Northern Lights

This Spring+Summer look to be a bumper collection of tech industry events in the North; regional geekery seems to be snowballing…

• 10th May: Northern Exposure – a games conference organised by industry consortia in Yorkshire and the North East (I was due to keynote here).
• 13-20th May: Sheffield’s international festival of digital arts, Lovebytes, just closed out a few days ago.
• 22nd May: Manoj Ranaweera’s third OpenCoffee event in Manchester sounds like it’s picking up a growing community of people in the North West.
• 22nd May: Regional Development Agency, Yorkshire Forward’s just closed entries for Big Idea, a contest to find+fund a regional entrepreneur; one of the judges is my old colleague Ajaz Ahmed.
• 23-24th May: Ben Dalton‘s invited me to the VIP Evening for Leeds Met’s Undergraduate Showcase for their Innovation North faculty. The show opens to the public tommorow.
• 24th May: OSS Northern Way is holding its first discussion, bringing together entrepreneurs, regional development agencies and universities to promote the use of open source software across the Northern Way.
• 26-27th May: This weekend will see the first BarCamp Sheffield event. Seventy people sounds like an amazing turnout for the first event, particularly securing sponsorship from Cisco, BT, Tiscali and others. I love that they have a steel welder in their logo!
• 31st May & 12th June: North West ‘grassroots geekery’ community GeekUp will be holding a pair of meetups in Liverpool and Manchester over the next few weeks.
• 14-15th June: Next month Katz Kiely’s Just-B will be holding the 2007 edition of B.TWEEN at Bradford’s National Media Museum.

So all this is telling me to get my ass in gear on Carbon’s Northern Blog Project, OpenCoffee Leeds and potentially a BarCamp event for Leeds too…watch this space 🙂