Philly Tech Week has a new mission statement

Way back in early 2010, we at Technical.ly first proposed a Philly Tech Week. By that November, we had enough planned that we announced we would hold the inaugural celebration of tech and innovation in Philadelphia in April 2011 — complete with a, um, sweet placeholder logo.

From its origins, the goal was to help define a community and make it a more welcoming one than others in those early days of non–Silicon Valley tech clusters.

As organizers at Technical.ly do today, the idea was to co-organize a bunch of events with friends to make the loudest noise we can for the Philly tech community. It was open-source event planning, a brash bid to put Philly on the map.

From the jump, we had an internal mission statement that resembled something like this: Philly Tech Week will establish a broad and inclusive Philly tech community through collaboration and collective organizing, and become a meaningful annual tradition.

Though there’s lots of work to be done in the tech sector on inclusivity, we tend to think the core goals of helping to define a Philly tech community and building a tradition for others to use as a platform have been reached. Yo thanks, fam. You, we, did it.

So that’s usually a good time to revisit your priorities and update your mission statement.

Over the last several months, we at Technical.ly have talked internally and with several stakeholder groups to do just that. As first announced publicly last month at our annual Help Plan Philly Tech Week event, ahead of the eighth-annual installment (April 27 to May 5, 2018), Philly Tech Week 2018 presented by Comcast has a new mission statement.

Philly Tech Week convenes and connects people who use new tools and processes to make a better future for all communities.

As a co-organizer of this since the very beginning, I’m proud of that.

Let me point out three parts in that simple sentence:

• It’s about bringing together people first.
• We define the scary word of technology and the misappropriated word of innovation in simple terms: “new tools and processes.”
• We capture the civic-mindedness of seeking to support “all communities.”

That’s something we aim to live by with this event series, and year-round, too.