By Press Release Submitted to OnMilwaukee.com Published Apr 09, 2018 at 11:56 AM Photography: David Bernacchi

On Monday, May 14, at Radio Milwaukee, the inaugural Meet the Meetups event will bring together 23 of the community’s top technology Meetup groups for a night filled with tech talks, pizza, craft beer, live music, door prizes and more. The goal is to celebrate Milwaukee’s tech community and build more connectivity between techies in the region.

The 23 collaborating Meetup groups cover various technology topics, ranging from software development programming languages to emerging areas of technology such as Data Science, Machine Learning and Cloud Hosting. Combined, these groups have over 16,000 members in the region. This will be the first time all of these groups have collaborated on a large-scale community-building event.

"Tech meetups play an important role in the professional development of the talent within our tech ecosystem," said Matt Cordio, who is organizing the event. "Meet the Meetups is intended to raise awareness of Southeast Wisconsin’s tech meetup groups and better network the broader tech community here in our region."

The program will feature tech talks from various community leaders:

  • Josh Gall, Director of Marketing Technology at Aurora Health Care, who played a critical role in Aurora’s partnership with Microsoft on the development of an Artificial Intelligence powered ChatBot.

  • Ray Cole, Chief Technology Officer at Delta Defense, who is helping the fast-growing Inc 5000 company grow and scale their technology team.

  • David Vasko, Director of Advanced Technology at Rockwell Automation, who leads the company’s applied research labs

  • Dr. Derek Riley, Associate Professor and Program Director of Computer Science at MSOE. MSOE’s Computer Science program will have a strong focus on Artificial Intelligence.

  • Joni Theobald, Program Director for TechHire at UMOS, Inc., a federally backed program that is training new tech workers in metro Milwaukee.

  • Shion Guha, Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Marquette University, who is helping build the university’s data science and analytics programs.

  • Caroline Hardin, Regional Manager for Southern Wisconsin at TEALSK12, a Microsoft backed Computer Science education program

  • Each meetup group organizer will give a 60-second speed pitch on the mission of their respective meetup group

  • More speakers will be announced leading up to the event

Meet the Meetups is free and open to the public. The event is being supported by some of the region’s top technology employers, including Aurora Health Care, Delta Defense and Northwestern Mutual. Other key sponsors of the event include Mars Solutions Group, Skills Pipeline, TechHire Milwaukee and Trisept Solutions.

The 23 Participating Meetup Groups include: AWS Milwaukee, Azure Meetup, Big Data MKE, Brew City UX, devcodecamp, Docker Milwaukee, FinTech Wisconsin, Girl Develop It Milwaukee, Greater MKE Java Meetup, Laravel MKE, Milwaukee Agile, Milwaukee JS, Milwaukee Machine Learning, MKE Functional Programming, MKE PHP, MKE Search, ReactJS Wisconsin, Salesforce Saturday, Startup Milwaukee, Web414, Wisconsin Salesforce Developer Group, Wisconsin Dot Net User Group and Women in Big Data’s Midwest Chapter.