Nominations are open for the 2021 Technical.ly Awards: Who should be celebrated in your local tech community?

The Technical.ly Awards are back — and you have a chance to shape them.

Technical.ly is honoring the top companies, leaders and organizations in tech communities across mid-Atlantic cities.

Before we get into how to nominate folks, let’s look back. For last year’s awards, we focused intentionally on the reflecting the moment when they took place. 2020 was a year wracked by a deadly pandemic, jolting awareness of systemic racism and repeated hits to a fragile economy. At Technical.ly, we reported on all of these shifts, including the locally helmed scientific breakthroughs, workplace culture changes and small business pivots, as well as the lessons to be learned for a (hopefully) more resilient future.

More than celebrating success for success’ sake, we wanted to honor challenges overcome, as well as ongoing work to make local tech and entrepreneurship communities places that also challenge the unjust status quo. See who won in Philly, Baltimore, DC and Delaware, from a global COVID-19 tracker to a hydroponic vertical farm that employs returning citizens to an Instagram-famous trashman.

In 2021, we are continuing to closely track responses to these shifts, as they certainly haven’t gone away. But we are thinking less about rapid responses, and more about the long-term change needed. So we will be less prescriptive this year, as we seek to reflect new challenges being tackled.

With that, nominations for the 2021 Technical.ly Awards are open.

It’s your chance to shout out the success of local tech businesses, as well as the dedication of professional, technical and impact leaders. Who’s making your community better? What products and companies will most shape the future? Who’s done the most work this year to widen tech’s tent?

The categories are:

• Invention of the Year — What product, project or release this year is best poised to change their industry?
• Tech Community Leader of the Year — Who has most made this community better through coalition building, nonprofit work, access-minded initiatives, policymaking or other pathways?
• CTO of the Year — Who is leading groundbreaking technical work within their company or organization? (Similar titles beyond CTO will be accepted.)
• Startup of the Year (under 50 employees) — What promising young company is tackling an interesting problem or inspiring a brighter collective future?
• Growth Company of the Year (50 to 1,000 employees) — What growing company is shaping the future of its industry?
• Culture Builder of the Year — What empathetic leader or organizer is making their workplace or professional group more inclusive, resilient or engaging? (“Leader” doesn’t need to mean they hold a leadership title.)

Submit your noms by EOD Wednesday, Nov. 3. Nominations will be curated by the newsroom, to reach five finalists, and released for a public vote. Hang tight for our plans on the announcement of winners, too.

The ultimate goal here is to bring folks together and recognize the hard work that’s been happening, as well as what remains to be done. Join us by telling us who should get the spotlight.

P.S. If you missed them, be sure to check out the 2021 RealLIST Engineers in Philly, Baltimore, DC, Delaware and Pittsburgh.