In September, board members Christina Turner and Jennifer Stencel attended Greater Cleveland Partnership’s 18th Annual Best of Tech Awards event.
It’s been a rough year for tech, so the genuinely positive energy in the room was actually a little jarring at first. More than 200 tech CEOs, tech professionals, and representatives of 28 tech-centric Partner organizations, like UX Akron, mixed and mingled around cocktail tables set up with pamphlets and trinkets and business cards. Everyone seemed to fall into engaging conversations quickly, and it was great to see just how many tech-focused organizations exist in our area, approaching development from various angles.
In the keynote, the Founder of Overdrive, Steve Potash, spoke about the 30-year transition from selling volumes of digitized legal publications on collections of CD-ROMs (the tedium of digital operation in this era was summarized by Potash as “By about the 25th disc, you’d think, do I really need the whole book?”) to developing Overdrive’s beloved flagship e-reading app Libby by way of getting a law degree, following the urging of his librarian wife Loree to branch out into e-books more generally, and partnering with Cleveland Public Library to develop the first iteration of the Overdrive app with librarians for their patrons.
Then came the awards themselves, which did a fantastic job of spotlighting a variety of avenues illuminated by technology and ingenuity in the Greater Cleveland area with categories that celebrated collaboration and creative approaches, as well as taking a moment to highlight the good work of each nominee. Awards were given to the CEOs of startups and the CIOs of more established companies, to Tech Teachers, AI Innovators, and Cybersecurity superstars, and to companies and organizations driving innovation in Cleveland’s manufacturing sector.
It was encouraging to hear about all this happening in Cleveland, and not just recently or in a buzzword-laden, hype-forward way. The role of place in how we capture and understand information often gets lost online. The internet as a medium supposedly transcends geography, and therefore development has proceeded from a point of conspicuous lack of interest in how life is lived IRL. This ethos means the internet doesn’t yet handle the nuance of IRL artifacts well (concepts like timezones, dialects, differences in conceptual understanding of a topic even when content is in the “same language,” the role a local economy plays in a user’s wellbeing and even participation in the great project of the internet, weather, etc. which shape our ways of consuming and understanding information.) This event showcased how natural a sense of community can be experienced in person, it was great to meet people really DOING things right here in Northeast Ohio, shake their hand, and hear them talk about their work and genuine interests.
In UX, we used to talk about people being “unicorns” if they could design and code. At this event, they talked about “unicorns” being tech companies that reached $1B in profits. There are 6 such companies in Cleveland. “What do you call a herd of unicorns?” Greater Cleveland Partnership’s CEO Baiju Shah asked the audience. “A blessing.”
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