A block party that started in a Seaport parking garage only five years ago is now a marquee tech event housed at City Hall Plaza. Boston TechJam grew from the garage gathering into a platform for organizations to collaborate with 7,000+ tech enthusiasts.
Boston TechJam which began in 2012, is back for the fifth year in a row to inspire the innovation community. It will be held on June 15 at City Hall Plaza, from 4 p.m. to 9.
Christine Nolan, the co-founder of Boston TechJam, laughed at the thought that the first "Boston TechJam" was now probably the site of a new building in Seaport. The growth of the festival, she mentioned, has inspired her to believe that her efforts, alongside her co-founder Mark Lorion, have finally come to full scale.
"Now we can open up [TechJam] as a platform, and people can use it as a way to showcase how they support Boston as a tech center," she told me.
Here’s what to expect: the “block party” will feature live music, a food truck alley (aka I’m sold), and tech-based art. There will about 7,000 people, 100 exhibitors, and unlimited access to drinking, networking and partying.
There will be a couple new additions to the event this year. One, we are proud to announce that we will be partnering with TechJam and be taking the lead on the Content Booth, giving some great coverage on emerging trends and leading minds. Another new addition to the party will be David Delmar, the founder of Resilient Coders, who will be running a campaign at the event to showcase why diversity is better for business.
I caught up with David to hear his hopes for the campaign and TechJam. "We want to change the way we talk about diversity in tech, towards tangible, quantifiable business impact. The idea is to follow in the footsteps of what I see as the narrative arc of the ecological sustainability movement: The nineties and early 2000s were the age of Al Gore, and the messaging was guilt-based. It didn't work," he told me. "With the development of the sharing economy (Zipcar, Airbnb, Uber), ecological sustainability became a happy passenger in a transition really driven by economic incentive." He added: "We are, right now, on the brink of a similar inflection point in the battle for equitable access to the tech economy."
"Everyone always talked about Silicon Valley being the best place to start a business," said Christine, when I asked her about the inspiration behind TechJam. "We need to come together and just showcase that we’re a different type of place to grow a business. We're very collaborative we're open to helping each other. We're trying to get Boston to break out of its shell a little bit."
You can register for Boston TechJam here. June 15 at City Hall Plaza.
Photo Credit to David Polcaro, East Coast Catalyst.
