I'm in the Office of Civic Innovation in the City of Louisville Ky, and I'm looking to connect us for more public/private partnerships, but I have a heck of a time getting connected to Silicon Valley entities (Google etc) for civic tech initiatives. How do I facilitate these relationships better outside of blind emailing and ignored tweets?
Every company has a team of sales people who is responsible for government deals. Hard to find though.
It's not even just sales. We're trying to solve big civic problems, and build partnerships to do it, and it's like shouting into the void.
The problem may be your location for true traction. Yes every company has outreach for activities you mention, but usually plan the funding strategy years in advance and target locations for various reasons.
Well, I can't exactly relocate my city, so I'll have to find another avenue :)
It makes a great response to an interview question down the road having to be creative. :) Wish I could help, but do not have anyone in my network there.
Maybe get your state to repeal those obnoxious anti gay laws. Tech industry is pretty diverse and will clash with that stuff.
Sure, I know what you mean. Louisville is not Kentucky though, and is incredibly LGBTQ friendly. So once I pop on down to the state capital to fix that, what do you suggest?
What are you looking to accomplish? I've built entire telecom networks in large cities (San Diego, San Francisco, Miami...) Be wary of working with the larger companies, they will try and get exclusive revenue sharing deals with developers that effectively lock out customers from having a choice, even though the FCC strictly prohibits this. Are you looking to build broadband infrastructure quickly and efficiently (i.e. there's a budget)? Also to add to this, I'm still an Alphabet (Google) employee, so get in touch. ππΌ
Hello, are you still looking for leads?
I used to work for Google enterprise. It's complicated but they have business development people dedicated to Govern deals/contracts. Which team are you looking to talk to? Google for work? Maps? Fiber?
+1 nice one. OP, gov sector typically does their finances in Q3 right? So you guys have budget.
The Google Assistant team to start with, we want to get them equally represented at civic hackathons, but also Sidewalk Labs (our missions align). It's a hard sphere to break into, especially being from Kentucky (and all that entails).