Weeknotes #2 — Getting things off the ground

Here we are already. Our second weeknotes.

This is our attempt to keep everyone in the loop about what we’ve been up to at Sheffield Digital. We know it’s not always visible how we are promoting, connecting and representing the digital community, so hopefully these weeknotes shed some light and help us get a load off our chest(s) while we’re at it.

By the way, we’d love your feedback. Even if that’s just in the form of an applause via the relevant button here on Medium. Go on. Please clap.

Let’s get into it.

This from Mel…

Today has been a great week for getting things off the ground :-)

1. Sheffield College has started recruitment for the first cohort of software developer apprentices (yay! wahoo!). I’ve sent an email to all the employers who have been involved/interested to date telling you what you need to do next — please read and act on it. There’s also info in this post. I’m so pleased to see this happening, especially as we only started talking about it last autumn (trust me, that’s quick in the skills arena). Hats off to Steve Elliott and Bella Abrams at the College and the mighty Liz Wallis at Sero, who is a longtime advocate and campaigner for all things digital skills.
2. I’ve been working behind the scenes for a while with Mike Faulks (Ioetec) and Paul Wheway (Sheffield Hallam Uni) to find a way to get some kind of Sheffield cyber security special interest group off the ground. We’ve now got a first meeting confirmed for 23rd May and nearly 20 people signed up already. If you want to know more about this or come to the meeting, please let me know asap. (Note how I’ve refrained from saying, “I could tell you about it but then I’d have to kill you.” I think I should get extra points for that.)
3. Sheffield’s Women in Tech group (ShfWIT) is gathering momentum too thanks to the efforts of a number of people — too many to list here but “chapeau” to all of you. (More points for me for my cycle racing reference there.) There’s a mailing list to sign up to if you want to be kept in the loop and you can also follow @ShfWIT on the twitterz.
4. And the weather’s not been too bad either . . .

This from Chris…

(Note to self: I really need to drop things into these weeknotes as things happen, instead of trying to remember it all at the end of the week…)

So, I’ve got a couple of things on the back burner at the mo — an overdue post on the public WiFi, and one about Kollider’s plans (finally!). Both of these should see light next week.

It’s also the final week of voting for dotSHF in the Digital Leader awards, so I hope everyone has voted for it, it would be amazing to win! I’ve also had conversations with the new coordinator of dotSHF about how to run it and reach out, so there will be an announcement about that soon, as well as the website launch. We’d like to run some more Conflabs in specific domains in the second half of the year, too. As well as the digital conference of course.

And I’ve been involved with the 5G testbed bid, and will be feeding in to that, along with Sarah Lowi-Jones at Growth Sheffield, around the likely economic impact on the city and the local digital sector.

I published a piece about the legal challenge being brought against Spearmint Rhino in the CIQ, and we’ve had some responses about how their presence there has affected people. Please let us know your opinion about this, and participate in the campaigns if you’re so inclined.

I’ve also been preparing for the next SmartSheffield meetup, which is next Monday and will focus on citizen engagement, they are still a few tickets left if you’re interested in urban tech.

And I’m trying to progress the CDM Camp for Year 10 kids at the UTC. I’d love to hear from any digital media and content firms who would like to engage with them during the first week of July.

That’s about it for things this week — still lots on the to do list though :)

It’s Friday afternoon and I’m about to go to meet Paul Blomfield MP over at The Floow to discuss the local tech industry.

Have a lovely weekend you lovely people!

This from Iain…

The bank holiday has meant it’s been a quieter week on the content front, though we published both the Sheffield College and Spearmint Rhino posts mentioned above.

Next Tuesday, we are recording a recruitment special edition of the Sheffield Digital Podcast. We normally record on Fridays, so it could be that we both record and publish in the same week. Imagine that.

I’ll also be preparing the next edition of the newsletter. You can subscribe to that via our website. No. You should subscribe to the newsletter via our website.

And I hope to begin work in earnest on updating the Sheffield Digital website. It’s going to be a bit of a slow burn with incremental changes, so don’t expect a big reveal. It will be a tale of quiet improvements, all being well.