Northern Digitals, a casual meetup for digital-creatives in Manchester

by Robert Ruggiero, Wilson Sherwin, Linus Vanhellemont
and contributions from Lotte Agten

A brief history

Toward the end of 2008, Matt Booth had had enough. Tired of comparisons to London, Booth seized the opportunity to create what Manchester was desperately missing: a casual meetup for digital-creatives in Manchester.

Using twitter and Meetup, it took all of fifteen minutes to sow the seeds of what would become Northern Digitals. With no expectations, agendas, or even nametags, the first meeting consisted of about 40 designers, developers and freelancers gathering at a quiet pub in the Northern Quarter.

Tweets, geeks, chats? CING!

by Maria-Valerie Schegk, @valerie_schegk
and contributions from Olivia Sandri, Christina Schraml

How does the theory of Richard Florida’s creative class work in practice? How do digital creatives in Manchester intermingle? How important are face-to-face meetups like CING (Creative Industry Networking Group) in the time of Twitter and Facebook? Speaking with Phil Northall, co-organizer of CING, one of the biggest monthly meetups for creative digitals in Manchester, helps us get to the bottom of these questions:

Social networking

by Valentin Dellieu

 

Social Media Café

by Valentin Dellieu, Jeroen van Looy, Andreas Wagner

Curious, hesitant, but eager to give it a try, is how my pet hamster seemed to react to her new toy-wheel, and how my colleagues and I felt after being asked to look into Manchester’s Social Media Café. For our first meet-up, we found ourselves in the cozy cafeteria of the iconic BBC, the Social Media Café making good use of the building’s appealing facilities.

The evening started with socializing overrefreshments and we immediately felt welcome amongst the comfortable sofas and friendly faces. We found ourselves in a large crowd of about 70, in their mid-20s to mid-40s, of which at least a third were women. The next days’ tweets chirped about the event being: “The biggest Social Media Café ever.”