BURLINGTON — Sharing spaces, solutions and knowledge is a key theme in this year’s Vermont Tech Jam.
The seventh annual Tech Jam, a technology sector expo in Burlington’s Memorial Auditorium featuring more than 60 businesses, is showcasing products and services designed to share information and encourage collaboration.
There was plenty of innovation and new technology, but there was also a movement by nonprofits to present ideas and tools designed to move the tech industry forward through collaboration and shared information.
This includes setting up small, fully stocked workshops so that part-time tinkerers and professionals can experiment and build new gadgets, apps or engineering products that enable data sharing on the Web.
After kicking off the event Friday morning, Burlington Mayor Miro Weinberger said Tech Jam is an opportunity to not only show off products, but it is an open space to present ideas and collaborate with various players in the tech industry.
“This year, it’s much more about communication,” Weinberger said.
He said the Tech Jam proves that Burlington is capable of being the “next great tech city.” Earlier this week, he made a similar statement when the city announced its partnership with U.S. Ignite, a national organization that will provide the city with resources and advice to develop tech infrastructure and innovation.
During Tuesday’s news conference, Weinberger said the city should invest in “spaces” designed to incubate ideas and technological development. Several businesses at the event described just what these spaces might look like.
Denise Shekerjian is a board member for Generator, an open to the public workshop stocked with the tools for designers and builders of all kinds to come and experiment. Shekerjian said people need spaces to collaborate.
“Once upon a time, all anything people cared about was a profit,” Shekerjian said. “It’s no longer one guy in his garage, it’s now a collective activity.”
This “makerspace,” which will be arriving at the Burlington’s Memorial’s Annex on Jan. 1., is necessary to get people out of their garage and working with others on projects, she said.
Built upon the open-source model for sharing ideas, this “playpen” will attract a wide range of people, from artists to engineers, all working within the same building behind shallow, 4-foot-high dividers, she said.
Generator, a nonprofit that is modeled on a Massachusetts-based makerspace, Artisan’s Asylum, raises money through membership, fundraising, renting out spaces and teaching courses.
Chris Thompson, who serves on Generator’s board, said if all the equipment were bought new, it would cost about $180,000. This equipment, ranging from 3D printers to traditional woodshop tools, will be free for the public to use, he said.
While some organizations are designing physical spaces to foster collaboration, others are creating technologies that make it easier and faster to share large amounts of information on the Web.
Laboratory B, a Burlington-based hacker space stocked with wi-fi, workbenches and whiteboards, is creating ideas and technology that would enable Burlington residents to share information faster.
Their “Freedom Router,” a small wireless device capable of supporting gigabit-per-second (Gbps) Internet speeds while blocking hackers and viruses, is one example of a tool used to enable the sharing of open-source information that will be available to the public.
The product, which is still being developed, is designed to remove limitations and restrictions on the Internet, such as poor speed capability and government regulation and surveillance, said Justin England, vice president for Laboratory B.
England said his router will support gigabit Internet connectivity, making it easier to access stored data on the Web rather than saving it on one’s personal computer. By making it easier to store and access data on the Internet, people will be more apt to share information, he said.
A gigabit is a unit of speed with which information travels across the Web, said Nicholas Martin, senior account executive of commercial sales at Burlington Telecom, the city-owned telecommunications provider. A gigabit is equal to 1,000 megabits (Mb).
He said the city has had the infrastructure to set up gigabit technology ever since it installed fiber optic cables 10 years ago, but the technology, such as routers and computers owned by many residents, would not support the increased speed.
Burlington Telecom is currently in a lawsuit with CitiCapital, a New York-based creditor that is demanding repayment for the citywide fiber optic network. One of their claims requests that the city uninstall and return their fiber optic infrastructure.
However, Martin said it is unlikely that the city will have to return the fiber optic cable to CitiCapital.
“It would cost more money to dig the fiber up than its actually worth, one hundred times over,” he said.
Vermont Tech Jam is free and concludes Saturday.
