Patricia Kneski Joins GP as Managing Director
It is with great excitement that we announce a new addition to the General Provision leadership team. Patricia Kneski has been named as Managing Director, tasked with continuing growth of our platform through community partnerships, membership, and outreach. Her love for people and passion to connect others is a natural fit for our vibrant community. Continue reading
Techstars Startup Weekend: Pitch Workshop [Live Stream]
Coding Courses Added to Membership Offering
It’s been our mission at General Provision to build a tech ecosystem right here in our city of Fort Lauderdale. Accessing technical talent and filling technical jobs is a critical part of building an innovation economy, so GP worked to establish Broward County’s first independent coding academy at our coworking space in 2015. Since then, we have watched nearly 100 new software developers change their lives by learning how to code. Broward County continues to lead Miami-Dade and Palm Beach counties in open tech jobs, and we are excited to announce that we are now fully integrating an on-demand coding curriculum as a part of our Membership offering .
Marketing Hack, Live Stream
This event has ended–here’s how it went down!
2017 NDCH Marketing Hack Timelapse from Trim Agency on Vimeo.
2017 NDCH Marketing Hack Pitches from Trim Agency on Vimeo.
2017 Marketing Hack Winner Announcement from Trim Agency on Vimeo.
B.I.G. Dinner: Lloyd Shefsky – “Visionaries Are Made Not Born”
Thursday, November 30th at 6pm: Author Lloyd Shefsky makes a stop at GP to discuss his latest book at the B.I.G. ( Books Inspire Growth) Dinner!
Civic Hack Recap
Miami, Fort Lauderdale, and Savannah, Georgia may be geographically located in the southeastern United States, but you’ll rarely see the aforementioned cities in the same sentence. This past weekend, on the other hand, designers, technologists, and community members at three separate events taking place simultaneously teamed up to “hack” on Hurricane Resilience and Response projects. The following is a brief recap of what took place at General Provision, and you can find a full regional recap here.
In Fort Lauderdale, a timeline was used to come to a shared definition of the key priorities for storm preparation and post-storm follow up. Many conversations circled around procuring supplies and materials, as well as keeping informed of news updates and road closures. Connectivity and integrity of data also posed unique challenges which, as many agreed, would not be solved overnight. For many, outlining the process together allows for consensus to form and inspiration to take hold.
A passionate team of developers lead by Kyle Pierce created OurSight, which leverages Foursquare’s API and Google’s Firebase to serve as a platform for resource availability tracking with SMS updates. “What if we could crowdsource a number of resources a specific location has?” Kyle explains on his blog, “People who are at a single location can let others know ‘this Publix has a lot of water’ or ‘this Home Depot is out of plywood’.” OurSight’s code is available on GitHub, contribute!
This year’s National Day of Civic Hacking was marked by devastating storms and divisive politics, but if this past #HackforChange event has shown us anything, it’s that given that right information, timeline, and support, talented members of our community are not only ready to step up and collaborate to solve problems, but they very well may be the most important experimental force we have in our toolkit. If cities are now the new “laboratories of democracy,” then citizen experimenters and civic hackers are the new “founding fathers and mothers.”
Written by: Rob Davis | @robdotd
