Creating new opportunities to connect is the goal of the inaugural Waterloo Tech Week. Organized by the same student-led team behind the Hack the North hackathon, the week will feature more than 60 events from Sept. 8 to 11, including panels, meetups, workshops, and parties.
“We’d heard stories about the awesome community events that used to happen, and we wanted to help bring some of that energy back.”
Ian Korovinsky, Waterloo Tech Week co-director
Event hosts include venture capital firms like Simple Ventures and Soma Capital, as well as local tech organizations and companies like the Accelerator Centre and Iversoft. The official Waterloo Tech Week kickoff took place on Sept. 7, at Google Canada’s office in Kitchener.
Co-director and University of Waterloo student Jasmine Jiang said Waterloo Tech Week builds on the mission of Hack the North and its non-profit parent, Techyon. In addition to Hack the North, Techyon supports multiple tech-related clubs on the University of Waterloo campus.
“Our mission is to make tech accessible and exciting for everyone. But, we’ve always felt limited by the fact that Hack the North is only one weekend for the 1,000 students that we can accept,” she said. “There are so many things happening in Waterloo all the time, specifically around the tech community, and we felt that people needed to experience all them.”
The idea for Waterloo Tech Week started with a student interviewing for a role on the Hack the North organizing committee. Ian Korovinsky, Jiang’s co-director on Hack the North and a fellow UW student, said they always ask candidates what they would want to see added to the hackathon. One of this year’s candidates suggested an event for high school students.
“Not many high school students get to attend the hackathon,” Korovinsky said. “[We thought] maybe it’s not just high school students. Maybe it’s the community of Waterloo as a whole.”
The team looked at tech weeks in New York, San Francisco, and Toronto for inspiration, but Korovinsky said they knew the culture in Waterloo needed a tailored approach.
“The culture in Waterloo is different. It’s a very student-driven culture,” he said, noting that the team worked to scope a week that ”truly represents the student builder community here while still engaging everyone else as well,” he said.
Waterloo Tech Week is a decentralized event where event hosts submit proposals to be included as part of the event. Jiang and Korovinsky connected with Toronto Tech Week organizers to learn about their process for managing events and promotion, with the pair noting that their Toronto counterparts provided critical insights on how to support event hosts in Waterloo.
The turnaround from idea to launch was quick. The Waterloo Tech Week website was launched in July, shortly after Toronto Tech Week. Jiang said interest was initially slower than they had expected. But interest spiked in August, and the team was surprised by a surge in event submissions.
“Even up until today, we’re still getting people wanting to submit events and get involved. It took off way more than we expected, which, honestly, is just a testament to how much the community needed something like it,” she said.
It has been a year of student-run events that have connected the Waterloo Region’s tech community. On March 19, over 2,000 people attended the Socratica Symposium at the Waterloo Memorial Recreation Complex for a day-long celebration of builders. While Korovinsky and Jiang were not involved in the Socratica event, Korovinsky said they took inspiration from it for Waterloo Tech Week.
“As for inspiration, it’s a mix of things. Part of it is seeing all the great stuff happening in Waterloo and realizing how excited the community is to come together and build through big events like that,” he said.
“From another perspective, I know there have been other tech-focused events in the past, but since Jasmine started in 2022 and I started in 2023, we haven’t seen as many of those. We’d heard stories about the awesome community events that used to happen, and we wanted to help bring some of that energy back and keep building on the sense of community in Waterloo.”
All images courtesy Alex Kinsella for BetaKit.