Last month, Jeff and I were honored to speak at Infotec09, a two-day IT conference held at Qwest Center Omaha.

Our talk, "Building Omaha's Creative Class with Silicon Prairie News," is embedded below, and preceding it is a write-up from Tim Erickson of the AIM Institute, which was originally posted at blog.infotec.org. Thanks Tim!

Also, a big congrats is due to the AIM Institute for a successful event. It was their first year in Infotec's 35-year history of managing the conference.

Building Omaha's Creative Class through Silicon Prairie News

By Tim Erickson

Track: IT For Community Development

Presenters: Jeff Slobotski, co-founder of Silicon Prairie News, helps organize events to connect various groups of people. Dusty Davidson is the co-founder of Silicon Prairie News and a co-founder of BrightMix, a web application development and internet company located in Omaha.

Download Presentation Slides (PDF)

Essence of track session:

Interesting people doing interesting things, without knowing about each other. Building connections, getting people together. They break down silos. Bringing divergent entities together. Why?

It's a two-pronged approach, bringing people into Omaha and providing services outside of the region. They do video interviews, social media groups and connections, and hold events. Drew energy from Sarah Lacey and her energy. She was from the Silicon Valley and was intrigued by Omaha's innovative spirit.

They hold events to get people together. Barcamp was one of these events. They hold Tweet-up's which allow for face-to-face with others in the community. Invest Nebraska Pitch Session - Pitch ideas and offered a prize for the best idea.

But the next level is to take it to the next level . . . and assist in building the community. Various events are planned including Big Omaha, bigomaha.com. They believe that we can create an incubator that has a cool vibe and not a traditional facility. It's a creative incubator. They are trying to create accelerated serendipity. Surround Yourself with Awesome. But it must also produce results.

It's time to break down the silos and get people together.

We need to work with city leaders and other entrepreneurs to build infrastructure. They also help launch new businesses, highlight existing companies to showcase cool things.