What is the future of NYC Technology companies?  Are we here to service the old gatekeepers?  Or are we going to build new companies that empower people to do great things?  Scott Heiferman put that question to an audience of 700 tonight in an FIT auditorium.  A number of do-gooders (Scott's label) proceded to challenge us technologists to do more than just produce another shopping app.  It's been awhile since I attended a NY Tech Meetup and I definitely need to make myself a regular.  

Majora Carter wants city planning tools that better show the value to citizens lives of green spaces.   She was particularly harsh on Sports Teams and public funding of stadiums.  It added a little perspective.  Clay Shirky left me thinking about why their is value in evaluating the profiles and dataset of friends of my friends.  I've alway been skeptical of Social Networks broadening your scope to larger connections as being self serving.  He left me wondering if I'm missing an important component of how my online neighborhoods can have value to me.  Clay repeated referenced a  study by Christakis and Fowler about influences in your larger circles.

Tony Bacigalupo (New Work City) predicted that the ways we work, and where we work will continue to evolve away from cubicles.  Look for Tony starting an impromptu BarCamp in a laundromat near you.  Ben Berkowitz showed new tools in ClickSeeFix to allow municipalities to customize Mobile Apps.  Jacqueline Novogratz showed how basic infrastructure changes lives.  

Congratulations to Andrew Rasiej, now chairman of the board for the NY Tech Meetup.  His anecdote of how NYC became the great city it is because of great infrastructure decisions (particularly clean fresh water) left me thinking about how important it is RIGHT NOW to wrench our public data out of the hands of the current gatekeepers. Andrew also criticized our local officials for not being transparent. Representatives from the MTA had to follow him with a feeble attempt to show how they were changing and attempting to embrace the mashup community.  

Rachel Sterne from GroundReport exposed a number of issues that need to be solved to make citizen journalism effective.   

1)  Writers get little to no revenue.  Technology can help them to produce more, higher quality content.

2)  Vetting Process has to evolve, I think reputation systems can help.

3)  Local news is decentralized and hard to find.  Better searching and sorting algorithms are needed.

4)  Advertorial content is everywhere.  The firehose has to be easier to filter.

5) .. Flash Headlines, Contrived Controversy ..  hmm -- not sure about this one.

The meeting on a whole was uplifting, to see people going against the cynicism and trying to make a difference does make you question what your contribution can be.  My takeaway is that Crowd Fusion has to focus on the ways that our platform empowers people to do more with less time and financial resources.  Specifically helping answer Rachel's issues (or at least 4 of them).