LOCAL

BTV Ignite aims to make city a tech hub

Elizabeth Murray
Free Press Staff Writer

Burlington's tech economy is growing as the city and surrounding towns are establishing themselves as the place to be to create a tech startup.

Mike Schirling, the new executive director for BTV Ignite, is trying to harness the energy from established players such as Dealer.com and MyWebGrocer to newcomers Designbook and Ello to grow the tech ecosystem in Vermont.

Schirling spent 25 years with the Burlington Police Department, serving as chief most recently, before retiring in June. Late last month, the city of Burlington announced Schirling's new gig.

BTV Ignite is the Burlington-based section of US Ignite, an independent nonprofit dedicated to fostering creation of the next generation of the Internet, according to BTV Ignite's website. Schirling said BTV Ignite encompasses the greater Burlington area, not just the Queen City.

William Wallace announces Burlington's selection and participation in US Ignite, a national technology program, in 2013.

BTV Ignite had formed a board and subgroups before Schirling was named executive director, Schirling said. Schirling had been part of one of the subgroups focused on public safety, Internet security and cyber security. The groups that met created a "playbook" by which BTV Ignite and the greater tech economy could grow, he said.

Schirling has spent his first weeks on the job meeting with economists, BTV Ignite partners, and tech start-up leaders to gather information to begin creating a road map for the nonprofit.

The Burlington Free Press sat down with Schirling to speak with him about his new role and the way he envisions BTV Ignite fitting into Burlington's tech scene.

Burlington Free Press: Tell me a little about what BTV Ignite is.

Mike Schirling: It is essentially a technology generator initiative. A few years ago, the National Science Foundation picked, I believe, about 40 cities, and now it's around 50 cities, to designate as "ignite" communities. They got that designation either because they had a high-speed fiber optic network or they were building a high-speed fiber optic network. The National Science Foundation is immersed in essentially building the next generation internet. The idea is you have communities that are ready to begin building things to leverage that next generation of technology, which by all accounts would be equally as transformative as the first Internet.

Every "ignite" community is a little bit different. BTV Ignite in its first two years looked at a lot of different things ranging from education to economics, and now as it takes the next steps, the goal is to build out the economy in Burlington and surrounding areas, and then hopefully throughout Vermont using technology as the vehicle for that. High-speed Internet, next-generation applications, tech-centric education, that's the nutshell.

BFP: What are the steps that BTV Ignite will take to do all the things you just mentioned, including building up the tech economy?

MS: The first thing is to get out there and talk to as many people as possible about their ideas about what's going on. It's been fascinating over the last week-and-a-half as I've just begun to scratch the surface on all of the really powerful things that are going on around the greater Burlington area in everything from education to small business development to obviously the big things happening with the Dealer.coms and the MyWebGrocers. There's just a lot of really energetic and interesting things happening.

We will also try to take some cues from the successful Ignite communities in other places. We won't emulate exactly what everyone else does, but there are really exciting things happening in other parts of the country also. It's a sharing ecosystem where the ideas and the initiatives are shared and you cross-pollinate the types of things that are going on.

BFP: How has the transition from the Burlington Police Department to leading BTV Ignite been for you?

MS: It's exciting. It's a little challenging coming from a well-established 150-year-old organization that has systems for everything and has a large staff to what is essentially a start-up with no staff. I have renewed respect for entrepreneurs and small business folks with all that they have to do on a day-to-day basis to keep things running.

BFP: What in your background as a police officer and later as chief of police do you think has prepared you for this job?

MS: The overarching thing is that public safety is about community, health, safety and vibrancy at its core. Ignite is about the same things.

But, the types of things that I think makes this an exciting new chapter are the connections. I've been here my whole life and worked in public safety for 25 years, so I have a lot of connections, and I have a fundamental understanding of the city. That said, there's a lot I don't know about what's going on in all of the corners of tech everywhere. There's so much going on, it's amazing.

My background even in law enforcement has a fairly sizable technology thread woven in there from the initial work building the Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force. I helped to build the initial forensic capacity here in Vermont. I was fortunate to work with Gary Kessler at Champlain College, and we co-founded the forensics program there, which is now the Leahy Center for Digital Investigation.

I was fortunate as chief to actually be able to get involved in software design as we tried to solve some of our technological challenges and embrace some opportunities for new technology in forming how business is done in public safety and helping to leverage that to make our employees more efficient and less frustrated with the technology they were using.

BFP: How are you hoping BTV Ignite will fit into the city's current and state's current tech economy?

MS: As a facilitating organization, basically. The hope is that you've got a number of very large key institutional players and then a huge cross-section of folks in a variety of different sizes in different areas. The goal is to act as an information sharing mechanism and make connections so that folks can leverage the high-speed bandwidth we've got, the higher-speed bandwidth that's coming, and make connections to things like the Kauffman Foundation Entrepreneurial Grant, which the city announced. There's also a tech hiring initiative that the White House is pushing out that Burlington will be part of.

We're just trying to bind all of those things together so that each of the things that are working can leverage the rest to make even more progress. For example, the city would like to be a "smart city," so having full transparency in the types of things that are going on in government and being able to deliver more robust services, whether it's through the electric department, the street department or the police department to constituents. At the same time, there's people working on things in the tech ecosystem that are working on things that if they're translated to smart cities would have great impact on those efforts.

There are folks working on hardware here that relates to the Internet of things, so making smart appliances and smart objects and once those things start to be built, we'll need people to write the applications and leverage the bandwidth to make things flow. The hope is as much of that work as possible in the Northeast happens in Burlington. We're trying to set the stage for that.

As important, there are things that probably need to be done that we don't know yet. This listening tour for the first six to eight weeks the job is probably the most important thing we're doing right now. We're trying to figure out where we can be helpful and where it's important to stay out of the way.

BFP: This is a college town. Some students are graduating with skills and specializations we've never seen before. Are the tech jobs going to be there for them?

MS: Yes, and actually the narrative I keep hearing now is the jobs are there. There aren't enough people with the right skills to jump into all of the coding jobs that are out there. Both the small firms and the larger players in the software development arena here all consistently say they can't find enough people to do the work they need.

Some of it is about ensuring from kindergarten through high school and STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) programs in junior high and high school and into post-secondary education that those programs are connected to the folks on the ground doing the work and making sure that they're putting out the product that is useful. Not to say that's not happening now, but I think there are ways to enhance those connections and really have the folks doing the work help to guide development of new educational programs.

Some of it might be training people in a trade-school model. … We need to build programs that get people ready for the economy that is coming. ... We're going to have packages delivered by drones. Are the cars going to drive themselves? Some versions of those things are going to happen, and we're going to need people to build the software and the hardware to make that all work.

BFP: Do you see a lack of interest from students in the types of jobs you describe?

MS: I don't know the answer to that yet. I do know that with younger children or even high school students, when you talk about things like STEM education or coding, to some kids that seems like a very daunting, heavy thing. Finding ways to make that fun, exciting, accessible, simple and intuitive is happening in many places. The questions are, how do you get that message out, how do you replicate those programs, and how do you replicate other Ignite communities?

Tech mentorships and apprenticeships are things that are happening informally. There are ways to make them more accessible to more people hopefully.

BFP: What are some of the current challenges BTV Ignite is facing, in addition to students coming out of college lacking the right skills?

MS: We're still painting that picture, in terms of what the challenges are. Number one, I've heard, is how we train more tech talent here and how we attract more tech talent. When you talk about economic growth, it's a big cycle. So, the more tech jobs we create, you create more support jobs that go with that, so the economy grows, which creates more job opportunities in a variety of different fields. Then, more people can come here and bring their families so their significant other or the person they're coming with has a place to work. It becomes self-generating if you reach the right point.

In terms of other challenges, some of it is branding. We need to brand the city and its assets as much as possible so folks think of Burlington as a place where coming here to do a tech job or a start-up is something they will think of. Capital and funding goes with that. It's a small area, so there is not a lot of capital availability. … Whether it's by additional branding of the city, through projects, or leveraging some of the larger institutional players, the hope is we'll be able to infuse more resources into the ecosystems.

I'm sure there are other challenges we haven't uncovered yet.

BFP: I know you're still on day seven or eight, but what progress do you see BTV Ignite doing in the next five years or 10 years?

MS: I'm going to do one year at a time. The hope is within the first six to 12 months, we've got a solid road map of projects, initiatives and connections that are made and that we're undertaking a few key projects. It really has to grow organically if it's going to grow. It's not like a start-up where there's a plan to make this a larger organization or anything of that nature. It's got to just fill the right spaces at the right times and add value to the ecosystem.

If it's doing that, then we'll continue to go down that road. But, there's no artificial overlay of what success means. We are starting to have meetings with folks about metrics and measurements, so we'll figure out what the baseline is now and how we can measure impact of not just Ignite, but of the tech ecosystem as it hopefully grows.

BFP: Do you see any projects or initiatives so far that might work in Burlington?

MS: Out of one of my very first meetings the day before my position was announced came the very first project. It is being worked on by a startup here and some Champlain College students. It is at least tentatively called "Project Space."

We figured out there isn't a place right now where people go if they have a project that they want to do, or a company goes and can look for matches. So basically, this is a project match-making site where, if you're a company or a programmer or developer or coder, you can post information about what you do, what kinds of projects you're working on now, the kinds of things you'd like to undertake in the future, and hopefully make matches with folks who are looking for work or have an idea and don't know how to execute that idea.

We're going to try to build something within the next month or so that actually begins to organize the energy.

EARLIER

Contact Elizabeth Murray at 651-4835 or emurray@freepressmedia.com. Follow her on Twitter at www.twitter.com/LizMurraySMC.