Last week I wrote a post about the broader Iowa innovation community's achievements in 2016 and this week I want to highlight the good things that happened a little closer to home here in the Gravitate community. All in all, it was a pretty eventful year in 2016 so even though we’re already a few days into January, I wanted to take a few minutes to share some things that I'm proud we accomplished.

Paul Singh shared something on his blog this week with regards to comparing many of the 38 startup communities (including Des Moines, Cedar Rapids and Ames) that he had visited throughout the last year: "In short, it’s pretty much the same everywhere."

After two weeks of travel, it feels good to be back on the ground and relatively stable here in Iowa for a few weeks. Unfortunately, all of the emails and tasks that I snoozed while I was traveling came flooding back on Monday morning and two days later I'm still catching up on everything.

Bonjour from Montréal! I'm up north for the Canadian edition of the Global Coworking Unconference Conference or GCUC (they pronounce it "juicy"—really, they do!). I participated last year when the conference was in Toronto and found so much value in it that I knew I needed to come back this year.

Much respect to the hard work put in by our friends on the eastern side of the state this week in dealing with #Flood2016 preparations. As of this morning, it looks like the Cedar Rapids community did what needed to be done to avoid another disaster like the 2008 flood and that is such a relief (unfortunately, some smaller communities didn't fare as well).

As promised last week, here are the details on our big Two Year Birthday Celebration coming up on September 2!