48 Hour Launch: Internet of Things Edition

Email to Convenings Team:

Last Friday, Katie and I met with our partners and dear friends at The Company Lab (Co.Lab), Chattanooga's non-profit business accelerator org. For background, Co.Lab has been very good to Mozilla since our earliest days in Chattanooga, inviting us to partner on numerous events and bringing us into important conversations about gig + entrepreneurship in the community. For example, when we launched the Gigabit Community Fund in 2014, they put an educational technology spin on their "48 Hour Launch" weekend event to try to help us drum up project ideas. Our most successful project to date - Adagio - came out of this event, which is essentially a startup incubator program compressed into 48 hours with a pitch competition at the end. Teams apply to participate in 48 Hour Launch, and selected teams receive pitch support, dev and design help, mentoring, legal and financial advise, and other help over the course of two days to help begin to turn their startup dreams into reality. The culminating pitch competition on Sunday evening usually draws several hundred Chattanoogans and is one of my favorite events of the year.

At our Friday meeting, Co.Lab's events director suggested that perhaps we could put a Connect Devices/IoT spin on this year's 48 Hour Launch ("48HL"). Conveniently, they're looking at an August date, just as we had been envisioning for our IoT+Gigabit event! I think this is a WONDERFUL opportunity to put a Mozilla spin and flavor on an already incredibly successful Chattanooga event that we can definitely learn a lot from.

Here's what I imagine:

Working with Co.Lab, select an August date for Mozilla + Co.Lab 48HL: IoT Edition (or 48HL: Connected Classroom? or 48HL: IoT? or 48HL: The Future Classroom? Let's brainstorm. I'm not exactly sure how to define the learning angle. I don't want it to be too limiting because as we know, some technologies can have an education application even if its inventors did not originally imagine it as a learning tool!)
Hold a series of ideation meetups or Hangouts in order to recruit participating teams from across Mozilla's networks, focusing on KC + CHA + and our Gigabit Community Fund Expansion City #3 (TBD). These would be teams with a business idea for IoT*Learning innovations that could benefit from testing or piloting on Chattanooga's next-generation network.
Select teams in collaboration with Co.Lab. There is (some) money budgeted in NSF budget to support travel to CHA for participant teams and for staff.
Pair each team with a local teacher mentor and a mentor from Moz Connected Devices team or other IoT expert for the 48HL weekend
Support teams with relevant hardware to incentivize developer participation (MoCo's discussed IoT starter kits for example)
Determine appropriate "prizes" for winning pitch night team - perhaps travel to MozFest to show off project and get continued support from Moz community? In a dream world, we could also use this stage to announce some kind of awesome new IoT small grants program!

There could also be a few wraparound events. For example, I've discussed with our local school district's Superintendent for Innovation the possibility of doing an educator feedback panel or round table to inform our IoT*Gigabit work, perhaps on the Friday afternoon before 48HL would kick off. We could also use the opportunity of the large crowd gathered for 48HL to showcase Gigabit Community Fund projects as it will fall at the end of our

MozillaFoundation / gigabit

48 Hour Launch: Internet of Things Edition #2