Each month the largest Meetup event in the world takes place in New York City, where local innovators show off their latest work at the NY Tech Meetup. Over 800 people come each month, and hundreds more now watch live at simulcast events.
Though there were some excellent demos last night (CartoDB and Scroll Kit stood out) but this month the most important presentation was a speech by Andrew Rasiej, Chairman of the NY Tech Meetup and founder of the Personal Democracy Forum, as well as a longtime entrepreneur and investor in the local tech community.
Rasiej (pronounced ra-shay) first recounted the community protest on January 18, when the NYTM community organized a protest of over 2,000 people at the offices of Senators Gillibrand and Schumer to put a stop to the highly controversial SOPA/PIPA legislation. As he recalled, the legislation “would have significantly dampened the growth of and investment in tech startups here and elsewhere. More dangerously, the bill they were supporting would have irreparably damaged the Internet’s ability to act as a open conduit for free speech and their advocates around the world.”
The New York Tech protest of this legislation finally introduced the NYC startup community to political organizations as more than just a constituency, but as a political force to be reckoned with. In the wake of that moment, the tech world has been uplifted and galvanized. Last night Andrew Rasiej called on the community to maintain that sense of engagement, while warning that “it is much easier to say no to something than it is to build something.”
With that in mind, Rasiej’s closing words first sounded like the beginning of a political campaign, but they were more of a call to engage collectively and to draft new leaders:
“Imagine a future New York City where every public school student has low cost 24 hour access to all the world’s learning resources and students who graduate from our schools flow seamlessly into the New York workforce…
“Imagine a future New York City where all of its public data is available online for free…
“Imagine a future New York City where in addition to all of its cultural riches we add a robust “culture of code”…
“Imagine a future New York where our Senators, our councilmen, and even our future Mayor are all members of the NY Tech Meetup…
The New York City startup community is one of the largest and most politically engaged small business communities in the world. The NY Tech Meetup alone has over 20,000 members, and the city is teaming with thousands more equally innovative thinkers and financiers — many eager for new candidates to represent them. So you can expect to see many of those candidates jumping into races in over the next six years. And none of us should be surprised if Andrew Rasiej is one of them.
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