I wrote this article about a week ago, but resisted posting it. Reading it back, I’m now even more convinced I’m right.

The simple truth is, OpenCoffee as a format doesn’t work in Manchester and we should be glad about it.

Here’s the basic format of an OpenCoffee meeting:

• Meet in a coffee shop (or hosted environment with coffee available) early-/mid-morning
• Meet people involved in startups who want to network
• Ideally grow businesses through that networking

Now, here’s an exercise. Spot the two big reasons from that format why it struggles in Manchester.

First, there is timing. The people who would be interested in meeting developers, entrepreneurs and technologists in Manchester tend to fall into one of three categories:

• Working for somebody else, in a salaried job. They can’t do OpenCoffee because their boss would notice their absence doing networking for the new company they’re about to start.
• Working for themselves and insanely busy and so find it hard to justify taking a couple of hours out of their schedule just to meet up
• Working strange hours that means they’re almost certainly fast asleep 7am-11am which are the “prime” traditional times for an OpenCoffee

Then there is the fact that OpenCoffee comes with an agenda: I am here to meet people to help my business. That just doesn’t work in Manchester. Ideas flow freely and sometimes get turned into business agendas, but the one thing that will kill an event in Manchester is an explicit attempt to progress your own agendas. Just meet, chat, see whether there is anything you can do for each other, if not just see what is going on.

People in London and New York don’t “get” this. They hate it. They need OpenCoffee. We hate the London events, and we should be glad about that. It’s what makes our community ours.

So, let’s design the perfect event for Manchester then:

• It should probably happen in the evenings when most people are about
• It should have a focus, but not an agenda
• The networking should be casual, not explicit
• Given it’s after work, some people will want beer, not coffee

Congratulations, we’ve just designed GeekUp. What’s that? You want investors in the room and a more structured event? Oh, OK, well, that’s NW Startup 2.0. You don’t want to pay for NW Startup? Well wait until the next BarCamp and we’ll try and get some investors in the room.

Remind me again, exactly what the point of OC would be if these events exist?

Co-working is likely to go on incidentally - it makes sense for those who want to explore ideas together and collaborate in a way that doesn’t feel like a wasted day. OpenCoffee - for Manchester at least - is dead.

If people - and I mean people prepared to actually show up, because personally I’m tired of doing the announcements knowing it’ll be dead - howl in protest I’ll run it one more time to see if there is real interest, but I suggest that for now we just let it go.