Tech Toledo was created by Stuart Bertsch and Keith Instone in October of 2011 to begin creating a local tech community. At that time, Keith was a local UX guru and worked closely with local startups and regional businesses in the UX space. Stuart had many years of IT consulting and was working on several tech startups.
The idea for Tech Toledo started with a need to get local tech people together and showcase local noteworthy achievements. As the community grew, shrunk, evolved and changed, Tech Toledo always tried to keep everyone connected.
What we were doing in 2015 (with an ecosystem map) is a good recap of the range of things we did to support the community. A few examples of note, almost 10 years later:
- We helped establish ToledoTechEvents.org as the community calendar for the regional tech community. We encouraged people to add a range of events, not just IT focused ones: events for entrepreneurs and designers, for example. We maintained events, deleted spam, tweaked tagging, and added events as needed to make the calendar useful.
- We hosted Geek Dinner Holiday Mixers at the end of the year, to celebrate community leaders and foster collaboration. These were usually the largest gathering of community members, often setting new records each year.
- We partnered with EPIC Toledo to host Connect IT in the fall. These included roundtable discussions on various topics.
- In 2015, we created the Tech Startup RoadMap for the region to give local tech entrepreneurs and startups a resource to meet local tech people and find needed resources.
- In 2016, we led efforts to get the Tech Hire designation by the White House to build tech talent pipelines and expand regional tech sectors.
In the summer of 2019, we wrapped up our Tech Toledo efforts. It was fun and as volunteers, we believe we had a positive impact. We hope that some of what we started will be continued by others.
In the summer of 2024, we migrated the old (and broken) TechToledo.com website to this new place, cleaned up some things, and added a new “Community” home page to help the next generation of Toledo region ecosystem builders to collaborate.