I’ve been running around with a press pass at b.TWEEN 08 today and writing up thoughts for The Mancunian Way.

There is something odd about b.TWEEN I can’t put my finger on. Maybe it’s because I’m used to conferences where the audience run the agenda, or that are very, very technical in content, but I’m sure there’s something else. I’ll work it out eventually.

This evening I was also interviewed for the Guardian Tech podcast - I blathered a bit, but hopefully something sensible will come out of it.

Anyway, plans as discussed have been postponed whilst I get on with my rather hectic schedule for a week or so. Stay tuned.

It seems like an age since the last one (in fact it was late February), so I’m pleased to announce the next co-working day:

http://manc-coworking.eventwax.com/13th-may

No networking, no OpenCoffee, just plain old straight format where those who want to meet up and discuss something can do, otherwise we crack on with work.

It’s the same day as GeekUp Manchester as well, so those of you travelling from outside of the city centre can get two events done in the same day and then feel really tired the next day.

I’ve resisted blogging this, as the BCS have been a little incompetent and booked a smallish lecture theatre for what is likely to be a well-attended talk, however there is a backup plan those of us with an ear to the ground will have in place, so here it is:

Free of charge evening talk organised in association with the Manchester branches of the BCS and IET.

‘Free Software in Ethics and Practice’ - speaker: Richard Stallman

Thursday 1st May, 2008 - Talk starts at 6:45pm (ends approx. 8:30pm) with refreshments from 6:15pm.

Venue: Room D1, Renold Building, University of Manchester, Sackville Street, Manchester M1 3BB

There is no need to book a place - just turn up on the night.

Note that last line is perhaps the most stupid move anybody has made for a talk in Manchester involving an internationally-renowned figure in the computer industry, ever. I could be proved wrong, but I somehow doubt it…

Abstract:

Richard Stallman will speak about the Free Software Movement, which campaigns for freedom so that computer users can cooperate to control their own computing activities. The Free Software Movement developed the GNU operating system, often erroneously referred to as Linux, specifically to establish these freedoms.

About the speaker:

Richard Stallman launched the development of the GNU operating system (see www.gnu.org) in 1984. GNU is free software: everyone has the freedom to copy it and redistribute it, as well as to make changes either large or small. The GNU/Linux system, basically the GNU operating system with Linux added, is used on tens of millions of computers today. Stallman has received the ACM Grace Hopper Award, a MacArthur Foundation fellowship, the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Pioneer award, and the the Takeda Award for Social/Economic Betterment, as well as several honorary doctorates.

He’s certainly well known as a controversial figure, so it sounds like it’s going to be an interesting evening.

How exactly I ended up agreeing to him staying at my flat, I’m still not 100% clear. I have though, and will be pleased to host him for the evening. I was always brought up to be a good host even to those I sometimes disagree about some issue with so I only hope the fact me being an organiser of the local BSD User Group isn’t going to cause xkcd re-enactments. :-)

At tonight’s GeekUp (Briton’s Protection - just 50 yards from the usual venue - 6pm), there is another social discussion event. This time, another area I spend a lot of time thinking about is up for consideration. From the announcement:

Discussion Topic: “The Future of the Internet”

• How do you see people using the internet in 5/10 years time?
  • What features do you want to see browsers supporting?
  • Will people still be using browsers? If not, what will they be using?
  • Does anyone actually use 3G video chat? Will VoIP mainstream follow too?
  • Will Google always be the number one search engine?
  • Will Google be even bigger? Perhaps it might run our lives …
  • Will IPv6 actually be adopted by the masses?
  • Anyone up for a 3G wireless dongle biometric implant to hook your memory up to the net?!
  • Semantic Web - is it the future? what does it mean?

How we intend to get through that lot in a couple of hours I have no idea. I expect I will be writing up notes and reporting back tomorrow if people can’t make it, but if you can make it, you should.

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.

Towards the end I was tired, hot and wanted to go home, however we came through and BarCamp was great. I wrote a general overview over at the MEN blog. I thought here I’d just re-iterate my thanks, and give you a heads up about the photos on flickr and the Google Group where we can keep the conversations going.

I slept for a good while yesterday and even today feel fatigued like never before. Which makes it all the odder that we’re already planning the second event, and for this year. I’ll let you know when the pieces are in place…

It’s only just dawning on me now that tomorrow over 100 people are going to be turning up at the Manchester Evening News headquarters and engaging in an event that has virtually no planning involved in it whatsoever.

There is no schedule, no idea of how many people want to talk, nor any indication of whether everybody who has signed up has really just conducted an elaborate hoax and I’ll be sat there all on my own all day long.

I’m currently experiencing slight nerves and fatigue, because you have no idea how much work it takes to organise an event without any real planning.

Everything is about guess work and executive decisions. How much food do we actually need? What if we end up with too much? How do we give the prizes away? What are the logistics of moving people in and out of the building? Given the nature of the event until this week I kept the answers as nothing more than sketches and figured I’d work it out “closer to the day”.

This week then has been about forming a clear picture of what is going to be involved and how to manage it all. It looks as though tomorrow is going to be a great day now, but it’s all still “are we really going to try and do this?”

I’m going to really enjoy Sunday morning, regardless.

This week also saw the birth of the Google Group (which in turn produced a plan for some of us to meet tonight at the Bull’s Head near Piccadilly around 7pm), and as expected a few people had to drop-out. Alas, the waiting list went for a burden mid-week, so I’m having to re-open registrations. As I write this there are 2 tickets left over at the signup page. There may be other tickets available over the course of today, but at 5pm the list is locked and if your name isn’t down, you’re not coming in.

I also want to give a big thanks in advance to two groups of people without whose help and understanding I wouldn’t have managed to get this done this week.

First, Adaptavist who hired me to produce a back-end accounts system which is now a fortnight over-due and running. They’ve been more forgiving and understanding than a humble contractor deserves, and I’m now looking forward to wrapping up this work today that has been delayed by constant BarCamp interruption. They’re sponsoring the after-party about half of us are going to as well because they’re that cool, and I owe them a big, big thanks.

Secondly, Liquid Bronze, who have been cheering me on and helping with some of the logistics. Today they’re helping move food around despite this also being the day they move office. Quite frankly, they deserve thanks for that alone, but Andy Threlfall being a friend who knows me too well has done the sensible thing of provoking me into sitting down and thinking about precise details that I would normally wing.

If things go to plan and tomorrow everything slots into place like it looks as though it will, it’s in no small part thanks to these guys.

When Niels Bohr made the quip I use in the title, it’s unclear if he was intentionally or accidentally witty, or simply making an assertion about the weirdness of the quantum World.

Regardless, the Turing Lecture - an annual lecture given in London and Manchester - last night concerned itself with the future. Specifically, “The Meaning of the 21st Century”, as interpreted by Dr James Martin, a man of some considerable repute.

I absolutely hate being critical and scathing of anybody, but on this occasion I find I have no choice. If Dr Martin should find himself reading this one day, I’d ask that he note that I am not attacking him as a person, but purely his ideas and his execution of those ideas.

I attended the showing of his film before the talk, and discussions afterwards confirmed I was not the only person who considered walking out. In fact, my companion during the film decided he had better places to be rather than hang around for the talk.

The reasons for finding it so annoying are many. I actually stopped counting mistakes I found in the film after about half an hour (never mind the sound mixing being bodged and the long pauses at points), but it could be summarised as saying the tone was patronising and arrogant.

The thesis was heavily planted in the realms of Liberal Conservatism - two of the more prominent politicians interviewed were Chris Patten and John McCain with no counter-argument offered from anybody involved in “Leftist” politics. His answer to solving the problems of the World could effectively be described as US foreign policy for the last 60 years: export democracy and literacy and make foreigners realise they’re a bit thick - a policy which so far has led to where we are today.

Rather more disturbing for me was his attitude towards religion. Once in the film and once in the talk he talked about the “problems of Islam and religious fundamentalism”. He seems to think that the problems in the Middle East are purely rooted in Islamic fundamentalism and no blame can be apportioned to Christian fundamentalism driving a neo-Conservative agenda in the US, or that Israel has ever lifted a finger in anger or in error. He generalises a point about “all religions needing to learn the true values of their founders” but does not offer a method by which that can happen.

At one point in the film he makes a point after an Indian farmer has stated “God will help us” that “poor people need to be taught rational thought”. Sorry Jimmy, that’s just fundamentalism in another flavour.

I use this word carefully, but politically his arguments stray into what can only be described as a fascism, albeit a fascism he would want conducted by what Marx would have called “the proletariat”.

There is also something absurdly hypocritical about a film discussing the obscenity of the Californian lifestyle narrated by Michael Douglas, or the dangers of global warming being described by Martin appearing in a different city in a different country every 30 seconds. I stopped counting at 15 countries I think he visited to make the film, and in his talk he made a reference to “a few days ago I was in Cape Town” - it’s good to know he’s doing his bit for sorting out CO2 emissions!

So, onto the talk proper and I think the best way to rip this one to shreds is to go through the predictions he made. Many of you know that I think futurology is about as accurate as long-term weather forecasting, but with a difference: futurologists are exhibiting their hopes and fears. It’s hard to say whether he just collected predictions he considered credible for scientific reasons, or whether these form a good poll on his inner hopes and fears, but I’ll let you make your own mind up.

• Near-infinite bandwidth: in the future we will have bandwidth - “many thousands of a terabytes a second” - so fast that it may as well be considered infinite. Never mind history has always shown that we find a way to use nearly all of it almost immediately, there will be plenty to go around.
• Nanotechnology widespread: virtually everything manufactured in the 21st century will have nanotech in it somewhere. Some aspects of this I can see, but the extent he has predicted would be like suggesting in 1875 that every home in the World would have a steam engine in it by 1975.
• Ultra-intelligent computing but not human-like intelligence: this one confused me. He’s giving the Turing lecture. Turing described a successful AI as being one that passed “The Turing Test” - it would be indistinguishable from humans. He asserts that this is wrong, that intelligence will be “more alien”. Humans define intelligence, and therefore the only AI we will recognise as intelligent is one that which mimics our own. Even weirder though is how he thought this would combine with nanotech and by the end of the 21st century some humans would have millions of nanobots in their brain fluid using a “Brain Computer Interface” enhancing our mental function to “do the equivalent work of a PhD in 3 minutes” all communicating with each other via “wireless networks”.
• Automated evolution and genetic engineering: yes, I know evolution is already automated. What he means is that we will be able to kick-start it again for certain functions in plant, animal and human life. One prediction in the film is that 20 years from now people will be able to buy DIY gene modification kits for plants and they will design new forms of plant life.
• Use of quantum entanglement: cryptography moving to quantum? Well, yes. He doesn’t seem to have considered the true consequences of quantum computing though, specifically in the realms of breaking cryptography, or it’s use in science in a broader sense. His thoughts on “a friend who is a physicist” using quantum entanglement for more accurate brain scans were interesting though.
• Transhumanism: in effect, using technology to improve humanity in any way possible. Think rejuvenation technology currently being researched, the brain/computer interface, evolving ourselves, using stem cell research to “reset” our immune systems, and so on.
• Pebble bed nuclear reactors: I think he got confused at one point here because he suggested such a reactor could produce 180W of energy - enough to power three lightbulbs. I think he meant MW. Anyway, the idea is that this uses 10%-enriched uranium (which can’t be used for weapons) in a form that is impossible to extract, and using a design that makes it impossible to meltdown. The science looks interesting, and I’m prepared to go and research it but when he talks about pebble bed, it sounds like he might have shares in a company developing the technology. Apparently “there are Indians very interested in Thorium pebbles” - lovely.

Now, let’s talk about “Lovelock city”, his predicted “city of the future”. If the temperature rises by 4C we will need to build new cities somewhere cooler in which to live. This is reasonable according to Martin because we have seen the building work in Dubai over the last seven years prove that such cities are possible. It’s left as an exercise to the reader to work out the CO2 impact of building a new city the size of Dubai in the Arctic circle.

• Hydroponics: given the predictions he’s made about the lack of water available to us in the future, he thought hydroponics was the answer. Most students will be familiar with hydroponics thanks to their use for growing crops with which they’re more familiar.
• Magnetic Levitation Trains: which will run at “440km/h” back to our normal cities. You can always spot a crackpot futurologist when they get excited by Maglev trains. They’re horrendously expensive, stupidly noisy, hard to maintain, potentially quite dangerous, difficult to build and there is only one commercial maglev train running anywhere in the World. Still, the World will be full of them soon enough.
• Grand Masked Balls: I’m not making this up. Apparently the winters will be so dark in Lovelock city we will all attend masked balls. No, I don’t know why either.

One of my biggest concerns was that Martin had ideas, but no sense of execution. Ideas are worthless without some plan to bring them about. A political idea without a policy to drive it is effectively useless. At the end of his talk, he suggested 12 “policies” that would fix the World. The issue here is how you would bring about these “policies”.

• Manage the ecology of the planet: given we don’t really understand the climate models, ecological models and water cycle properly I don’t see how he can develop policies around this. Just because this is “the age of management” it doesn’t mean we can manage unknowns. Even when they’re known, the one group of people who know how to screw things up are managers.
• Decline in population to 4 billion: the World has too many people, apparently. Specifically too many Chinese and Indian people. But no matter, Martin has found an answer: women who are taught to read have fewer children. I figured his slogan for this could be “Women who read don’t breed!” - what did I tell you about straying into fascism? Anyway, a falling population is a good thing according to Martin, but I wonder who is going to tell the World population that this would mean all in this generation have to work until we were in our 80s in order to produce enough food for everybody and it would be the end of the state pension until the population had normalised down to his “ideal” 4 billion?
• Save water and improve soil: do you know how you save water and improve soil? You don’t eat meat. You don’t, I don’t, nobody does. It’s sensible, sane advice at an ecological level, but how are you going to convert a global population they can’t eat meat any more?
• Ocean management: we also need to reduce the amount of fish we eat in order to get fish stocks back up. If you avoid fishing certain parts of the ocean for a decade or more, we can fix the current depletion levels. Seems reasonable, but again how do you bring this about? It requires international consensus which can’t even be achieved at the moment around whaling!
• Millennium goals refined annually: do you have any idea how long it took to get the original goals agreed? Evaluation of progress against an objective is one thing, but annual debate is just going to lead to a quagmire of international politics
• Build up food reserves: politicians call those “food mountains”. They’re not very popular.
• Closing down of shanty towns: and move the people where? Let’s take a “shanty town” in a modern Western country: England. In Salford, “experts” decided that back-to-back terrace housing was inappropriate. So families who have paid off their mortgages are finding themselves in a position of compulsory purchase orders for their £60,000 houses and are being told they need to move. Don’t worry though - the new houses will be much nicer, albeit at a cost of £120,000. For a retired couple, this is just untenable. They’re happy where they are. They like their house. They want more neighbours. They want their community. If it’s happening in Salford, I’ll guarantee it’ll happen in developing nations.
• Religious tolerance: see above. Good luck, but Martin’s current theological ideas seem to favour neo-Conservative Christian fundamentalism.
• Tight non-proliferation controls: what more can be done? We’ve seen the NPT abandoned because any game theorist will tell you that Prisoner’s dilemma applies.
• Control of enriched uranium: that’s working wonderfully right now isn’t it? Look how friendly relations are between the US and Iran. How about this instead: develop foreign policies that don’t provoke other nations into wanting to attack you. Ron Paul in the US has a cracking little foreign policy that would stop all threats against the US - get the US army bases around the globe shut down, and if Iran wants nukes well, that’s its right. It sounds dangerous, but why exactly would anybody attack the US if they no longer looked like imperial conquering aggressors? This is obviously too insane for Dr Martin, who prefers an option that hasn’t worked so far and never will.
• Elimination of nukes: again, prisoner’s dilemma applies.
• “Understanding of dangers”: in other words, listen to Dr Martin some more

The truly sad part of all this is that in 2005 he gave $100 million to Oxford University to create The James Martin 21st Century School at Oxford. How many schools could he have built in Africa with that money? How many pebble bed reactors could he have built? How many alternative energy sources could he have invested in?

Yet he spent the money establishing a school named after himself, so that he could talk about his flawed ideas with some sense of credibility. His ideas aren’t just silly: they’re dangerous.

I expect Manchester University will ask him to invest in a center here, and given their uncritical view of his ideas he might accept.

If he turns up in Manchester again, I’m now prepared for an argument.

UPDATE: The link was broken earlier, should be fine now

It worked well last month, so we’re going to give co-working and opencoffee together another shot.

Please note that you need to type codes into the promo code boxes - “CW” if you’re coming for Co-working all day, and “OC” if you’re planning on just the “OpenCoffee” bit.

Hope to see you there!

I should have learned by now: January is a rubbish month for most things.

Not least because it follows a time of high spirits, but the bleakness of watching people fail their resolutions, struggle with credit card bills and deal with a slow business cycle would normally make it bad enough. Watching the pound lose face in the markets, people whine about a credit crunch and for several businesses I deal with to baton down the hatches just made it all the more depressing for this young entrepreneur.

Regardless of how bleak it was in other ways, January has been a great month for events in Manchester, and I thought it might be nice to give people a quick overview of what has been going on. In other words: Sorry I’ve been so quiet, here’s something to make up for it.

One highlight for me this month was the fact BarCamp Manchester was announced and booked out in less than a week. There’s still quite a bit of work to be done to get the final few pieces of the jigsaw together, but I’m confident it’s going to be a great event. If not, well, I’ll probably insist it had nothing to do with me!

Another highlight was the new format Co-working day and OpenCoffee that was a bit of an experiment that seemed to work really well for the co-workers. We need to get the OpenCoffee attendance up, but other than it worked well. In fact, the idea is so tempting that Leeds are going to be experimenting with the format in March. I’ll be opening up registration for the next Manchester one on Monday morning (planned to happen on the 26th February, space strictly limited), so keep your eyes peeled if you want in on it.

At the last Co-working day incidentally, it was decided to form a co-operative with a view to taking on a space permanently. Watch this space.

Also this month I managed to sit down and have a coffee face-to-face with Craig Smith who is the man behind O’Reilly GMT and I’ve agreed to start putting more content up there of a more generic European tech nature - at the moment it feels like a cross between an events listing blog and the occasional PR run. I’m working up story ideas at the moment, but if any of you have ideas on how you would like to see it develop, let me know.

The Northern geek scene has been developing in other ways as well. In the last month we’ve seen Manoj step up his events with the re-launch of the NW Startup 2.0 site. Always the man of ambition, he’s going for three regular events each tailored to an audience that four years ago probably didn’t exist in Manchester. I’ll be going to as many of them as time affords, keen to meet up with people who don’t make it to the more geeky events.

And of course those lovely Yorkshire types have been stretching out ahead of us North Westerners with the launch of NorthPack. Since the death of afeeda I’ve missed having a single place to track the whole of the local scene’s blogosphere. Good work lads.

Also, there appears to have been a miscommunication about my anatomy in the last month, as I got an invite to the very first Manchester Geek Girls Dinner being run by Valerie de Leonibus. It sounds like a hoot, so I hope it builds into a regular event like many others have around the UK and abroad.

All good stuff.

February and March are already looking like busy months, and with all that plus my own business to sort out it looks like the whole of 2008 is going to be filled with inspiration, communication and ideas. How on earth can we fail? :-)

It’s only been a week since I announced the opening of registration for BarCamp Manchester taking place on 1st March. As I write this, out of the 100 slots available, just 6 remain at the signup page.

UPDATE: We’re now full. No more tickets available!

I might, inspired by this ticket on eBay for TED 2008 auction mine off! :-)

This shows how strong a community we have in the area now. If we had organised a BarCamp here 4-5 years ago, it would have struggled to get to the same number of participants.

It was always a slight risk to announce this before every last piece of the jigsaw was in place, but we now have momentum enough to want to make it a big success. Thanks to all of you have are coming along already, and if you want to come along and haven’t grabbed a ticket already I suggest you do so quickly.

Over the last year or two, there have been many plans to hatch a BarCamp in our own dear city of Manchester. For some time the NWDC meetings revolved around trying to find a venue that would be a good fit, we could afford and that would meet our original requirements of two nights with the whole of the night spent on-site.

Late last year, Andrew Disley of GeekUp and I had a chat about being more realistic. We cut the scope down to one day, I went and talked to people about sponsoring the biggest cost of the day - food and drink - on the assumption we’d somehow find a free venue. We could use MDDA if we had to, even though it would be a little cramped.

Somehow I ended up being in the position of half-announcing it and saying to people “look, keep your diaries clear around here”. The moment I did that, it was like an entire community sprang into life and offers of help and sponsorship started landing in my inbox. Within just a couple of weeks a venue we hadn’t even thought of approaching came to us, met with John Keys of MDDA and myself, and confirmed they wanted in.

The space at the headquarters of the Manchester Evenings News is almost a perfect fit for what we need in terms of capacity and layout, and MEN Media are really excited about meeting a group of people on their doorstep who are full of ideas. Match made in heaven. Well, if not heaven, made in Manchester which is near enough. :-)

And so it was on Friday night I was able to throw an e-mail out to various local mailing lists and say “hey, just to let you know - BarCamp Manchester is ON!”.

We broke the eventwax signup page straight away, and now nearly half of the 100 tickets available have gone in less than 48 hours.

It looks like it’s going to be a great event and I expect by the end of next week we’ll be out of spare tickets so if you want to come, sign up now.

Manoj Ranaweera is an interesting friend to have. The amount of time we seem to spend talking to each other confuses some people, but the reason is simple: I struggle to understand the World the way he sees it, and I suspect the opposite is true, and we both want to try and cross a little bit into the other’s to see what we can learn from it. For me, it’s been really beneficial. I hope the same is true the other way around.

I’m not at all that surprised though that he has aired some reservations about what I’m doing to OpenCoffee, by slotting it into a co-working day. We’re good enough friends that we can each sustain a little criticism from each other.

That said, I thought it might be an idea to clarify what I’m up to.

As I explained to him, my reasoning is pretty simple. There are two big problems with OpenCoffee Manchester as it has gone so far: regular, consistent attendance and grassroots innovation.

We get sporadic attendance because people are busy with other things, and often there are not enough “doers” in the room to make an idea like edocr (spawn of OpenCoffee) to happen. I wanted to try and change things so that more business people could meet more developers.

But I knew the developers wouldn’t come.

When I go out to the developer community and I say “come on, let’s go network in the middle of the day” I get a pretty solid response: no way. Businesses in this sector in Manchester are small, often micro-sized and are incredibly busy. They need some sort of guaranteed payoff to giving up 1-2 hours of their time in the middle of the day, and ideally one that results in cash in their hand. OpenCoffee was never meant to give that, so has traditionally attracted a more conservative business audience who want to get to know more people in the community. All good stuff, but not where I think it can reach its potential.

So, we give people who can’t justify a few hours a way of justifying a whole day. It’ll be like a little mini-Geek conference, where we discuss ideas and work out ways of making them happen. Or we just get on with some work if nothing appeals that day - if nothing is going on, no loss. There’s still good company, quiet space to work and a bit of a drink afterwards. Oh, and in the morning, some people who understand finance, marketing, execution, they’ll be around to talk to if you want to find out what that is all about.

It’s about giving two core audiences exactly what they need at the same in the same place but giving them different things. It’s almost like a magic trick - each side sees what they want to see, but in the middle is something else going on. The people who want an hour of networking get an hour of networking. The people who want co-working get co-working. A few will cross between the two, and that’s where the interesting stuff might happen.

Yes, it might work, it might not. For at least a month or two, let’s give it a go and we’ll see how it develops. If nobody is interested in OpenCoffee but is into Co-working three months from now, we still have a win. If it goes the other way, we still have a win. What I’d be really surprised is if in three months time we don’t have a group interested in doing either.

We’re going to hold another co-working day next Tuesday the 22nd January 2008, and also include OpenCoffee as part of the schedule. This means there will be hardcore around all day, and a few people might show up for an hour to do some networking around 10am.

We’re going to be a little bit more structured this time around, and we also have a few extra spots to get more people in the room.

Ideally, you should come along with something you want to talk about. It could be about wanting to learn some SEO voodoo, share some experience, or you might just have a crazy idea you want to shoot around the room

9am: Start

9am - 10am: Introductions, and ideas for discussion later

10am - 11/12am: OpenCoffee - people turn up to network, meet people, they’re not going to be there for the whole day. Get on with some work if you want to.

Lunch - 4pm: Co-working, we can schedule discussions in this time as well outside of the main work area, and we’re going to try and find a way to feed you (but there’s decent butty shops nearby as well).

There will be free (Fairtrade) coffee and tea available throughout the day. If somebody wants to ‘sponsor’ lunch let me know, but I’ll try and work something out. To be honest, I’m winging this… :-)

Total capacity for the co-working is 20 including me, and you must register here:

http://opencoffee.eventwax.com/january-co-working-day

First come, first served, no exceptions.

If you just want to come along at 10am for an hour or so for the OpenCoffee bit, you can just turn up - no need to book.

On the back of my business cards I have 10 quotes which on discovering them the first time, I found to be something that resonated with me, and that I hope might resonate with potential clients, business partners and friends.

The first of those is a famous quote by E.W. Dijkstra that for me sums up the reason I got into the industry in the first place:

“Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes”

I also recall Ted Nelson’s talk about Transliterature at OpenTech 2005, where he also summed up why computers fascinated me as an 11-year old learning to program the first time:

“I studied Computer Science to help change the World, not to automate trivial crap”

There is something bigger here in our industry we refuse to acknowledge. There is something deeper beneath the surface that all the talk of social networks, long tails and user-generated content doesn’t get anywhere near.

This ember of a notion has been inside me for a while now, and it’s starting to turn into a small fire. I don’t know where it’s going, but what I do know is that I’m now getting more and more passionate for “big picture” stuff. The kind of things that need investment and great people.

I’m rather pleased then, with all this “big picture stuff” going on in my head, that this year’s Turing Lecture is being held again at Manchester University and that it has just been announced as being given by James Martin, producer of the film Target Earth - note, not the 1950s B-Movie, alas! However, it’s big in its approach, and I’m looking forward to watching it just before Dr Martin gives his talk.

I still haven’t decided what 2008 is going to be about for me professionally, but I do know it’s going to be less about me and finding ways to reconnect to that Dijkstra quote in my work. The Turing lecture will be a timely reminder of some of the issues facing us - and maybe sometime this year those of us in Manchester can start thinking about how to work out some of the solutions. Maybe.

I’ve just decided “Maybe” is my new favourite word.

Happy New Year.