By Joe Arney

Like many Boulder County residents, Nathan Schneider found himself glued to Twitter in late December 2021 as the Marshall Fire raced through Superior and Louisville. 

But was a social media platform really the best way to warn people of the danger and guide them to appropriate resources?

“I kept asking myself, could we have done this in a way that was more appropriate to this challenge, and more under local control?” said Schneider, an assistant professor of media studies at the College of Media, Communication and Information and founder of its Media Economies Design Lab. “Was the best solution really governments communicating on an advertising platform that’s been so notorious for the spread of misinformation and confusion?”

It’s a question he hopes to further explore next month at the Conference on Local Tech Ecologies, a gathering of thought leaders and nearby tech practitioners at the CU Boulder campus. It’s an event Schneider developed in collaboration with students in the Media Economies Design Lab and through financial support from Colorado ReWild.

The conference will feature discussions and insights into how to create robust local ecologies around technology, to encourage stronger community development. Importantly, the event is not is about Boulder’s tech scene—the giants like Google and IBM—but the entrepreneurial ecology that’s responsible for innovations like Nosh, the restaurant-owned food delivery service app, or the Magnolia Road Internet Cooperative, in Nederland.

“We have plenty of cases of entrepreneurs that are about building really appropriate, community-facing technology, as opposed to seeking global scale,” Schneider said. 

Distinguished speaker lineup

Nearly a dozen speakers representing industry and academic thought leadership are slated to appear at the event. Among them are Becks Boone and Jamie Anderson, of Boulder-based startup Rootable; Michael Perhats, co-founder of Nosh Delivery; Caroline Savery, a business researcher and consultant to entrepreneurs; and Josh Ritzer, founder and CEO of Nigh Technologies, in Boulder. Keynotes will include , director of the Initiative for Public Infrastructure at the University of Massachusetts, and , an assistant professor at Virginia Tech who studies science, technology and society.

The idea for the conference comes from Schneider’s extensive research into governance and the online economy. He’s worked with startups aiming to change how users interact online, and has studied different ways of talking about technology that change our relationship to it and relationship to communities. 

The conference, he said, is being designed to connect players in the tech community to one another—“to help them see they’re part of a movement, not just their own projects”—and build interest from residents and local governments to explore new tools on their own. 

“I think there is a real recognition that we need to shift power more locally in the platform economy,” Schneider said. “And I want to just showcase some of the different ways of doing that.”

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What happens when a startup is no longer just starting up?

If you go:

• What: Exit to Community webinars
• When: 
  • Thursday, Aug. 27, at 10 a.m. (MDT): Industry-Wide Accountability
  • Monday, Aug. 31, at 10 a.m. (MDT): Meet the Zine
• Where: Virtual presentation through Crowdcast
• Who:Events are open to the public by registering at Crowdcast for and .

The answer, known to insiders as the “exit,” is a critical part in any company’s lifecycle, says Assistant Professor of Media Studies Nathan Schneider. 

“For some people, the idea of ‘exit’ in this sense might seem a bit foreign. But for anyone who has worked in or around startups, the exit is a really big deal,” says Schneider, who is also the director of the Media Economies Design Lab (MEDLab). “It's the whole point of the startup: When it ceases to be a startup and the company gets sold—either to a bigger company or to the public stock market.” 

Part of the College of Media, Communication and Information, MEDLab is a think tank for community ownership and governance in media organizations. One of its programs, Exit to Community, partners with interested startups to explore and develop alternative exit pathways through policy research and popular education. 

This month, Exit to Community will host two webinars focused on corporate social responsibility and exploring new alternatives to standard models of startup ownership:

• Exit to Community: Industry-Wide Accountability, to be held from 10 to 11 a.m. (MDT) on Thursday, Aug. 27, will explore how broad-based ownership is being used to create more accountable economies with featured speakers , executive director of MSI Integrity, and , senior vice president of strategic planning at the Associated Press.

• Exit to Community: Meet the Zine, to be held from 10 to 11 a.m. (MDT) on Monday, Aug. 31, will explore what a new option for startups might look like and how companies can get started. The organizers will also announce instructions for people to order free copies of the E2C Zine, Exit to Community: A Community Primer, available in print and online. The publication was created as a collaboration between MEDLab and , a women and people of color-led network of startup founders. Its layout and design was done by Media and Public Engagement master’s student Cassandra Dana. 

Exit to Community connects founders, investors, workers, users, activists and friends in order to make stakeholder alignment a reality, as opposed to the traditional startup ecosystem that relies on a small subset of highly wealthy people. It is designed to enable people who use and love the startups to become stewards, Schneider says. 

“We don't claim to have all the answers, but we have a nice family of startups that are trying to do this, and we have some helpful tools on hand that can help make it possible,” he says.  “We hope that, with time, E2C will be a much more available option for founders to consider when they're deciding what kinds of startups they want to build, and how.”

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