One of the best things anyone can ever do to encourage the dissemination of ideas, collaboration, and innovation is to put all the relevant stakeholders in a room, provide some focus, and just get them talking.
A topical, relevant group discussion is a simple, but enormously effective tool when done right. It’s something we’ve been doing with nextNY for nearly four years now and I want to ramp it up significantly in 2010. We have over 2500 up and coming digital media entrepreneurs, designers, business people, investors—a great mix of up and comers that have come together to build a really inclusive and innovative community.
At the same time, I know firsthand that various big companies, schools, professional organizations, and service providers want to connect with this community and get some mindshare on a lot of these topics. I was just talking to someone last week about how a lot of big companies have great event spaces that basically go unused most of the time—and yet a lot of community groups struggle to find places to hold their events.
Therefore, I’m holding an “Event Space Drive”. I’d like to connect to as many companies willing to commit to donating event space for 50-100 people as possible. My goal is three spaces after work a month, each month for 2010. This way, if I book the dates ahead of time, I can guarantee the best speakers, the most well thought out topics and the right amount of planning and prep ahead of time.
So if you have space to donate to the NYC innovation community and you’d like to host a discussion or networking event, even if you can just give away a couple of dates, or one every other month, please get in touch with me at charlie.odonnell@gmail.com.