Let's Talk Urban Tech: starting a new online community for #urbantech

TL;DR:

• starting a new online forum to discuss #urbantech
• join at https://urbantech-forum.cornelltech.io/

Let’s start with a little bit of history.

The proposal that Cornell and the Technion submitted for the Applied Sciences NYC competition launched in 2011 included – among many other things – the creation of 3 hubs: one for “health tech”, one for “connective media” and one for “smart technologies for the built environment”. Cornell Tech kicked-off right away with the first two. The “third hub” (as we used to affectionately call it) remained on the drawing board.

I spent the last two years working on the “third hub”, researching the space, interviewing people, etc. The term “urban tech”  is the one term that encompasses everything we have in mind while not creating any instant allergic reaction like "built environment" (too narrow) or "smart cities" (overhyped and not human-centric).

There is no agreed-upon definition for “urban tech”, so much so that my numerous attempts at creating a Wikipedia entry for it have been harshly denied :-(

Informally, we like to define #urbantech as "tech to improve urban life for communities, businesses, and the Government while respecting the environment".

During my journey, I found a lot of experts and high-quality resources who influenced the design of the hub, but also a lot of fragmentation, by geography and by discipline.

Because Urban Tech is going to play a key role in our daily lives  – with cities representing 70% of the world population by 2050, 80% of the current GDP, 70% of current energy usage and carbon emissions – and because this is a very nascent space, it is critical to have a vibrant and diverse community around it.

The Urban Tech Forum (aka Let’s Talk Urban Tech available at https://urbantech-forum.cornelltech.io/) is a modest experiment towards this goal.

Some people will argue that we don’t need yet another digital artifact. I will respectfully disagree.

• Newsletters are great, but they are one-way (top-down), not designed for conversations and their weekly or monthly schedule often misses important timely issues.
• Slack (or similar collaboration tools) force people towards “thinking one line at a time” and are not public-facing (you cannot search them using Google, Bing, etc.)
• Blogs don’t convey a true sense of community as they are someone else’s space you get invited to.

These are the early days. As of this writing, we have 85 users, mostly from the US.

The ambition for the forum is to become your daily one-stop-shop for all things #urbantech, including:

• curated content from news websites, with tagging, highlights and user commentaries
• opinion pieces
• ideas
• Q&A
• announcements for events
• job postings
• etc.

So, take a few seconds to create an account (Google, Twitter and LinkedIn social logins are available) and join the conversation at https://urbantech-forum.cornelltech.io/ .