Two things you’re guaranteed to see when you walk into one of Mobility Lab’s Transportation techies monthly meetups: “the latest hacks of transit systems and a crowd of people who seem to care a lot about each other.”
Don’t miss this great interview with founder and organizer Michael Schade on why he started the group, and how he built the community.
“We don’t webcast or stream it because the whole point of the meetup is to meet in person,” he said.
Schade is originally from Colorado, where he studied Computer Science. In 1989, he moved to D.C. for a federal job. Today he still lives in D.C., and works as a data visualization engineer at the Center for Advanced Transportation Technology in the University of Maryland.
“It wasn’t until I moved to Washington that I became fascinated by the subway system,” Schade told us during a phone call earlier this week. “D.C. is where I realized you can live inside the urban grid and not have a car at all,” he said.
It was an interest that he said propelled him to join meetups like API and GEO DC – both of which inspired the format he would later use for creating Transportation Techies in 2013. Today the format Schade uses is essentially unchanged: each meeting begins with half an hour of mingling, followed by a succession of show-and-tells, then Q&As from the audience, and then a chance to mingle again afterwards.
When Schade started it, his employer at the time, Mobility Lab, sponsored the meetings and could host 80 attendees in its Rosslyn office. In February 2016, we covered how Transportation Techies began hosting their Metro Hack Night meetings in WMATA’s downtown headquarters after the group began attracting closer to 100 people.
“The biggest change is back in the day I pretty much knew everyone in the room. And now I look around like who are you people?” Schade joked to us.
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