The best thing you can do to support tech in your city...

...is to make tech in your city.  Success begets success.  I think in Baltimore we're doing a great job of burnishing our brand as an exciting place to work with technology, but nothing will help our reputation more than increasing the number of successful technology product companies and practitioners who reside here.

That's why in 2011 you'll see me focus my organizing and advocacy efforts around events and activities that involve making technology or funding technology development in Maryland:

• I'll be attending the InvestMaryland summit in Annapolis next week
• I'm teaming up with Monica Beeman and others to plan Startup City (a Baltimore version of successful investment-mentorship programs like Techstars and Y-Combinator)
• I'm helping organize Startup Weekend in the Spring
• I helped organize the Baltimore Hackathon last fall, which will come back again sometime this year
• I'd like to start a salon-style event called "Secret Software Society", styled after New York's Secret Science Society, where we have interesting cross-language and cross-platform talks about building software given by people working at product companies, especially people we don't often hear from on the tech scene.
• I'm starting a new product company that I hope will grow into an exemplar, an employer, a responsible member of the community, and a supporter of existing tech events and organizations as well as new initiatives yet to be planned!

I call this strategy "Bias for Action": now that Baltimore's technologists and entrepreneurs have a variety of ways to connect, I want to focus on projects that directly lead to them taking action!