Montreal Tech Watch

Note: Thanks to Jevon McDonald for the inspiration for the title. We are indeed working towards a MontrealTechWatch 2.0, although the website will have a permanent “beta” status.

As posted earlier, I’ve taken a few steps back to consider what MontrealTechWatch means on the long-term. We’ve done an open meeting at Laika too last wednesday, many showed up, and there were lots of suggestions. Thanks to everyone who commented or went to the meetup!

I’ve found out that this was in fact related to the essence of “blogging” in general, and its viability. MTW is dedicated to a small (albeit very active) community, and its success relies on reporting about latest news and on relevant insights on what those news means, beyond simple facts reporting.

And that’s where the problem is. “Relevant insight” means you have to be an active actor of the industry, someone who innovates/designs/codes/markets products and then have the necessary background to give those insights. Which means blogging has to be restriced to a few hours, and can never be a full-time occupation.

I am sure this is a balance problem that many bloggers stumbles into, at a specific point of their lifespan.

My position on this is that I still want to contribute actively on MTW, but make no mistake, I will continue to design/develop/work on new innovative projects, and that’s not negotiable.

And my vision for MontrealTechWatch is a beacon of light, for technology and innovation, where entrepreneurs/hackers/students get inspiration and aspire to work on great projects.

Can the two visions/positions be compatible? Although I have no final answer, I’d like to think (for the moment) that it’s possible to do so.

A solution that rose during the last meeting was getting more actors of the “community” to contribute to the blog. See this for instance:

In this chart, there would someone taking care of developing MTW and all sorts of business-related/administrative stuff like getting partners, such as entrepreneurship centres or technology clusters, be it in Montreal or outside. This is not necessarily me, and I’m thinking about meeting a couple of persons here in Montreal who would rise to the challenge.

Then, there would be an core team of 3 to 6 persons, who contribute weekly/daily to MontrealTechwatch. Patrick Tanguay wrote about having clusters, and that what we’re going to have:
- a section about entrepreneurship/startups
- a section about technology events (democamps, blitzweekend, breakfasts, etc.)
- a section about mobile technology (mobile platforms, telecommunications, mobile computing etc.)
- a section about video games
- a section about hacking + open source, which would be dedicated to the coder folks
- a jobs section
- and ideally, also a guide section, where posts like “Web entrepreneurship for students” or any other resource would be published.
If you would like to be part of this “elite”/official team and if the vision of MTW appeals to you, shout an email at news@montrealtechwatch.com or tweet a direct message at @mtw

Ideally, there should also be at least one person who would write in French, although as I wrote earlier, it’s difficult to do so in technology.

Around the core team, every other member of the community that MTW is geared to will also be invited to contribute, whether they post specific articles on a solution they worked on, or report news that might have been overlooked by the core team.

Next, there are the active readers, people who subscribe or comment on articles.

Now, here are the next steps that will be worked on, in no particular order:

• getting UI improvements done on MTW to allow more interactivity and more user-generated content
• finding the project leader / executive person for MTW, – work with other organizations like Alliance Numeriq, TechnoMontreal, universities and other partners
• write and publish a chart / a “declaration” to clarify the vision and the objective behind MTW,
• moving the MTW to a dedicated server, and also get an official status for MTW and all of its activities
• work out the workflow for the groups/teams as described earlier and publish this.

Note: if a company want to be an official sponsor (such as sponsoring development, or sponsoring gear or any other activity), shout an email at news@montrealtechwatch

We are also launching startupdrinks next week, either wednesday or friday late afternon (stay tuned for the final date/hour). The goal is to gather everyone interested in startups to get over a drink at a bar. No schedule, simple, free, an open source event, I will talk about MTW, but you are free to talk about anything you want to whoever you want.

I hope this will give you a better understanding on the future of MTW. I know there are some things that should still be worked on, but as one says, it’s about the journey, not about the destination. So here’s hoping you will enjoy the ride…

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