April 30, 2015
Tech-Focused Ideas Drive Mario Armstrong’s #More4Bmore Initiative to Help Baltimore
Armstrong hopes this kickoff will get Baltimoreans to come together to begin repairing the landscape–physical and emotional–of his beloved city, and says the hashtag was the call to action that could be aggregated and tracked in addition to collecting ideas, and eventually lead to more tangible projects. He also says he wanted the tech scene to be involved with non-techies to come up with actionable solutions.
“We wanted to build tech with the community, not for the community,†he says. “With lots of civic tech, (you get), ‘We’re the technologists, we identify problem, we’ll attack it.’ It’s too top-down and in a tech world, it should be bottom-up and crowd-sourced. Non-techies add growth and impact to discussions.â€
But he shrugged off a hackathon (“Somebody should, (but) I don’t want to do a hackathonâ€) in favor of reaching out to Kimberly Bryant of Black Girls Code.
“We have to get BGC in Baltimore City. Regardless of this protest that’s taken place, it’s just a powerful program that is successful, has measurement, has the ability to impact young black girls in an incredibly positive way,†he says. “(It) exposes young girls who normally wouldn’t be exposed to technology from a creation standpoint and not a consumption standpoint.†Armstrong hopes to get the chapter active by summer and notes that Black Boys Code will debut in 2016.
He also hopes to introduce an after-school program with a digital curriculum to expose more Baltimore youth to technology. And for now, #More4Bmore videos are popping up on Instagram and Armstrong is toying with the idea of Periscope Parties to encourage residents to show Baltimore in a positive light through community interviews.
“I think that people are taking ownership over the hashtag #More4Bmore is a great thing to see, because it’s not about Mario Armstrong–I have no agenda other than wanting to figure out ways to help this community grow,†he says.
Indeed, Armstrong sees the long-term effects of this campaign leading from the screen to in-person action, which he hopes will also extend to entrepreneurship.
“One of the things that I see from the responses were getting is the ability to empower people to push their ideas forward and find sustainable ways to monetize those ideas,†he says. “If we could help more people–not everybody can be an entrepreneur and not everybody wants to be–but certainly a lot of people (now) don’t even believe that they can be.â€
That’s something he hopes the hashtag campaign will inspire. Armstrong says More4Bmore.com will be updated in a few days to help move those eager to help into some tangible next steps.