MATA has received the Community Impact Award at Biz 417’s Excellence in Technology Awards, and I’m proud of this recognition because it honors work that is not always easy to see from the outside.
Not everything worth building is a product. Sometimes the work is the room itself: the people, the events, the conversations, the trust, and the connective tissue that helps a technology community understand its own strength.
Springfield has the talent. It has companies, founders, educators, technical people, and people doing serious work across industries. What the region needs is a stronger center of gravity and a clearer way for that work to become visible.
My interest has never been networking for its own sake. I want the technology community to become more legible to employers, students, civic leaders, entrepreneurs, investors, and to itself.
The Community Impact Award recognizes that kind of infrastructure work. It is less visible than a product launch, but it is just as structural, and it is work I’m proud to help build.
