Set the stage
To set the stage for myself, during the past year I, Rick Stomphorst, have attended a large number of professional networking events, seminars, panel discussions, meetups, tweetups, conferences and trade shows. I’d attended+volunteered at Mesh09 and Canada 3.0 conferences, which afforded me the opportunity see dedicated volunteers in the background executing a conference. At these events I’ve heard (for example) Premier McGuinty speak on the need for more technology based firms in Ontario, Gary Goodyear (M.P. Science and Technology) speak on the need for Canada to be a technology leader, the CIO of the Province of Ontario talk about paperless government, seemingly countless presentations delivered by CEO’s from small-to-medium ISVs, but it was the CIO of Waterloo’s Opentext, Eugene Roman, talk about the strong engaged hi tech community in Kitchener-Waterloo (KW), led by Communitech, and what Communitech has done to/for the community there. He spoke strongly about how he hasn’t seen such an engaged hi tech group anywhere else.
A lot can start over a cup of coffee
During a casual coffee meeting with Chris Herbert, we talked about our immersion in technology (albeit from different angles), the power of community, the need for growth in our area in terms of size and number of hi tech companies. We agreed on the positive effect Communitech has had creating a hi tech atmosphere in the KW region. Chris and I started verbally itemizing all the hi tech companies in our area and it quickly became evident that we have a sufficient base of hi tech companies here. The conversation meandered to about how our area needed a grassroots organization to connect the area’s technology firms and professionals. If connected, we could create awareness for the technology hub that certainly exists in the area. We could become the Silicon Valley North.
Why don’t we start one?
During our coffee, it was Chris’ question “Why don’t we start one?” that lit our hi tech group. All of the unrelated “wants” floating around in my consciousness suddenly converged and aligned. Yes, why don’t we start one? I was in immediate whole-hearted agreement. We could do this. We already had the “what” nailed down. Debating the who, when, why, how was written off to bureaucratism – we would have none of it. Within minutes we established the date for the inaugural meetup, ~30 days out, and established a target of one week later to name our new org. We quickly agreed to use free on-line tools to facilitate collaboration. Google docs was used to assemble seed-words, words we hoped would become the name of our hi tech group.
Fast Forward
One-week later, we sat down again over coffee reviewing the Google doc of seed words. The seed words Silicon and Halton stood out above the rest, as when combined, embodied what we hoped to create. Silicon, referring to Silicon Valley, and Halton establishing our area. Silicon Halton was born. A Twitter account and Linkedin group were created right then and there. We leveraged social media to spread the word about our inaugural meetup. Three weeks later, 20 of us converged on Williams Coffee Pub.
Start
Start: to move suddenly and violently; to come into being, activity, or operation; to begin a course or journey
If I had to choose a word to describe how we’re doing Silicon Halton, it would be start. Just start. If we’re headed in the wrong direction, we’ll change. That’s better in wasting time belabouring which direction to go, mired in analysis paralysis. Both Chris and I don’t have much patience to belabour decisions. Why? To quote Sir Ken Robinson at TED2006 “if you’re not prepared to be wrong, you’ll never come up with anything original.” So here we go.