“Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so.” – Douglas Adams

Thanks to Twitter, Facebook and blogs, it’s no secret within the local geek scene that I had a mild health scare around this time last week.

Note, for somebody who has never been to hospital other than as a visitor, a “mild health scare” feels like the scariest thing in the World.

The short version is, something odd happened, it could have been a lot worse but the diagnosis is ultimately positive in that it is not the very worst it could have been.

However…

It scared me. I’ll be honest: I work harder than most, I enjoy my social life more than most, and I have found it hard over the last three years to say “no” to anybody. I want to be involved in everything, if not organising it. I have the kind of lifestyle that worries mothers and makes fathers yearn for their own youth.

To find myself in the position I did made me realise I was risking everything

Between the scare and the diagnosis I had a lot of time to think about how that strategy was failing me, my family and my clients. I have started to evaluate what it is I want to continue to do that I did before, and what I am happy to consider left behind, dead.

There are lots of impacts that have emerged, wide-ranging in their scope. However, I shall limit myself to a discussion of the professional impacts here:

Basically, If I work 60 hours per week (as I have done), I get ill. We all do. You can perhaps do this for a short period of time or doing menial work, but if you’re doing abstract thinking to deadlines at that load for three years, you will break. Therefore including travel, I’m not prepared in future to go above 45 hours per week.

Going to geek events, reading mailing lists and RSS, etc. I now have to consider work.

Given my clients and other business need me for about 40 hours a week, I therefore have to be selective about the other things I do. Whilst I will remain a champion of Fly The Coop, NWDC, and remain a vociferous supporter of the local tech industry and help it when I can, I will be:

• Unsubscribing from most mailing lists I’m on
• Going to fewer geek events
• Saying “no” to more requests (but please don’t let that stop you requesting)
• Spending more time doing the things I think I do best

I don’t expect most people will notice or care, but I do note that people sometimes notice when I’m “quiet” for a while, so this is advance warning. I am no longer receiving mail for most groups I’ve been active with regarding email. I will show my face at about a quarter of the events I did before.

The flip side, is this blog is about to return to the regular, well-researched writing that highlighted its early days. For blog readers, this is excellent news.

Good luck to all of those in the community – I will be back, but only once a few other things are sorted out.

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? :-)

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.

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.

As Manoj said, I am now the lead on organising OpenCoffee Manchester. Manoj has done some great work on bringing these events to the North, so I just hope I don’t completely break everything and nobody turns up from now on.

One of my goals is to give these events a slightly clearer agenda and to make them geared more towards collaboration rather than networking. There’s going to be no major changes, but I’m fascinated by some of the success stories of past OpenCoffee events.

For example, as I understand it edocr was effectively conceived of at OpenCoffee and the partners attending decided to take an equity split in it. It wasn’t until several people (particularly Manoj) prodded me last month into releasing flaky code and “getting on with it” that I got around to releasing vagueware.com. At the same meeting I saw a prototype for a project that was discussed at a meeting a few months ago and several offered feedback that will get reflected in the code before launch. I’ve met people who I already know I’m going to end up collaborating with in future.

OpenCoffee Manchester then isn’t just about networking. It’s about finding people who you can work with and getting on with it. It’s about quickly developing ideas. Nobody intended for it to be like that – although Manoj has been an instigator in many of the success stories – but I think that’s where we need to set out the agenda for the future. A kind of mini-Project Sahara whilst we wait for that project to show results and to get buy-in from the key players in this city.

Of course it’s also a nice way to spend a Tuesday morning once a month.

I hope to see you all at the Starbucks behind Central Library next month on Tuesday 27th November, starting at 10am. This will be our last meeting of 2007, as the December meeting would have landed on the 25th – I think we all have alternative plans for that date – so it will be interesting to hear what people want to do from 22nd January onwards.

Today as a first event, it was only attended by a small handful of people but the mix was good and the conversation was really interesting.

Rhys Jones whose current business card – you get the impression he is a serial entrepreneur, and therefore business cards are transitory – currently says he’s doing interesting things at Accountis, but he showed me a cool piece of code he’s been working on.

I won’t blurt out what the deal is, but it’s the first time I’ve had to stop myself from giving somebody a standing ovation in the middle of a Starbucks: a cool idea, well executed, a clear path to monetisation, and you’ll hear about it a lot in coming weeks/months. I see a lot of code, and a lot of great ideas, but I wasn’t expecting that this morning and it caught me off-guard. It convinced me there really are people out there coming up with innovative ideas and executing them well in the region, and we just need to get talking to each other more.

Ed French was there from Enterprise Ventures and we had a great conversation around investment in software companies in general, and talked about Co-working ideas in Manchester a great deal. His angle on it was interesting when it came to getting it bootstrapped.

I talked a little about my business model, and there was interest in how I planned to grow it organically. Maybe it is just that Ed’s a good salesman, but I’m half-tempted to go out and talk to investors to see if this can get bootstrapped in a better way than through organic growth. The point I discussed was that too often we’re worried as developers about losing control of the company, or even the idea, but that comes at a cost of not getting really great advice from people with a vested interest in making it work. I’ve ‘recruited’ a customer to take an interest, and that’s helping, but the lack of cashflow within my business requires me to take on work elsewhere. That means he’s not getting the rapid iterative development needed to make it work: in a sense that model is working then, as it’s exposing my weaknesses, which is the most valuable part of a beta programme.

Also keen to talk about Co-working was Phil Hemsted of Yuuguu. It would seem that there is a real appetite for the kind of collaborative office I’m talking about within the business community, and there was a lot of discussion about how to make it happen, how to get money to get it started and how to make sure there was a great mix of people involved. I’m hoping to start getting more concrete terms around this over the coming weeks, but talking to people who are enthusiastic about it is always a good motivator to getting on with it.

I’ll definitely be trying to get to these events in future despite the early AM start. It would be great to see more developers and entrepreneurs turn up, as there was general consensus that too many people worry about keeping ideas secret and keeping their head in a bucket.

I’m going to try and get more people I know at start-up stage going along just to shoot ideas around. Whilst at the moment it still has a business feel to it – I was the only person not wearing a suit – I think it could act as one of those great little incubators of geek/business collaboration if we all give it a go.

See you there next week, and hopefully I’ll have worked out how my alarm clock works by then…

First up, there is the first dedicated Northwest Ruby User Group meeting happening tomorrow (Wednesday the 17th) evening. Things kick off around 18:30, and it should be interesting to see who turns up. The agenda for this talk is “What’s new in Rails 1.2” which means those of you too lazy to watch the svn commit logs on edge rails can catch up. It’s hosted by the lovely people at MDDA.

One of the highlights next week is the 2007 BCS/IET Turing Lecture – now fully booked, but will be available online afterwards, and I’ll sure to link to it here – which this year will be given by Grady Booch, Chief Scientist of IBM. The talk is entitled ‘The promise, the limits, and the beauty of software’ and the synopsis will sound compelling if you’ve liked some of my longer articles on this blog. Personally, I’m really looking forward to it.

Next up is the developer showcase for Windows Vista, back at MDDA again. This event is basically a sales showcase. I’m attending, I admit, to assess competition. I don’t think it does me any good to remain ignorant of what Microsoft are up to, even if I can’t as yet see a compelling reason to adopt the technology. This year is going to predominantly be about helping people move to open platforms for me, and Vista is certainly not that. Even so, I’ll attend and blog my rant on my return, I’m sure.

That’s followed on the same evening by the Manchester Geek Dinner over at the excellent Shimla Pinks which is strictly RSVP, 18:00 drinks for dinner at 19:30. For £20 you can get a decent meal with drinks at Shimlas and the food is renowned across the region. I must be a glutton for Microsoft punishment as the MS guys will be at that as well, so it would be great if a couple of Unix types want to attend and we can keep each other company. :-)

On the 30th January, the Manchester Literary and Philosophical guys have another in their series of talks, this time at Manchester Lecture Theatre in All Saints West (MMU) for Professor Simon Schaffer’s lecture on the relationship between the British Empire and Science. I like history, I like science, sounds better than staying in.

After that, if you want to see a second type of launch event intended as a more general showcase of Vista, with security highlights for developers, on the 31st you can head back to MDDA for a Manchester VBUG.net event which will have you covered.

After that lot, we return to another monthly cycle of regular meets. On the first Tuesday (the 6th) we’ll have the Manchester BSD Unix User Group which meets as ever at the Briton’s Protection on Great Bridgewater Street. This is very casual, and half the attendees don’t even run BSD any more, so feel free to come along if you just want to hang out in a pub with some Unix types. We don’t bite, providing I remembered the prescriptions.

The following Tuesday is the GeekUp meeting, on the second Tuesday as ever and always well attended. Right now, there is some debate on the mailing to replace the February meet-up with a – wait for it – roller skating disco meetup. I’m not making this up. It may be that this gets added on as an extra event, but some people want to do a replacement for the normal meeting. Check the website for updates.

If I think back to a few years ago, there was nothing in Manchester for geeks to attend other than 2600. Even last year there was little out there. It might be that they always were out there, but now word is getting around and so more people are discovering them. MDDA seem to be keen to get stuck in and lend a hand in terms of providing a venue, and the rest of us are certainly getting creative about what we want to meet up over. The tools out there – upcoming.org, the geekup afeeda, the mailing lists – are all helping too. 2007 looks like a good year to be a sociable geek in Manchester.