Original SA geekdom: the SAWS chilling plant, 1968Part one in an occasional series.
I was at Geekdom – the self-labeled "gym membership for geeks" sponsored by Rackspace CEO Graham Weston – in mid May for a town-hall meeting with Diego Bernal. Bernal is the District 1 Councilman who handled the Trinity-Monte Vista and Alamo Stadium fights in his first year, and is inaugurating his third with a campaign against payday and title-loan lenders. But this is the Mayor's declared Decade of Downtown, and voters just approved tens of millions in new bond dollars for his district, and for many residents he is first and foremost the face of SA's urban renaissance. Geekdom is located on the 11th floor of the Weston Centre downtown. Some 30 people were seated in the rows of chairs and a couple of people were camped on the floor. It was a pretty white crowd for San Antonio, and the men outnumbered the women almost two to one. Many of the attendees appeared to be in their 20s, but there were several 30- and at-least-40-somethings as well, and a couple of assertive high-school students.
I don’t recall if there was an agenda per se for the evening, but a theme quickly emerged: the geeks aren’t all that impressed with San Antonio, and Bernal wanted to know what the City could do to make them happier.
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