OpenCoffee {January}

Wow, I’ve been lazy…real lazy. It’s three weeks since the first OpenCoffee Leeds meetup of 2008 back on 8th January and I’m just getting around to a round up of that morning’s events…

• Trina Garnett of All About Joe and I have been talking on and off for a few months, but this month we managed to persuade her along to OpenCoffee. Like myself, Trina recently exited Orange to go solo, though she was part of the Ananova acquisition, rather than Freeserve. Trina’s new venture, a multimedia communications agency, looks to be well served by her experience at FT and Orange.

• Channon Powell of Leeds Learning Network, Leeds Met’s Linda Broughton and I got into an interesting discussion on the educational merits of OLPC‘s XO computer and associated learning programme. We got to talking about how the XO was actually useful in developed economies as well as the developing world; coincidentally, OLPC America was launched just a couple days after OpenCoffee!

• Kooji Creative‘s Katherine Moss and Johnathan Gallagher (who so ably managed the checkin at BarCamp Leeds) were interviewed for Northcast by Dom Hodgson during the course of the morning. You can catch a 10-minute MP3 at the NorthCrew site…I like that they namechecked their work for dot:north, a topic that we talked about a little during the morning too…I wonder if they could enter the Northern Design Competition!

• Regular Tom Scott couldn’t make it (he was on vacation in San Francisco) but I feel compelled to point out his very funny You Cannot Remove Your Fingerprints With Pineapple, which made today’s b3ta newsletter! While Tom and I were planning BarCamp Leeds over IM, he needed to limit his typing..so he didn’t pass out from the pain 😉

• Kilo75‘s Matt Seward and Monica Tailor  made it across from the Round Foundry. I wonder if we can convince Kilo75 and Kooji to move over to Old Broadcasting House…?

• The University of York’s Maz Hardey & Linda Broughton had a side discussion about plans for the Leeds’ first Girl Geek Dinner…I’m hoping we’ll see some announcement soon – maybe March?

I’d hoped to see Freeserve’s co-founder Rob Wilmot, Ian Green as well as Digital Therapy‘s Simon Jones, but they were unable to attend for various reasons…

We’ve settled into a comfortable 25-30 people each month, but it’s something I’d like to improve upon with a few tweaks to the format over the coming months…perhaps a Vagueware-esque OpenCoffee+Coworking Day at OBH, might see a few demos, so be sure to sign up…

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OpenCoffee Leeds {February} will take place on 5th February, 10am to 12pm at Loftart…be sure to let us know that you’re coming 🙂