What is happening across Wisconsin this tech month?

October is Wisconsin Tech Month: thirty-one days of hackathons, panels and pitch nights running through October 31 under the 2026 theme “Connected through Innovation.” The calendar lives at witechmonth.com, most events are free to register for, and the whole thing started in Milwaukee five years ago with about forty events. This year’s edition spreads across four themed weeks and reaches from Milwaukee to Kenosha and beyond.

A month that started with a declaration

The month is run by Milwaukee’s Milky Way Tech Hub together with Latinos in Tech, and it began in 2021. Nadiyah Johnson, the founder of Jet Constellations and of the Milky Way Tech Hub, told Essence how it started: her organization partnered with Governor Tony Evers’ office to declare the entire month of October dedicated to “equitably advancing the technology industry throughout the state of Wisconsin,” and Wisconsin Tech Month launched with 40 events. This year the same office calls it a statewide platform, and the four weeks each have a lane: MKE Tech Week (October 1 to 10) for policy and ecosystem builders, DEV Week (October 12 to 18) for hackathons and developers, Women in Tech Week (October 19 to 25), and Midwest Tech Week (October 26 to 31) for collaboration across twelve midwest states.

The kickoff happened this morning

The month opened October 1 at 9 a.m. at the Milwaukee Public Market on North Water Street, with a follow-up happy hour the same evening at Saint Kate, the arts hotel on Kilbourn Avenue. The listed kickoff speakers were Tim Dixon, chief technology officer of Regal Rexnord; Samantha Maldonado, executive director of i.c.stars; and Sheldon Cuffie, CEO of Cream City Cyber. The anchor event comes next: the Emerging in Tech Summit on the afternoon of October 13 at the Kenosha Innovation Neighborhood, covering AI, cybersecurity, workforce development and entrepreneurship, with a hackathon attached. The organizers also run outreach beyond the usual crowd: tech programming in schools with City Year, and digital literacy programming with My Way Out, a group that works with people returning from incarceration.

Three Milwaukee names to know this month

Johnson is the month’s driving force, and her framing has stayed consistent. “Technology is rewriting how we work, learn and participate in society, but progress is not measured by how fast the tools advance,” she told Milwaukee Startup News last month. “It is measured by how many people can see themselves in the future those tools create.”

Joe Poeschl, executive director of the MKE Tech Hub Coalition since mid-2025 and co-founder of The Commons, brings the organization’s Founders Day into the month’s calendar. When he took the role he told BizTimes his focus would be on “cultivating network connectivity, amplifying our stories, driving member value, and sparking a culture of innovation across the region.”

Steve Glynn, who writes the Experience Milwaukee newsletter and works in AI at Xorbix, sits on an AI panel during the month and has spent this year running a City Tech Tour. “I’m meeting regularly with tech founders, business and community leaders to study how strong tech ecosystems are built and what Milwaukee can learn from them,” he writes on the project’s page.

The backdrop the month lands on

The timing is not happening in a vacuum. In August, an agtech startup with Wisconsin ties, Quercus Biosolutions, raised $5 million for AI-designed herbicides. The University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee has received a $6 million National Science Foundation grant aimed at moving university research into commercial use, and a new initiative called Founder Factory launched this fall to help southeastern Wisconsin startups make the jump from innovation to commercialization, with SeeMed in its first cohort.

The one number nobody agrees on

How many events is the month actually running? The organizers’ own promotion two weeks out said “30+ events statewide.” Startup Wisconsin’s writeup counts 60. The official calendar holds far more entries than either figure once you scroll it. Wisconsin Tech Month may be the rare celebration that has outgrown its own scoreboard, which is a fair summary of where the state’s tech scene stands in 2026. The full calendar, and registration for every event named here, is at witechmonth.com/calendar.

This story was commissioned at the Sprokt assignment desk as a free beta commission, and it is credited to the person who asked for it. It was reported from public records and published writing; interview requests are out to two of the three people named above, and their answers will be added when they arrive. If a detail here is wrong, the desk wants to know first: request a correction.