Cleveland Tech Events

On October 22, 2008, I launched Cleveland Tech Events, in hopes of having one spot to find all of the technical user groups in Cleveland. I knew that the technical community was spread out quite a bit, but I didn't realize just how large it is. By being so spread out, it really was hard to see what Cleveland had going for it in the technical community. I really wanted to believe that there was hope here despite the politicians and economy, and launching this site has definitely given me a wonderful view of Cleveland's technical community and just how much potential is there.

In the past 7 months, I've met more influential people in our technical community and have started to meet these groups in person. Unfortunately, I am only one person, so it will take me awhile to meet all of the groups in person. As of today, we have 29 links under Resources - that's 29 groups so far. As more meetups are added and as I hear from others about more groups, I continue to update that list.

I put a Google calendar in place to make it a little easier to see how busy our technical community is here. Tomorrow, May 20th, we have 5 groups meeting at the same time. From architecture to social media to MySQL (database) to webloggers to NEOUPA - the topics for tomorrow's meetings are all across technology. Earlier this week, there was the Ruby meetup and tonight was the game developers meetup. Next week, we have meetings scheduled throughout the week. I don't think I've seen a week without a user group meeting of some sort.

I still have plenty of dreams for this site, but it'll take time to get there. I want to integrate the news postings and the Google calendar, to eliminate the double entry. I'd like to work with a more friendly layout - the Joomla layout only works for so much.

Another idea includes setting up a mailing list for group leaders and other community influencers to collaborate on events. I've had someone contact me directly on Twitter to get some groups together for possibly an upcoming event this summer. I've also had various leaders ask about the other leaders that I've been in touch with. Rather than have me as the middle man, how about having the ability to email directly? Is there an interest for this?

As I look at the site statistics, I am absolutely impressed with how well this site has been received, and I look forward to continuing this service for the community. Thanks to those of you who have contacted me and have gotten involved. I look forward to working with all of you going forward.

If you have any feedback on the site, suggestions, comments in general, or perhaps an event idea but not sure how to execute it... drop me an email at admin AT clevelandtechevents DOT com, and I will do what I can to help.