On Monday, May 14 several hundred members of tech meetup groups and the greater community will come together for a night of panel discussions, live music, pizza, craft beer and door prizes at the inaugural Meet the Meetups event at 88Nine Radio Milwaukee.
The idea for this event came when organizer Matt Cordio, who is also the cofounder and president of Skills Pipeline Group and Startup Milwaukee, noticed that while tech meetups play a vital role in Milwaukee’s tech community, many are disconnected and have limited reach on their own.
“There are all of these meetup groups that are the informal professional development programs of the software developer community and tech community,” he said. “We thought that it would be interesting to bring them all together and celebrate technology in Milwaukee. This hasn’t been done before, so we just want to figure out if there could be new collaborations that come between groups, and if the community needs a consistent event platform that brings it together.”
The night will feature two panel discussions. The first will be a conversation about the local tech community with Josh Gall, director of marketing technology at Aurora Health Care; Ray Cole, chief technology officer at Delta Defense; and David Vasko, director of advanced technology at Rockwell Automation. The second will be about how to develop the next generation of tech talent in Milwaukee with Dr. Derek Riley, associate professor and program director of computer science at MSOE; Caroline Hardin, regional manager for Southern Wisconsin at TEALSK12; Joni Theobald, program director for TechHire at UMOS, Inc.; and Shion Guha, assistant professor of computer science at Marquette University.
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In addition to the panels, each meetup group organizer will give a minute long pitch about their group.
As a meetup group organizer himself, Cordio understands the challenges of growing an audience and feels that an event like this will help get these groups get in front of more people. “It’s really a selfless act,” he said of running one of these groups. “We just wanted to figure out how to celebrate these people and help them grow their audiences.”
Through his work with Skills Pipeline Group and Startup Milwaukee, Cordio is interested in growing the city’s tech scene through three main demographics: entrepreneurs, technologists and corporate innovation. “We’ll continue to try and build programming that brings those three audiences together, and we may have to launch a new platform in the community to do that,” he said. “Ultimately, there needs to be so much going on in the ecosystem that every night it’s a hard choice for somebody to choose a professional development opportunity.”
