Everything Ignite UK North

Our first Ignite was a massive success, from our point of view. I can’t believe it went as well as it did. There were a couple of hiccups here and there, there were things we should have done differently but I think it was a pretty good show for a first attempt. Certainly, the list of speakers was tremendous, and the audience were generous, knowledgable, friendly and open. A huge thank you needs to go out to Imran Ali, who did a magic job putting it together. And equally, Linda Broughton and her team at Old Broadcasting House were simply splendid.

The Ignite UK Meetup page is still the place to go to contact anyone you might have been impressed with. Thanks to everyone who has left a comment over the last few days. Most of it is complimentary, but we’ll certainly bear in mind the tips and pointers people have given us when it comes to future events.

We have loads of photos, videos etc marking the event. I’m working on a write-up of the preparations and running of the event, and when we get slides through I’ll start to include them here. If you know of any other material elsewhere in the world concerning Ignite UK, please let me know and I’ll link to it.

Video

The official video is a couple of days away: when it comes it will be free to download and use as you will. In the meantime, you can always watch the carryings-on of the evening via the Ustream footage, which may be crude but gives you a healthy taste of proceedings. The footage on the O’ReillyGMT channel on Ustream has 34 minutes of gather before it really kicks in, (plus the ludicrous sight of Imran and myself staring at the computer and gormlessly wondering whether it was on or not). I have converted it to .mov file from .flv, (with the fantastic Perian plug-in for QuickTime) and I chopped off the start, so you could watch it on Vimeo as an alternative:

My colleague Caitlin also did a quick spree of interviews before and after to gauge the mood of the event:

And finally, for now, on the video front, this is Tim O’Reilly himself putting the shout out for Ignite UK North:

Photos

Rain Rabbit’s Photos From Ignite UK North

Write-ups

Ian Cleary of Magician wrote a lovely piece on the Hull Digital/Hull Open Coffee website:

The format for the ignite meetings is pretty simple, ample opportunity to network and chat, and a series of 5 minute “Lightning” talks… There
was a great roster of speakers and a few familiar faces such as Dom “The Hodge” Hodgson and Tom Scott provided informative but highly entertaining presentations (Dom talked about the future of search and Tom gave us his life in 20 graphs). The speakers covered a really diverse base from design sensibilities (Dean Vipond) to IT projects in Africa (Jeff Allen), from concurrency (Michael Sparks) to mental health (Kate Brown). If you’ve a new idea to get across, are looking for support or wish to raise awareness of a tech-related issue then I cannot think of a more appropriate forum for this.