Innovation in Software

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.

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? :-)

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.

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.