Tuesday, November 23, 2010

The Hackathon Was Amazing

More details later, but just a quick note to thank all of the sponsors and volunteers and participants who helped make the Hackathon a huge success. Here are the winners and here are some cool photos.  Stay tuned for video, too!

Tuesday, November 9, 2010

Help Us With Ignite Baltimore

Recently friends have been offering to help us with Ignite Baltimore. It's a true labor of love that's completely powered by volunteers, donations, sponsors, and goodwill and I'm super psyched that people want to help.

However, it's hard for me to know how serious people are.  Heather, Neal, and I have various responsibilities divided up between us but there are plenty of things that we don't have time to do or can't do as well as a dedicated person might.  So, as an experiment, I'm putting this list out into the ether to see who might step forward to take up one or more of these projects!
  • Organizing an after party: It would be nice to have a really well-planned event immediately after each Ignite that we could funnel the audience towards. Ideally it would feature live music by a Baltimore performer. This event would probably need separate sponsorship.
  • Creating content for our website: I'd like us to post things like follow-up articles with Ignition Grant winners and past speakers, interviews with upcoming speakers, etc.
  • T-shirt printing and sales: we have a few custom-printed shirts that the organizers wear, and people often ask where they can buy the shirts.  We could really use someone to step up and take charge of this, including selling the shirts at events.  Ideally they could be sold online as well. All proceeds would benefit the Ignition Grants. 
  • Manage Facebook presence: I'm in charge of this right now and just don't have the enthusiasm for Facebook that I do for Twitter. I'd love to see someone become the guru of our Facebook page and turbocharge it.
  • Manage LinkedIn presence: Ditto.
  • Manage media partnerships: We have great relationships with The Urbanite and MD Daily Record. I'd love someone to take this over and start recruiting a few new partnerships (like a radio station).
  • Print marketing: We don't do anything with postcards or flyers right now. I feel like we could diversify and renew the audience further by trying this for the next Ignite.
  • BmoreSmart: We're part of this group of social entrepreneurs. They have all kinds of interesting projects and opportunities.  Helping them would be a great way of helping us!
If any of those catch your eye please email me at mike@subelsky.com.

Thanks!!