Community Engagement

CWRU has plenty of cool stuff going on, and HacSoc presents some awesome weekly events (not to mention LinkState and HackCWRU). So it’s not like HacSoc members should feel like they’re lacking in community engagement. But the fact is that Cleveland has a surprisingly active tech scene, and every HacSoc member should really consider participating in it as much as possible! It’ll end up benefitting everyone:

• You’ll learn plenty from really cool talks that are put on by Cleveland interest groups. There are quite a few interest groups out there, so if you spend a little time looking, you probably can find one for your interests.
• You’ll meet really cool people, many of whom do things like hiring at tech companies, who may just be interested in hiring a smart, self-motivated HacSoc member that comes to their tech meetups!
• The more HacSoc members head out to these tech meetups, the more our reputation and name spreads around the community. That means, among other things:
  • More people and companies coming to us, interested in giving HacSoc talks.
  • HacSoc members become more valued in the eyes of companies who hear about us!

Here are some pointers for places to start getting involved with the Cleveland Tech scene:

Cleveland Tech Slack

Join the Cleveland Tech Slack team! You can sign up here, and once you have an account you can join the conversation here. Be sure to introduce yourself on the #intro channel, and join as many topic-specific channels as you are interested in. Watch out for announcements of meetups here. But, this probably isn’t the place to have notifications on for any activity, so you’ll have to peruse the messages every now and then.

Cleveland Python Area Interest Group

There is a Cleveland Python Interest Group. They have meetups every so often at the LeanDog boat, complete with talks, beer, pizza, and friendly tech conversation. If you are at all interested in Python, it may be worth signing up and getting the emails, so you can remember to make your way out there for their meetups.

Cleveland Big Data and Hadoop User Group (CHUG)

Similarly, there is the Cleveland Big Data and Hadoop User Group (CHUG for short). They are also on Meetup.

Other Meetups

You can find a ton of potentially interesting Meetup groups on Meetup, if you browse through Cleveland. Here is a small dump of potentially interesting ones:

• Cleveland Game Developers
• Rosetta Tech Talks
• Cleveland Ruby Brigade
• Cleveland NodeSchool
• Cleveland Web Design and Development
• xDD-CLE (x-Driven Development)
• Cleveland Node.js User Group
• Cleveland JavaScript Meetup
• We Can Code It
• Cleveland Dev Craft (Microsoft Stack)
• GiveSec

Cleveland Tech Events

This probably should be higher up, but Cleveland Tech Events seems to be a really awesome website that aggregates a lot of announcements for tech related events, as well as links to even more resources for the CLE community. Check it out:

http://clevelandtechevents.com/