Introducing Manchester Tech Nights

I've now made this actually be a thing - please see Manchester Tech Nights #1

There's something that's bugged me about events in Manchester's tech scene for a while. There are a lot of great specialist events, and a lot of networking events, but there appears to be little in between, ones that cross knowledge sharing with networking, other than the now-defunct Social Media Cafe, the Northern Digitals BLAB Talks, and ThoughtWorks' Manchester Geek Nights. However, BLAB Talks are geared more towards the creative side of the industry, rather than the technical side and Manchester Geek Nights speakers appear to be limited to ThoughtWorks.

The specialist events are great, but there's just so many of them, that it's impossible to attend even just the ones that are interesting to you, and the networking events tend to be heavily geared around alcohol and drinking, which in itself is problematic and can be exclusionary.

When I lived in Oxford there was a great event I attended frequently, Oxford Geek Nights, which basically has a format that fills a gap that I think Manchester now has, so I'd like to start running a monthly series of nights in this format, and hopefully some other people think this is a good idea too.

What?

I'm going to call it Manchester Tech Nights, and I basically want to use the format of Oxford Geek Nights - 1 or 2 keynote speakers followed by a series of unconference-style lightning talks, followed by relaxed chatting and drinks if you'd like.

The talks would come from anyone who feels they've got something interesting for Manchester's tech community:

• perhaps you work for one of Manchester's hosting firms and you've got some cool DDOS evasion techniques you want to share
• maybe you're a developer who's pushing the boundaries of responsive web design and you've got a cool demo to show off
• perhaps you're involved in tech activism and you want to talk about open data/geek feminisim/data privacy
• maybe you're an academic who's doing some cool stuff with semantic web technologies
• if you've just done something nice in a niche language like Rust or Go and you want to spread the love
• or maybe you've just made something really cool (e.g., Tramchester) that you just want to show off

When?

Monthly feels right, and having a look in the important places (Lanyrd, the MadLab/TechHub calendars), the last Thursday of the month seems to be pretty clear, so if I said 28th November 2013, 7.30pm for the first one, would that suit?

Where?

This is the hard question. Basically, I'm looking for somewhere which is:

• easy to travel to and is accessible
• has a projector and a sound system we can use (ideally with mics or something similar)
• has reasonable facilities for post-talk chatting (i.e., doesn't turn off all the lights and start playing drum and bass at 96 dB)

Now, in my naivety, I'd hope venues like this would be available for free, but if they're not, then we'll need sponsors.

What Next?

Well, I'm hoping to draw on community experience for venue suggestions and then organise somewhere, and I'm going to need some speakers, so if you're interested in giving a 20-30 minute talk please let me know at chris@pling.org.uk, in the comments below or @cnorthwood on Twitter.

Oh, and some attendees too. If you're interested in attending, please let me know on Lanyrd!