share it with the rest of us.
I will say that our initial ideas have an altruistic thread that challenges the event organizers among us to structure their registration in such a way that a given portion of dollars collected for “Tech” events has a direct impact on helping the next generation of tech enthusiasts and entrepreneurs. We’re also coming up with a strategy that benefits this same group of young people simply by participating in the NOLAtech community, in even the smallest of ways. Expect to hear more about this campaign, and more, in just a few weeks. You have my word that we’re not just blowing smoke over here, we’re either going to be super helpful or fail spectacularly, but either way our intentions are genuine… we want to help, we want to build the community, and we want to have fun doing it.
P.S. If you’re anti-facebook, which is totally understandable, you can still join the conversation anytime by tweeting with the #NOLAtech hashtag. Feel free to tweet me @joecorbett anytime or leave a message on this post if you have a question or just can’t wait to get involved.
P.P.S. If you haven’t already done it, you should sign up for New Orleans Barcamp6, aka Bearcamp1
