Jack Templin, left, cofounder of Providence Geeks, chats with Saul Kaplan, executive director of the state Economic Development Corporation.

Photo courtesy of the Rhode Island Economic Development Corporation

PROVIDENCE — Holed up in cramped offices and hunched over laptops in coffee shops, information technology stars have kept a low profile in Rhode Island.

The skyline boasts no monuments to their fledging companies, and despite the startling growth of GTECH, the gaming giant, the state’s reputation is more closely linked to cobwebbed mills than to the World Wide Web.

But recently, the typically shy and overworked wizards behind the state’s newest start-ups have been creeping into public view.

Early last year, the Providence Geeks, a new industry group, began hosting monthly gatherings at its Providence “clubhouse,” the AS220 bar and taqueria on Empire Street.

The dinners — heavy on chitchatting but also featuring lectures by the heads of local companies such as Tizra, Eyeglue and FarSounder — draw more than 100 IT and digital media specialists.

State economic development officials, who have been struggling to grow high-wage technology jobs, have taken notice.

Yesterday, the state Economic Development Corporation launched a Web site, www.rinexus.com, to give a permanent, virtual hangout to technology innovators.

It was to be unveiled last night at the September meeting of the Providence Geeks.

“It’s the one sector that’s kind of invisible,” said Jack Templin, who helped start Providence Geeks and designed RI Nexus for the EDC. “There’s a lone-wolf mentality. A lot of the players are smaller, and they’re spread out.”

The state spent $80,000 to develop the site, paying programmers and financing a six-month outreach effort by Templin to solicit input from local companies and universities, according to Melissa L. Withers, a spokeswoman for the EDC.

State officials say that investment followed an analysis that counted 15,000 IT and digital media jobs in Rhode Island, paying an average of $69,510, far above the state’s median income.

Saul Kaplan, the head of the EDC, says he hopes RI Nexus will expand the sector by making it easier for companies to find employees. It will also help technology savvy Rhode Islanders “connect, communicate and collaborate,” trading ideas and forming new firms, Kaplan said.

The goal is to capitalize on the state’s size, often viewed as a disadvantage compared to larger cities, where a software developer can’t buy an iced coffee without stumbling on a crowd of computer scientists talking shop and trading tips.

A searchable directory on RI Nexus offers information on 200 local companies, universities and government agencies related to the IT and digital media sector. Individuals can also post their profiles, and participate in online discussion forums on the site.

A calendar lists industry events, and a state map identifies hundreds of technology firms, their locations marked by green balloons that users can click on to research the company.

A “marketplace” section, still being developed, will soon post jobs, internships and “gigs.”

Some users have already discovered the site.

Adam Darowski, 29, pounced on the online bulletin board to gauge interest in “co-working,” the sharing of office space by self-employed IT professionals or employees of “virtual companies” that do not provide office space for their staff.

Darowski, who attends the Providence Geeks dinners at AS220, worked near Boston until May, when he was hired by the Barrington-based firm BatchBlue.

“This definitely fills that gap,” Darowski said of RI Nexus. “You don’t have to wait for a once-a-month talk over a burrito to talk over ideas. You can do it online.”

The site will rely on user contributions for much of its content, but paid staff will monitor postings and update the blog. State officials say those costs will eventually be paid for by advertisers and sponsors.

To generate regular traffic, RI Nexus will host a blog updated daily, and post news stories related to Rhode Island companies. (The news archive already has more than 400 stories that appear in response to searches for companies and business sectors.)

Yesterday, the homepage highlighted a feature in Inc. Magazine that listed 12 Rhode Island companies in a list of the country’s 5,000 fastest-growing private firms.

For now, Templin is in charge of the blog, although his initial posting promised an “illustrious group of guest bloggers.”

“We are making the invisible visible,” said Templin, a Peace Corps alumnus who recently moved to Providence from New York City. “We believe we can get to the point where the outside world takes notice.”

In trying to re-brand Rhode Island as a Silicon Valley in New England, state officials hope to draw IT professionals from out of state who are searching for a place to design the next iPod, YouTube or MySpace.

But in many ways, RI Nexus is mostly reaching out to local programmers, software engineers and Web designers, including the students at Brown University and the Rhode Island School of Design who pour out of Rhode Island the day they graduate.

This is not the first effort to draw out local IT entrepreneurs.

The Tech Collective, a nonprofit association in Providence, and the state-supported Slater Technology Fund have for years hosted educational and networking events for the industry.

But this is the first time the EDC has built an online community for an industry, and the site’s designers say they hope RI Nexus will bring together the crowds who have flocked to the monthly Providence Geeks dinners with their counterparts who are more comfortable sitting in their pajamas at their home PCs.

The EDC is also promising serious outreach, including a mailing to technology companies, a presentation at last night’s Providence Geeks dinner, postcards distributed at cafÉs and lectures by Templin at universities.

“For me, the shocking thing was that this community existed,” said Brian Jepson, a cofounder of the Providence Geeks, who has attended similar networking events in Oregon and Washington state. “We found this, we didn’t create it. We’ve got something going on here, and it’s awesome.”

bgedan@projo.com