Our fourth event of the year was on April 13th at The Ohio State Bar Association. Initially, we’d planned to have someone from The Columbus Collaboratory come in and talk to us about who they are and what they’re up to. After all, as a collaboration among seven of the most prominent companies in central Ohio, it’s one of the most exciting startups in Central Ohio. And one of their main focus areas is analytics!

Well, the “someone” we got was Ben Blanquera, VP of Delivery and Experience at The Columbus Collaboratory (by day; by night, he’s “Tech/Startup Connector Extraordinaire”), and he brilliantly proposed that we broaden the topic to be “Collaboration in Columbus.” He then proceeded to pull together a roster of speakers that managed to blow the attendees away with the breadth of exciting, scrappy, high impact collaborations going on in town. The firehose went something like this:

Tony R. Wells, The Wells Foundation

Tony spoke about the power of bringing together technology from OSU with a little bit of direct investment and then negotiations and partnerships with for-profit organizations to develop technologies and services that positively impact both central Ohio, but also national organizations.

Roman Holowinsky, The STEAM Factory

Technically, Roman is a math professor at The Ohio State University — a local school you may have heard of. They pay his salary, at least. But, Roman spoke to us about The STEAM Factory, which is an OSU-affiliated, bootstrapped organization that pulls together lecturers and students from across many different departments at OSU to tackle innovative projects while also providing community engagement. Fun fact: a few ordinary citizens discovered they were color blind as a result of one of those community engagements last year!

(Side note: the author of this blog post dropped a few of his favorite math jokes on Roman after the presentation. Roman graciously chuckled. One of the other co-organizers of WAWs later pointed out that he is sure — at a 99% confidence level — that Roman had heard those jokes many times before. The author of this post also realizes the the “99% confidence level” joke included in this side note is a statistics joke, and statistics is not actually math.)

Aladin Gohar, ICF Summit 2016

Aladin is a long-time community builder in central Ohio, most notably as one of the co-founders of IT Martini. But, he spoke to us about the Intelligent Community Forum, which is a global organization that promotes “intelligent communities.” Did you know Columbus was actually named the Intelligent Community of the Year in 2015? Pretty cool, right? As such, Columbus is now hosting this year’s ICF Summit, when the finalists and past finalists will be coming to our fair city and checking out many cool aspects of Columbus. And, the 2016 recipient will be named. If you’re interested in learning more, or if you’re interested in attending at a very steep discount, shoot Aladin a note at aladin at itmartini dot com. Just tell him that you found out about the summit through Web Analytics Wednesday, and he’ll hook you up!

Ben Blanquera, The Columbus Collaboratory… and more

Ben gave us an overview of The Columbus Collaboratory, but he also spoke to a number of other startup- and collaboration-oriented groups and activities in Columbus:

• GiveBackHack
• Columbus Startup Week (it’s coming up soon!)
• TechLife Columbus

All in all, it was a pretty information-packed and energizing evening!