Category: Dotnorth

In the run up to the launch of dot:north, here’re a few more events and snippets from across the country’s favorite compass direction…

• The next few months sees a pile up of BarCamps across the North of England and Scotland too with definite plans now announced for BarCamp in Edinburgh and Manchester and planning starting for Newcastle and also Sheffield‘s second camp. We’ll be making a decisions about Leeds soon, most likely aiming for an early Summer event to avoid the traffic jam and take advantage of the great weather 🙂

• Last week saw a screening of Abstract Fear at Old Broadcasting House; with a bunch of upcoming evening talks and further screenings, the North’s first coworking space is warming up a great programme of creative and digital events.

• Last week’s GeekUp Leeds played host to the launch of NorthCast, NorthCrew and NorthPack, respectively podcast, collective and blog-aggregator covering developments across the region. Kinda a rival to our own plans for dot:north and kinda not; the fact that people are bootstrapping coverage of the region – and indeed, looking at the region as a whole – is good news for everyone…watch out for Manoj Ranaweera’s expanded NW Startup 2.0 in coming weeks too.

• Manoj’s programme of events in the North East continues to draw plaudits with last week’s edition of North West Startup 2.0; catch local VC, Ed French’s impressions here… Next month, Manoj will be hosting Mobile 2.0 on 21st February in Manchester…the speaker lineup will include Ed and my old boss and mentor, Dr. Norman Lewis; I’ve been helping Manoj out a little behind the scenes with speakers and themes…

• Last Thursday saw the Manchester Digital Development Agency host the city’s first WordPress User Group and later today Paul Robinson’s remix of coworking and OpenCoffee will take place…sadly I had to drop out, but I’m really liking this idea and plan to pinch it for met:space! Paul’s also one of the brains behind BarCamp Manchester 🙂

• Like Leeds and Manchester, the North East is really starting to buzz, largely through the efforts of Gareth Rushgrove.  Gareth bootstrapped OpenCoffee Newcastle which’s now evolved into Refresh Newcastle; incidentally he’s just published an article on How To Build A Facebook Application. Gareth has invited me to speak on Web 2.0 and Business at Codeworks’ Think & A Drink meetup next month; incidentally Codeworks (the North East’s digital development agency) has been been namechecked by Richard Florida! Last but most certainly not least, May will see the inaugural Thinking Digital conference in Gateshead with a lineup including two of my heroes – Tara Hunt and Dan Lyons aka Fake Steve Jobs!

• Next week, I’ve been invited to attend this year’s Leeds City Centre Vision Conference by the city’s Chief Economic Services Officer, Paul Stephens. Paul’s been a champion of Leeds’ digital industries with his support for Leeds Media and the now defunct eHQ Leeds; I’m hoping to impress upon the delegates the notion of Leeds as one of a half dozen hubs of an emerging digital ecosphere across the North.

• Jennifer O’Grady, formerly of Brazen PR has just completed her garden leave by launching her new agency, Democracy PR – named for emergent forms of media democracy. Jen’s collaborating with other regional digital marketing, and media-casting experts, so it’ll be interesting to see what comes of these micro-JVs 🙂 Her more from Jen at YouTube…

• Local dotcom heroes – and ensembli‘s Enterprise Ventures stablemates – Yuuguu were present as exhibitors at Macworld 2008….check their blog for their Apple fanboy impressions! (I hear Anish fainted at the sight of the MacBook Air).

• This year Katz Kiely’s b.TWEEN 08 conference, on 19+20th June, will be moving from its erstwhile home at Bradford’s National Media Museum to Manchester’s Museum of Science & Industry. Now if only there was a Museum of Media, Science & Industry eh?

• In a couple weeks time Venturefest Yorkshire will be holding its annual event at the York Racecourse on 6th February; Leeds Met has kindly asked me to join their table at the evening reception, along with Enterprise Ventures’ Ed French and Plusnet’s Dean Sadler.

• Gavin Holland, Orange UK’s former design team manager, based in Leeds has gone indie with his new venture Freeman Holland, a Manchester-based creative consultancy. Gav and I used to run Orange’s Design Futures research programme together, including some experimental product and services designs along with a design conference – Design+. Expect to see great things from Gav and his partners.

• Holbeck Urban Village‘s Round Foundry in Leeds is holding an evening networking event, Future Work, to help introduce ‘directors and staff from the cream of creative design agencies,
  technology companies and arts practitioners’

• Last, but not least – two weeks from today is the February edition of OpenCoffee Leeds, complete with a handful of demos 🙂

So wow – if I didn’t live here already, I’d wanna move to the North – the Pennine Parallel is taking shape – now all we need is a fucking Apple Store in Leeds!

God bless Katz Kiely 🙂

As well as spinning up planning on the 2008 edition of b.TWEEN, Katz’ Just-B Productions are also behind the upcoming MELD, a forthcoming event bringing together the North’s foremost interaction designers and journalists for a week of ideation, blending the talents of old and new media.

I’m not sure ‘interaction designer’ is the best characterisation of the kind of people MELD’s looking to recruit – but I guess bloggers, social media mavens and anyone with a flair for the distribution patterns of the 2.0 era would be appropriate…perhaps even some ARG designers, mobile and locative experts?

MELD is running launch events in Leeds (15th October) and Manchester (10th October) with the ‘lab event running from 10-14th December

—

I’m uncertain that polarities exist between journalists knowing how to tell a story and social media experts knowing how to distribute. Blogs like TechCrunch and Blognation are as professional as Cnet and Wired – and actually displacing the authority and reputation of their old media predecessors as well as mastering the new tools of distribution.

Perhaps, what’s more significant than an amateur/professional divide is the broadcast/conversational juxtaposition. New media can teach old media how to co-create, discover, collaboratively filter, crowdsource, syndicate and mashup – but new media’s just as strong at content creation. Most importantly, social media is providing ad-hoc accountability and oversight of a mainstream media that’s drifting towards incurious laziness and still looks down its nose at its new rivals.

So MELD is perhaps an opportunity to do more than create and pitch, but a chance to understand what’s really changed; it’s important to understand the cultural and technological shifts that have driven social media and captured the cultural imagination and the reasons why mainstream media is increasingly distrusted.

Carbon‘s new landlords, Leeds Met‘s NTI are holding a party to celebrate their newly acquired status as one of Apple’s Authorised Training Centres.

Come and join the party at Old Broadcasting House on 16th October…it’s a great chance to meet the trainers, check out the beautifully refurbished OBH facilities and find ou more about NTI’s training programmes.

{ Invitation flyer on the left… }