“Similarly, the impulse to keep to yourself what you have learned is not only shameful, it is destructive. Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you. You open your safe and find ashes.”
Annie Dillard
We’ve been around for a while, but this site has been sitting at the “hello world” state for… months. It’s time to change that, and give us a place to talk about what’s going on in Savannah, opportunities for the technologically inclined to give back, and a place to organize ourselves to cause as much good trouble as possible.
We live in… interesting times. I think The Bitter Southerner summed things up pretty well. Now is the time to get off the sidelines and help people who need help, regardless of our politics. This election was a wakeup call that a lot of people are hurting, and the fallout will likely hurt a lot more. So, what do we do? I’m not exactly sure yet, but it has to be more than nothing. It has to be more than we did before.
We need to not only work on our businesses, but help each other as much as we can. We need to help people normally left out of the tech world. I don’t know exactly what that looks like yet, but I have some ideas:
- Continue doing RailsBridge, but start finding local organizations that will host us so we can get it out to new audiences. Those groups could be anything from clubs, churches, libraries, non-profits – it doesn’t matter to me. As long as we can get a space that works (wi-fi) and lunch provided, we’ll bring the volunteers and curriculum.
- Take our expertise and share it with other small businesses. We can work with the various Chambers of Commerce (Urban, Latino, German, Small Business, etc) to provide speakers, training, etc to their member companies.
- Work with local schools to showcase careers in technology.
- Continually look for new ways to help. This is intentionally broad. We all need to look for opportunities to help out, share them, talk them over, and get other people involved.
Some of these are already in progress. Some of them have been tried and just kind of fizzled out. But, it’s time for Savannah’s tech community to get more involved in the community and give back. We live in an amazing place, with a ton of great non-profits already doing great work. We need to join the work in progress and help where we can. We can provide creativity, design, problem solving and all the other skills we’ve built that we take for granted, and help solve real problems that affect real people right here where we live.
Let’s get started, y’all.
Kevin Lawver, 11/15/2016
