Philly Tech Week Presented by AT&T will feature ‘Track Days’

Through three years of hosting Philly Tech Week Presented by AT&T, we kept hearing that you wanted more curated events nearby each other, for better planning, more serendipity and to introduce people to new corners of our community.

(Note the survey stat from #PTW13 revealing that nearly 75% of attendees in 2013 were unable to make it to all of the events they had hoped to, because there were too many.)

We’d like to introduce you to the Philly Tech Week Track Days, which will do just that during next year’s event, April 4-12, 2014. (Find our more by attending next week’s Planning event at Venturef0rth!)

Traditionally, all Tech Week events have been listed on our calendar with a track (or subject matter area) designation, which also governs our coverage area: Access, Civic, Business, Development, Creative and now also Media.

So while there will still be an open calendar of events — nearly 100 this past April — we’ll curate strong, relevant programming that lands on the same day in a similar part of the city and encourage you to hit that day in that place. (We hope to add more regional elements in the future, too).

Here’s a tentative outline of the Track Days below, highlighting the day’s anchor event, around which other programming will be built:

• CREATIVE: Where art and technology collide.

Fri. April 4 – Kickoff event; large scale interactive digital public art display and app festival near the Art Museum. (It’s like PONG, but bigger.)
Fri. April 11 – Daytime community arts events, Signature Event and Afterparty.

• DEV: Where programmers, designers, developers and project managers come together.

Sat. April 5 – A day-long workshop dedicated to learning software development and a correlating maker/artisan skill.

• CIVIC: The impact of technology on government and civil society.

Mon. April 7 – Large Open Access Philly convening/reunion

• MEDIA: The future of marketing, content and strategy.

Tues. April 8 – An afternoon conference on content marketing and strategy.

• BUSINESS: The startup, investment and business community conversation.

Wed. April 9 – #FailFest: Conversations in Failure with some of Philly’s business leaders.

• ACCESS: Discussing technology issues that affect everyday citizens and underserved communities.

Thur. April 10 – Citywide digital day of service

There are a ton of details to come together on these anchor events, as well as other Track Day events, and everything else around them. As always, there will be a number of community-hosted events as well as those that we partner with community groups on.

Find more info about how to get involved on our Event Organizer Guide and then submit your event proposal. Please indicate if you’re interested in lining up your event with one of our Track Days.

Have questions? Come out to our Help Plan Philly Tech Week 2014 event, happening next Wednesday at VentureF0rth. RSVP here.