by Andrew Seward
Founder of Tech Nottingham & Hack24
I’ve been working on Tech Nottingham and the many events and projects under its banner for the past 11 years, it has been a big part of my life. I’m incredibly proud of the team we’ve assembled - seeing all of our efforts to build the community gradually succeed has been hugely gratifying and I believe that community has made a meaningful positive impact on our city and on people’s lives. However as the world changes, so too must this organisation and that has been a difficult truth to accept.
The Tech Nottingham team have organised 211 events over the past 11 years. That number includes:
121 Tech Nottingham monthlies (32 under our early ‘Geekup Nottingham’ brand)
48 Women in Tech events
21 Tech on Toast morning events
6 Christmas parties
4 hackathons
An assortment of workshops and careers events
The majority of our events were in person, in venues around Nottingham - most in our spiritual home, Antenna on Beck Street.
We’ve also built up an online community of over 3300, who’ve exchanged almost 1.4 million messages on our Slack group.
The Covid Years
When Covid hit, we focused on supporting our community online. We reorganised our Slack group and moved our events online using Zoom, Gather.town and tried out pretty much every collaboration tool under the sun.
I’m personally very proud of what we were able to achieve together with the community during this time:
Our #remote channel was a big help to people working from home for the first time
Our #running and #cycling channels helped keep people active
Our #craft community grew and ran weekly socials
Our community 3D printed over 1600 PPE face shields and distributed them to frontline workers
Our Folding@Home team donated computing power to COVID-19 research - becoming one of the top 1500 teams in the world (out of 350,000!)
Our Device Donate & Refurb Project refurbished donated laptops, tablets and smartphones and got them to school children, adult learners and job seekers who needed them
Clark Seanor ran daily online coffee breaks
Our Secret Santa gift exchange allowed us some socially-distanced festivity at each of the two Covid Christmasses
Our remote setup allowed us to experiment with some weird and wonderful new event formats, such as our online gameshow ‘Know Your Audience’, our everybody-plays interactive human-powered text adventure ‘The TechNott Adventure Gameshow’, virtual gatherings in Gather.Town, a Hamilton watch-along, a series of online Lightning Talk events, our Women in Tech workshop series and much more
Remote events are difficult
The audience at a remote Tech Nottingham event
Our ethos and secret to our success at Tech Nottingham has always been that everything we do, especially our events, are first and foremost about building community. That fundamentally means getting people who don’t know each other to talk to one another.
In person we used all kinds of tricks to get people talking, from the table layout, to the pacing, how the food was served and how the content was presented. Creating situations where dialogue can happen and leaving people to it.
With remote events you need to be more explicit. In any video call you’ll have at most five people talking, no matter how many people are attending. At first we used breakout rooms to put people into groups of five with something to discuss. This is an effective technique, however we found as peoples’ workplaces started using breakout rooms it started to feel too heavy handed and too much like the worst aspects of the workplace.
The biggest challenge with remote events is that by the end of the work day people have had just about enough of video calls. Even with the most creative content it still starts by yet again logging in to Zoom. This was a motivational challenge for us as organisers as well as our audience and so it’s no wonder that after two years we struggled to keep people engaged.
In person events must change
I love hosting in-person events, it always to me felt like the beating heart of what Tech Nottingham is. Seeing the room fill up, getting the measure of the crowd, seeing a great talk land perfectly and fill the room with chatter. The sound of ideas being shared and friendships being made.
And as the lockdowns finished we naturally began preparing our return to those events. We built infrastructure for broadcasting from our venue and planned our content. However when it came to pulling the trigger on our new hybrid setup we discovered that we couldn’t do it.
Covid continues its cycle of surging and waning, still wreaking havoc in our lives. Even as we prepared to return I was seeing family members go on ventilators and we faced childcare challenges as people around us needed to self-isolate.
It became clear that going back to packing 120 people into Antenna every month is just irresponsible. Our community has families, elderly relatives, livelihoods that continue to be threatened by Covid and gambling with that as a matter of routine cannot be the path forward.
A one-off event here or there such as a hackathon, an unconference or a workshop, small gatherings like our career cafe, these seem palettable. Perhaps more niche regular events or more community-focused online events that look nothing like our day jobs - accepting that they will reach a smaller audience.
It pains me to have to accept that we’ve seen the last of our days rushing to scrape together the last few chairs for a packed house at Antenna, and I’m not completely sure what it is that will replace those.
Whatever we do, it can’t be what we did before. There’s no return to the in-person events we all loved so much any time in the near future, and it doesn’t seem that presenting talks on Zoom is the answer either.
Share your thoughts
We want our community to thrive and we want to support people living and working in technology, but we must accept that how we do that needs to change.
We’d love to hear your thoughts on what you’d like for this organisation and this community. Join the conversation on Slack and on Twitter.