When I attend OCRI events I am always struck by the fact that I paid $30 or $50 or whatever dollars out of my own pocket while the majority of people I end up meeting are government bureaucrats whose department picks up the cost of their attendance. Quite frankly it seems to me at least 60 - 70% of the attendees at any given OCRI event are government workers there simply for the free food and time away from their cubicles.

When I first setup an office for my business in San Diego 8 years ago, I was introduced to an organization called the San Diego Software Industry council. Like OCRI, they organized events and meetings for the local high tech industry. Unlike OCRI, they were a member funded organization (read no tax money from the city of San Diego), they worked out of a basement office donated by Qualcomm, and the staff consisted of two, the director and his assistant!

There is no question in my mind that OCRI’s government funding should be pulled, every last dollar of it. I am not going to hold my breath on that though. I can’t imagine any politican bothering to do the right thing and slay this beast; after all, where would they go for a free breakfast and box tickets to a Sens game if OCRI lost it’s funding?

Have you ever asked OCRI if it would charge the member rate for all startups (member or not) to attend ZoneFive? I have no idea if it can do that, but OCRI would probably be able to use the difference as an in-kind contribution to match some of the government funding it receives for entrepreneur development.

One of my pet peeves is OCRI’s insistence for charging non-members $70.00 (twice the $35. members pay) for Zone-5 - its tech marketing seminar series. We hear over and over that one of the differences between American tech businesses and Canadian ones is marketing savvy (from segment/need analysis during development to messaging). While I’m not sure that’s true any longer - one still as to question why the non-member fee is 2x when the incremental costs are nearly zero, and not opening the event up not only deprives presenters (typically marketing consultants) from the audience they desire - but keeps smaller tech firms for hearing about marketing approaches that could make them more competitive, which of course helps grows Ottawa tech base - and promotes Ottawa with every new customer. Everyone loses.

That said I think that connection between grass roots and progressive organizations in the Montreal to Winsor corridor is positive. As you and others have pointed out the cities are different - both in terms of the composition of their businesses and the issues they face. This diversity gives rise to different approaches - from which we all can learn. It also opens the promise of organizations working together where issues and opportunity overlap.

Communitech’s entrepreneur services group has always operated independently of the organization’s traditional membership model. I say “group” but when it was established in 2005 it was just me, two days a week. (They had a person on staff in the early 2000s assisting startups, but that role had faded away.)

It was formed with an clear understanding that we would help any startups in the area — whether they were Communitech members or not. It was something I was adamant about and Communitech president Iain Klugman felt the same way, so it’s really never been an issue. I had been working with a lot of non-member startups through WatStart (Waterloo Technology Startup Network, launched a year earlier) and wasn’t going to insist that they become members before they could continue to get my help. Ideally, these companies will grow to become Communitech members, but their membership status isn’t a factor in the level of assistance they receive from my group.

It was something different for Communitech, which had described itself as “member-based” and “member-driven” ever since it launched in 1997 and adopted OCRI’s membership model (this was back when OCRI was just a tech industry association and not a regional economic development organization). That model was useful in creating a revenue stream from membership fees, but in other dimensions it’s a bit of an albatross.

Of course, the money has to come from somewhere and in our case Communitech was able to bring me on board thanks to financial support from IRAP. Last year we received additional funding from the Ontario Ministry of Research and Innovation, which enabled us to expand the group. I’m now at four days a week and we added two executives-in-residence last year. Ali made good use of all three of us! As did most other startups in the area. Our first EIR just left to become CEO of one of our client companies. In 2007, we probably spent 90% of our time working with startups or emerging tech companies with fewer than 15 employees. Through Communitech, we also arranged funding for StartupCamp/BarCamp and for WatStart, which are entirely focused on startups.

Another half-time EIR is about to join the group, although technically they’ll be part of a MaRS-managed program and not contracted to Communitech.

So there will be four of us at Communitech, paid mostly from government funding rather than membership fees, and all available to help any startups in the area whether they’re members or not. All of us were selected based on our track record of working with startups. Government funding brings its own issues, but it’s enabled us to build a bit of a Chinese wall between the member-driven components of Communitech and the entrepeneur services group.