Can Dayton get its geek on?

Back in January 2007 (yeah, I’m a bit behind on my reading) Wired magazine had a spread on “Best Geek Cities.”

Pittsburgh made it- nothing in Ohio did. We talk about building “Tech town” for a decade- but are totally missing the factors that make Geeks want to invest their social capital in our city. Here are the factors that Wired used:

Wired 15.01: 10 Top Tech Towns

Wired assessed the geek cred of more than 30 major US cities by crunching the following numbers:

  • Proximity to top-ranked engineering schools
  • Tech jobs, per capita, on Dice
  • Personal ads, per capita, on Geek 2 Geek
  • Craigslist postings per capita
  • Number of attendees at local meetings of dorkbot, a group for “people doing strange things with electricity” (hey, we have a chapter!)
  • Availability of free Wi-Fi
  • Comic book stores per capita
  • Circuit City stores per capita

So, instead of building tech town- maybe we should all join the local chapter of dorkbot, expand free Wi-Fi (and maybe think about jumping up to something faster than DSL or Cable like the rest of the industrialized world), give tax abatements to Comic shops- and start posting more on Craigslist (it’s free after all).

Sounds a lot easier than what we’ve been doing so far.

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