Civic Tech Events This September

| Matt Stempeck

NY September

Greetings everyone! We hope you enjoyed your summer holidays. The kids are going back to school and we’re back with another month of civic tech events here in NYC. So come see what’s happening in the space, find a new partner, or just learn a little something at one of these exciting events coming this September:

 

September 8 — Gender Avenger Reception with Senator Liz Krueger at Civic Hall: Join Senator Liz Krueger and Gender Avenger Founder Gina Glantz for an evening dedicated to ensuring women are always represented in the public dialog.

September 8 — Composing Music for Video Games: Learn the basics of the compositional process for video game music, from meetings with the creative directors to mixing the end product.

September 9 — Read My Thoughts: How to Use Mind-Mapping Tool the Brain to Get Smarter at Civic Hall: For the last 17 years, Jerry Michalski has been taking notes on things worth remembering and putting them into an app called The Brain. Join Jerry as he shares the process he uses to keep adding to his brain, and offer tips on how you can use mind-mapping tools to better organize your thoughts and keep track of what is important to you.

September 9 — September 2015 NY Tech Meetup and Afterparty at NYU Skirball Center: Join fellow technologists for an evening of live demos from companies developing great technology in New York.

September 10 — Extraordinary Entrepreneurs, Unlikely Places at Civic Hall: Join New America NYC for a conversation with Elmira Bayrasli to discuss the rise of global entrepreneurship, how Silicon Valley has become universal, and how innovation in shifting to the other side of the world.

September 10 — Getting Started with VR: Oculus + Unity: You’ve heard about the Oculus Rift – But did you know that with pretty basic Unity knowledge you can create an out-of-the box virtual reality experience? In this hands-on class, we’ll show you how to get started.

September 10 — Coindesk Consensus Conference: Consensus 2015 is CoinDesk’s inaugural summit on digital currencies and blockchain tech. Digital currencies and blockchain technology cut across multiple and diverse sectors, with the potential to impact everyone from Wall Street to the world’s unbanked. CoinDesk will convene experts and leaders across these sectors to debate real-world problems and find the solutions that cutting-edge digital currencies and blockchain tech might offer.

September 10 — Covalent Connect at LMHQ: Meet, join, and be inspired by people at Covalent Connect, the first step on your journey to achieving amazing social impact. This isn’t your typical pitch event. No powerpoints. No jargon. Just real talk to get us to real action.

September 12 — C# Coding Bootcamp (Full Day Workshop): Get a hands-on tutorial on game architecture and problem solving with C# in Unity! Sam Eng will walk you through practical implementation problems that come with developing a game and its architecture, culminating in a final tiny, code-based game at the end of the workshop.

September 14 — From Rio to NYC: Can Eyewitness Video End Impunity For Police Brutality? At Civic Hall: Join the WITNESS Media Lab as they bring together leaders from the U.S. and Brazil to explore whether video is the best hope for accountability and truth for communities and victims most affected by police abuse.

September 15 — Tech & Government Featuring NY Attorney General Eric Schneiderman at Civic Hall: Join Attorney General Eric T. Schneiderman as he lays out his vision for ensuring that New York’s economy serves the interests of tech entrepreneurs, workers, and consumers.

September 15 — Project Management for Game Developers: Game development is tricky! Schedules slip, deadlines fly by, that small feature you added ballooned up into a huge resource hog. Team members aren’t exactly sure what to do and spin their wheels, and the resources (including time and money) that you’d planned for the whole game were used up in the first half.

While there aren’t any magic bullets to make game development completely smooth, there are ways to make sure that the game is well-planned and well-considered. During this workshop, we’ll look at scheduling, task examination, planning and many other tools to help your game projects run as smoothly as possible. We’ll start by examining the core elements of project management as they relate to games, and work through some exercises to put this knowledge into context!

September 16 — BetaNYC Civic Hacknight at Civic Hall: What is a civic hacknight? This is a weekly project night is for technologists, designers, developers, data scientists, map makers, and activists who are working on “civic technology” projects. Consider this to be a study hall or office hours to improve you and the city.

September 17 — Voice Acting for Games: Good voice acting can make a good game great, and bad voice acting can make a decent game terrible—but both those making games AND those acting in them need to know what to do (and what NOT to do!) to create the best game possible! In this class, Melanie will lead you through the video game voiceover production process, where you will experience first-hand the process of finding voice actors, deciding who is right for the role, and how to get the best voice acting performance possible.

September 23 — Civic Hacknight in Brooklyn with NYU GovLab: Another night with BetaNYC hacking for the city. This time the festivities will be out at the NYU GovLab. Be sure to come be a part of this regular convening of civic minds in NYC!

September 24 — Idea to Reality: Planning Strategies for Game Development: How do you approach game development? How do you turn your ideas into actual games? How do you get an idea in the first place? How do you stay motivated enough to finish your game? This class will provide students with exercises and tools for developing realistic game design goals.

September 25 — NYC Media Lab Annual Summit: NYC Media Lab’s Annual Summit is your crash course in the best thinking, projects, and talent in digital media and communications. This is an opportunity for media executives to explore a wide range of prototype technologies, applications, and research projects from universities in NYC and beyond.

September 28 — Bloomberg Data For Good Exchange: The Data for Good Exchange is part of a long Bloomberg tradition of advocacy for using data science and human capital to solve problems at the core of society. #d4gx

September 28 — Game Writing Portfolio Workout: Interested in writing for video games? Here’s a workshop highlighting the skills needed and what types of samples are typically requested in a game writing portfolio. Be prepared to write during the workshop. Existing story ideas are welcome, but not necessary, because writing prompts during class are intended to generate leads.

Out-of-Town Shoutouts:

September 11 – 12 — Transparency Camp in DC #tcamp15: TransparencyCamp is an “unconference” for opengov, an event where, every year hundreds of people gather to share their knowledge about how to use new technologies and policies to make our government really work for the people—and to help people work smarter with our government.

September 15 — Techonomy Detroit 2015: The impact of tech on the American economy, its cities and how tech is transforming the urban ecosystem will shape the agenda for our fourth annual one-day Techonomy Detroit conference. The social and economic evolution of our cities is being impacted every day by tech-driven change in every aspect of how we live and work. Be it advances in transportation, education, healthcare or government, tech is enabling new tools to address the challenges and opportunities that will drive the business and social structures of our interconnected, urbanized future.

September 30 – October 2 — Code for America Summit: The #CfASummit is a roll-up-your-sleeves conference that brings together innovators from hundreds of governments across the U.S. along with civic-minded technologists, designers, community organizers, and entrepreneurs.

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