Finding life beyond tech: Meeting Megan Smith Chief Technology Officer of the United States of America

Saturday, May 2, 2015

Meeting Megan Smith Chief Technology Officer of the United States of America - May 1, 2015 at the Foundry Buffalo NY

An opportunity of a lifetime

As of Thursday April 30 at noon, my Friday May 1, was going to be a normal work day until I got an email from Matt Lehner of Buffalo Lab and he asked if I would like to participate in a meetup with the CTO of the United States! I was like what?!? OK so I had to get some coverage of my work day but once that was done it was on! First off let me introduce you to Megan J. Smith - Chief Technology Officer of the United States of America.

Click on her Pic to see her bio on the Office of Science and Technology Page on the White House website. She is the first female to hold this post and only the 3rd person ever! She also was a VP at Google for 9 years and and is from Buffalo. She was a graduate of City Honor's High School!

So first of all Katie Campos Executive Director for Teach for America was contacted by the office of the USCTO sometime late Wednesday and thought the Buffalo Lab inside the Foundry would be a great place to have the meetup. Well that set the wheels in motion, the Buffalo Lab people started to reach out with the plan of having 20-30 people come out and meet with Megan. I was asked to work with the organizers and away we worked to invite the Tech's of WNY and hoped we could get 20-30. Well when it came time for the event at 3:00 p.m. on Friday, we had over 40 people at the Foundry. I got there around 2:00 and helped setup chairs and talk with Megan McNally the Executive Director of the Foundry and Scott Vader one of the leaders of the Buffalo Lab about what should be said at the opening and then people started to show up and we were ready!

What I thought was the coolest thing about Megan is, she just walked in and started meeting people, here she is meeting Jon Spitz of 43North.

Megan met Karl Newell the winner of the #ATTWNY Civic App Challenge!

The seating was set to a circle by Scott Vader which was very open and made for the conversation to flow to anyone who wanted to speak.

Megan McNally opened it all and introduced us to Megan Smith.

This picture below shows you how cool our @USCTO is!

Scott and his son Zachary spoke about innovation and creating a company and got the conversation started.

Of course I take a lot of pictures but this was a great shot of Megan and I. Kevin Hayes thought it would be cool for me to give her a puck from Dave Sheffield's company called Buffalo Bottlecraft.

Here she is talking with the creators of HeadsUp Display, Clark Dever is demoing the product!

She also got a T-Shirt from the Foundry!

Here are the folks that run the Buffalo Lab, the coolest place to learn about Technology. I cannot thank Scott Vader, Matt Lehner and Annette Wong for always including me in these great events!

THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU!!!!!!

Thimble is a new company created by Oscar Pedroso that is a Maker project in a box! I love this idea and it could be used to inspire children of all ages to create and make things!