Pittsburgh would be a great choice, I agree. Do you think the local government would invest? As I work on the idea, I'm starting to realize that it needs to i

Pittsburgh would be a great choice, I agree. Do you think the local government would invest? As I work on the idea, I'm starting to realize that it needs to involve public and private investment. The problem seems to be to convince investors that we can audit the programmers. I'd probably need to hire a well-known programmer as, at least, an advisor. Even if he didn't want to make the decisions and conduct the interviews, it'd be huge to have his name on the letter. The cities where I see the best odds of this taking shape are: Austin, Pittsburgh, Madison, and Portland. Apologies if I missed one; there are plenty of other good places, but those are the 4 that would be the big targets. I agree that one city is just a start. The concept needs a pilot, but ultimately the goal isn't to make one specific city a new Silicon Valley (if that happens, I've failed) but to encourage more equidistribution of talent and, as a nice side effect, also squeeze out the real estate assholes (who take advantage of the fact that our career needs force us to crowd into expensive cities). Once it's going multi-city, though, I'd need someone else to run it. I could be the lion for a couple years, but eventually I'd want to get back into code.