All posts in Miami

In case you are joining us now, and missed the previous posts. We discussed the government’s role, the individuals, the entrepreneurs, the investors, and the communities’ role in shaping our tech community in greater South Florida. The last piece we need to touch upon is that of the media’s role in making the area stretching from Key West to Jupiter into a tech hub.

If you had asked me just a mere 6 months ago what I thought the role of the media was in transforming or participating in the future of the tech community, I would have told you their job was to get the heck out of the way and let us innovate on our own, that we didn’t need them or care about them.

Then again, a lot has changed in just 6 months. No, I am not retracting my previous statements about saving newspapers (some of my ideas are already being implemented, speaking of which, where is my consulting fee?). In the last six months we’ve seen the old media embrace digital and social tools to as best as they can so far. They haven’t fully figured out the whole puzzle yet, but they are trying in earnest to get it as quickly as possible. I mean six months ago if you told me the Miami Herald would be putting out an iPhone app or the New Times would have a dedicated tech blogger, I would have LMFAO.

Here we are though, at a juncture between old and new, so how do we get one to embrace the other. As members of the tech community we need to realize that despite our open disdain for “old media,” they have something we need from them: exposure. Depending on your role in new media, its hard to argue with the reach of old media. Now don’t get me wrong, this is definitely a two way street here, old media needs us (tech) to teach them, share with them, and help them adapt to well, us.

So what can we as techies do to help out old media whom we complain about not writing or covering things that interest us? Well we start by helping tap them into our stream. Every reporter, new media or old, needs sources, yet many of us in tech in South Florida don’t communicate our presence to old media. Just because your startup just launched and you blogged about it, doesn’t mean your grandma will find out about it in the paper. You have to inform people at the paper, tv, and radio stations about your new startup. Send them the links to your blog. Be your own PR person. Every newspaper, radio, and tv journalist is going to hate me for this, because they are all going to get floods of emails from the community, but in the end it will be worth it. Why? For the simple reason that the tech community will get exposure, and the media will get to cover something other than foreclosure and unemployment rates rising every week.

I’ve talked about the need for the techies to connect to the media folk, now we need the media to connect back. We need the media to embrace these tools the tech community has built and provided, because ultimately we all need each other.

I started writing this post in early September. Since then, there has been a huge surge in coverage of tech in South Florida, and many of these things I rant about aren’t as big an issue anymore, but I still felt it necessary to get my word out about them.

Perhaps this post would have been better titled “The role of groups in South Florida’s tech Community future.”

Much has been said about the tech community down here over the last 12 weeks. I’ve been quite vocal discussing everyone’s roles in what is our nascent community. I’ve also spent a lot of time during this period discussing the state of affairs with a number of people who responded to my various posts or through twitter, meetups, etc. Ultimately though, the fate of our community as a whole is dependent on the fates of the individual groups we are all actively cultivating.

A lot has changed in South Florida in the last 4 years. A lot of new groups have formed, connections made, and new initiatives started, but we are still ways away from having a robust and marketable community. We’ve done a great deal on our own, but there is still a lot left to be done. One of the critical things that we have to wrap our heads around is the fact we need more groups, both large and small to emerge in south florida.

My buddy Craig Agranoff wrote for the Palm Beach New Times recently that we were suffering from an identity crisis of sorts, or a disconnect with our communities down here, and he may have been right. I rarely venture north through Broward or even less frequently Palm Beach county (no one ever invites me up there, plus I thought all they did was play polo and talk about their gulfstream jets), so I can’t really comment on what’s going on up there, but I can expound upon how I see these groups interacting and playing their part in Silicon Beach.

Now, let me make something clear: I love the fact that there are literally dozens and dozens of new groups popping up. I don’t think that its a bad thing that we now have a tweetup for bagels, or a meetup for beers, or a group for enthusiasts of a specific programming methodology(not language, a method). A lot of discussion has been made about the dilution of the community, but in my mind that dilution results in more and more groups being created that target people’s needs more precisely. Running Refresh, I have come to the conclusion that I can never appease everyone, there is no club that everyone will enjoy, no topics universal, so why bother?

There will eventually be a logistics and scheduling catastrophe when you have so many groups popping up, but that is also going to be a blessing in disguise. No one will be able to make it to all the events (I already gave up trying a while back – sorry if I’m not at your events), but if the event organizers film/record/share their events online, people will be able to catch up on the content, even if they end up missing out on the key benefit (the people themselves). With the abundance of easy to use tools for events and group management out there, its going to become easier and easier for each group to communicate with each other group. We’re growing nodes, and these nodes will eventually work to make our community better and more powerful.

We don’t need to mimic Silicon Valley, that’s a futile effort, we need to forge our own distinct version of a tech community. Maybe we aren’t very strong in venture backed companies, but we are strong in internationalization, and access to emerging markets. We are also an area full of hustlers, people out there doing what it takes to make a buck. Hustle folks. Hustle.