What is CODE?

Many members of the group may not know the history of CODE. In brief… The closure of Motorola’s Champaign site in 2007 dumped 200+ tech professionals into the local job market. We knew that this was more than the community could absorb, so a group of employees got together to attract businesses to the area. Through their efforts and coordination with other local organizations, Yahoo! and Qualcomm sites were opened. Since then, we have helped to attract other companies and to spawn projects to benefit the local tech community.

A small group of people constitute the current CODE board. These are not elected positions. The leaders are volunteer who have the drive and passion for developing the community at their own time and expense. We meet informally with local organizations and coordinate mostly through email. (Personally, I would like a slightly more formal organization.)

Mostly, the CODE board is an influencing organization. We have no income, but we have lots of contacts with local and remote businesses, organizations, and individuals.

Our projects include:

• working with the EDC on a central community job board;
• discussions with Parkland about starting a Mobile Development Certificate program;
• meeting with the U of I to help them understand the needs of local business and to help make hiring from the University more accessible for medium or small business.

We have worked on or discussed many other projects, but we are constrained by the number of volunteers we have.

Regarding meetings… We have discussed having quarterly, or even monthly, meetings and events of various types for the technical community. The EDC already sponsors regular TechMixes. (One was held yesterday evening.) Most likely, I think that the first set of open meetings for CODE should be quarterly meetings to discuss the needs of the technical community and how we can act to push those items forward.

We would gladly be a conduit for helping to advertise meetings on technical topics, but we would need someone from the community to volunteer to lead and organize the meeting. Our current volunteers are at capacity.

If anyone would like to volunteer to assist in any capacity, we would welcome their help.