An Exciting Proposal

We'll be growing! The Café is outgrowing it's Board Room, our microbusiness and self-employment classes are ramping up, and we know we could be doing so much more to help people in Pima County find work and start businesses.

The Library is seeking funding for a full-service entrepreneurship and job help center downtown at Main Library. We envision it will be a place where anyone can come get help, whether they're starting over, or a startup. We are planning rich resources and a variety of programming so that jobseekers and the business-curious could visit over several days and find something new every time.

Functionally, we expect this space will have a teaching lab, breakout rooms, and a meeting area perfect for the Catalyst Cafés.

What will it be like? We don't know yet, but we are looking at several existing library entrepreneurship centers in Arizona and around the country, as well as facilities for coworking.

Eureka Loft, Scottsdale Public Library

Here are some examples of what other libraries are doing:
Eureka Loft, Scottsdale Public Library   
ThinkSpot, Mesa Public Library
Digital Commons, Washington DC Public Library   
The CoWorking Space at Richland Library, Columbia, SC
Business Science and Industry Department, Philadelphia Free Library      
Small Business Center, San Francisco Public Library

And here are some coworking spaces we're looking at:
WeWork, NYC
Entrepreneur Works, Philadelphia, PA

Dogpatch Labs, Cambridge, MA
Entrepreneurs Roundtable Accelerator, NYC   
GreenSpaces, NYC
The Yard, NYC
Vuka, Austin, TX

I want to make this planning process as open as possible, so watch this space for more news. --Lisa

"Startup.gov: Reworking Government Through Technical Innovation" at SxSWi 2011

Session main page: http://schedule.sxsw.com/events/event_IAP7534

Presented by Jennifer Caldwell

The open government movement was well-represented, with local government officials from around the country and around the world. I was very heartened to see a lot of passionate bureaucrats (an oxymoron, right?) who wanted to make the government more accessible to the people it governs.

What did they mean by open government? Ideas were far-ranging, but many centered on the notion of using technology to bring the people back into government. Making more data generally available is one part of this: having government information be easily searchable seemed to be what people wanted most. Ways to do this include:

• building better government websites – right now government is exceptionally poor at disseminating information online
• making it so government databases can talk to one another better, including unifying local/regional/state/federal in a more cohesive way
• allowing government databases to interact more with private databases (lots of concerns about privacy here, and justifiably so)
• increasing the technological culture of government

More about this last point: many government agencies do not have a culture of being techie, being savvy, being comfortable with technology. Tim O’Reilly is pushing Code for America (http://codeforamerica.org/), modeled on Teach for America, wherein tech professionals take time to work with government agencies to a) help government reach its goals of connecting with the people, b) seeding a tech culture within these agencies, and c) help complete concrete projects with both short-term and long-term goals.

Another concern many government officials had was that they don’t have any model for working openly and enthusiastically with the public. There was a lot of wishing they knew how to connect with people, to listen to people, and to respond to people. Something that seemed obvious to me was that they do have a model: the library: the library exists just to provide information and service. I think the library is an ideal model for (other) government agencies to use to improve their customer service. Interestingly, when I brought this up, while everyone enthusiastically supported the library, it was clear they thought of the library as a place to drop off flyers and maybe hold town halls, and NOT as a model for public service. What this tells me is that while the library has a lot to teach, it also has a lot to learn about marketing itself, even to potential (and natural) allies and partners.

"Innovating & Developing with Libraries, Archives & Museums" at SxSWi 2011

"Innovating & Developing with Libraries, Archives & Museums"
Main event page: http://schedule.sxsw.com/events/event_IAP6396 (with audio)

• Open Library
• Lookback Apps
• Philly History
• Post about their augmented reality project
• Texas State History Archive
• Azavea

 The part of this panel that gave me goosebumps was Deborah Boyer's rapid-fire tour of what happens when museums, libraries and archives open their collections up and go beyond digitization to mashups and augmented reality through the use of open APIs.

I love what she said:

• Make your archive as open as possible
• Use the tools you already have (like google maps)
• Form partnerships with local coder groups and have "hackathons" to connect APIs

Here are her slides:

Innovating & Developing with Libraries, Archives, and Museums

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