Weeknotes #10: After the AGM
Here are our weeknotes from last week (w/c 9 July 2018).
As you might imagine, there was one significant event that occupied our thoughts — our Annual General Meetup last Wednesday evening! But there is plenty more for both us and you to digest too. Don’t forget to follow us here on Medium or give us a great big clap if you find this useful.
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This from Mel…
Never, ever again will I schedule an event without checking the possible dates of important football matches! Who would have thought that, when we set the date for Sheffield Digital’s first Annual General Meetup, it would coincide with England playing in a World Cup semi-final??
Never mind, thanks to some excellent tech wrangling by Mr Dymond and the unflagging patience and support of the events team at SHU, we had our AGM and watched the football at the same time.
Shame we couldn’t do anything about the result, but I take consolation from the fact that we still managed to have a great time at the event and we got lots of excellent feedback from our members about the future direction of Sheffield Digital. More on that as it all comes together, plus we’ll have a video of the presentation and a podcast special edition from the event ready for you in the next couple of weeks.
Friday was a big Sheffield Digital day for me as well. In the morning, I attended a Sheffield City Region workshop called “Made Smarter in the SCR — Accelerating Digital Adoption in Manufacturing.”
Hosted by the AMRC at Factory 2050, the workshop brought together digital suppliers, manufacturers and various support organisations to see if we could generate ideas for some pilot activity that the LEP could support.
I was there to bring the perspective of the digital industries and because of the work that Sheffield Digital has already done with the AMRC and with Barnsley’s Connected Manufacturing project.
In my three-minute segment, I had three main points to get across:
- Don’t expect digital businesses to do the work of educating manufacturers — they’ve got too much else to do.
- Address the supply chain — the region needs to create more new, specialist digital businesses.
- Understand that digital adoption is about change and culture, not just technology.
I stayed to take part in some of the workshopping, but couldn’t be there to the end, so I’ll be interested to see what comes out of the morning and whether the LEP sets up a programme to support some useful pilot activity.
Then, I met up with Paul Wheway from Sheffield Hallam and Mike Faulks from Ioetec to talk about how to move things forward on establishing a local cyber-security hub/network. The good news is that both Hallam and the University of Sheffield are definitely interested in supporting this. We just need to work out the mechanics.
Looking ahead to next week, I’ll be continuing the ‘digital meets manufacturing’ theme with another meeting with AMRC contacts and I’m looking forward to seeing lots of people at Freelancer Friday at Sheffield Tech Parks.
This from Chris…
Well, not sure I need to say anything more about the AGM. It was a great event in the end and I thoroughly enjoyed it, footy result notwithstanding (it looked so on after Trippier scored, eh. Bloody hell.). And I also think we got our points across well — I look forward to seeing the video of our update talk.
Anyway, here are some other things that have been happening.
It’s Freelancer Friday this coming Friday, which I’m hoping will generate a new buzz around the Cooper Lounge and is another great way to support Sheffield Digital (members also get a discount!).
Kollider announced their partnership with Jon Perry’s Tamper and Depot Bakery, as well as Peddler’s Market. I’m really pleased that food and drink will play such a role in the new tech hub, and that it is planning on being an open venue from 8am till 11pm at night.
Megaverse has set up their VR scanning rig at Sheffield Hallam, and will be experimenting with live 3D broadcast to VR and AR devices this month. Check out the blog post to see how to attend the showcase on the 27th July.
At Geekbrekky on Friday morning, I met and chatted to Nick Russell, who is a policy advisor at DCMS and involved in advising the government on their Brexit strategy as it affects the digital industries. He’d very much like to engage in more conversation with local tech firms around this to feed concerns back directly to ministers.
It would be great to organise a Policy Conflab event around this, and that’s something I’m going to work on with him. But in the meantime, if you’d like to talk to Nick about it, let me know and we’ll coordinate a Geekbrekky when we can all be there to chat.
And on Friday afternoon, I attended the launch and first workshop of people.SHF, the people-oriented domain of the dotSHF Digital Coalition. It brings people together around health and wellbeing, digital inclusion and benefits and welfare (this is a change from previous iterations of the domain model and still needs to be properly reflected).
It was a good session. People came together who ordinarily do not talk to each other. It was especially interesting to hear about the very specific problems around things like the imminent Sheffield rollout of the Universal Credit benefits system, which assumes so much about access to and ability to use digital services.
These challenges will be reflected in the Trello board associated with the people.SHF domain, where people will be able to engage and explore potential solutions together. Look out for more developments and communications around this, as well as the other domains that form dotSHF.
Finally, my “pause for thought” this week is around economic inclusion and the contrast between this article by James Bloodworth in Unherd: “Why we can’t ignore the working-class identity crisis” and Sheffield Digital member Anthony Turner’s attempted defense of his Tesco Hackathon crown this week.
Ant is a delivery driver for Tesco Extra in Chesterfield, and is a self-taught app developer and two-time winner of Tesco’s internal hackathon. I think he’s an inspiration and Tesco are very lucky to have him. But it also makes me wonder where all the other Ant Turners out there are…
This from Iain…
It was great to see so many people attend the AGM despite the clash with the football! I interviewed a few people and got some interesting quotes about the digital scene in Sheffield, as well as Sheffield Digital itself. My plan is to edit those interviews into a short, special edition of the podcast.
For me, the AGM was also a great chance to speak to Sheffield Digital’s supporters and members directly. Chris and Mel do all the hard yards, of course, but it was extremely nice to get lots of positive feedback on some of the communications work we’ve been doing, especially the podcast.
Getting ready for the AGM took up a fair bit of time last week, so this week I am looking forward to getting a few of these blog posts up and on to this old internet thing of ours. I’m also really pleased that we are interviewing Chris Roberts, Founder and CEO of Nimble Approach, plus plenty more besides.
And finally, I am going to be at Freelancer Friday on… Friday! Apart from being able to bag a discounted ticket as a Sheffield Digital individual member, I think the event is a great idea. I love the challenge of doing my own thing, but I definitely feel like I miss and need the input of others from time to time. Should be good!
