Digital Harbor Foundation is happy to announce the start of the BmorePipeline project.

Conceived as a community-driven wiki, the BmorePipeline intends to deliver the goods — information, mentorships, internships, and opportunities in tech — to students throughout Baltimore. The BmorePipeline helps students, parents, teachers, and guidance counselors understand the local tech ecosystem and helps students better understand how to enter careers in tech and innovation.

The site will detail career pathways, mentors, internships, and ultimately opportunities for young people to get tech jobs or create innovative startups. All while demonstrating the strength of community that we’ve got in Baltimore.

We have a handful of community members dedicated to bring this thing alive; and we’re going to have students researching and reaching out to folks as well — this is a resource for them, and we want to see them take part in making it. We’d like you to be a part of this.

Please read through the explanation of the project below; and then get on over to the wiki to help out.

The Need

Welding pipes together, on Esdraelon stretch – American Colony Photography Department source: Library of Congress

For the cities of the future, the most important pieces of infrastructure are not going to be physical roads, miles of underground pipes, or power plants. These things are important and part of modern life, but the truly transformational infrastructure — the thing that will distinguish one place from another and decide the “winners” and “losers” economically speaking — are pipelines built of pathways into the high-need digital workforce in a variety of tech sectors.

“When there are two tech jobs for every single unemployed person in technology, it is obvious we don’t have a jobs problem, we have an education one.”
– Andrew Coy

The problem facing our city and our country is one that will not be solved by doing the same things we have always done. We need innovative new ideas that leverage the omnipresent nature of ubiquitous information in today’s Internet age. We need schools that inspire creative problem solving instead of asking students to “solve” problems for which we already have answers. We need teachers that no longer see themselves as “disseminators of information” but as key network nodes in a wide world of possibilities. We need to break down the factory-style educational methods and build in their place apprenticeship, passion-based, real-world educational mindsets in learners of all ages.

The Pipeline

The BmorePipeline from “a maze of rusting pipes” – original photo by autowitch

This website is all about documenting Baltimore’s pipeline in an effort to assist students as they make their way in the wide world of the web.

• Pathways – opportunities (both formal and informal) to learn the hard and soft skill sets you will need to be successful in the dynamic world of the new tech workforce.
• Internships – an introduction to a potential career with real hands-on learning.
• Mentors – key individuals in the community who take the time to help new talent find its way through the maze of opportunities and pitfalls
• Jobs – paying work that makes use of all the things learned along the way.
• Organizations — both Businesses and Community groups (formal or informal) which support individuals at various stages along the way from education to career.

We also feel it is important to catalog the multitude of resources that are constantly floating around out there as well as document the history of Baltimore’s robust tech scene.