Birmingham Bloggers Meetup 3 - Coworking and a Social Media Cafe

About thirty of us turned up which made for a lovely crowd of people at Rooty’s in the Custard Factory. I was really pleased that when I went and asked the owner if they’d stay open for us to run an event with no guarantees of numbers that they were really interested and were really warm to the idea. (Thanks for your mtrust guys!) I think we’ll be welcome back too.

It was more formal than the previous two events, with this format:

Pre-event chat. It was billed for a 7pm start, Nick Booth and I were there from 6ish and met up with Josh Hart (ex- Made Media ) to talk about his BrumLive project.

Gather. From 6.45 there was a steady flow of new arrivals and some of us used stickers to namebadge ourselves. A few drinks, chatting.

Discussion. Then we had the option of going and sitting in the second room or staying in the main cafe for a post-sxsw chat and to hear what Lloyd Davis had to say. I think that meant that pretty much everyone eventually followed.

Chatting. Then we dispersed for more chatting until 9.15

Off to the pub. A bunch of us (perhaps half) then headed up to the Rainbow for a while.

The discussion

Pete was streaming the discussion on Bambuser (but I think the sound was dropping out), Dubber was videoing though and you can see the whole thing here:

What were the hot topics?

SXSW wasn’t about tech - it was about using tech to do interesting things. Which means we came back thinking about:

Coworking spaces. Do we want one? Seems to me the answer was a resounding ‘yes’. I’ve already had some interesting chats with people who may be able to help ‘resource’ it… Who’s up for helping on this?

Sharing content widely. With all of us producing content, what do we do with that and what can we make happen through sharing ideas? There are interesting ideas coming through from Screen West Midlands about supporting ‘content’ - we need to find out more about that.

Social Media Cafe. Something that a few of us have talked about a lot is some kind of space or ‘moving meetup’ in the form of a cafe. Am I confused? Don’t we just say ‘we meet up every fortnight at Rooty’s on a Monday’ and that’s that one solved? Ooh - Idea. How about we make Rooty’s a website in exchange for a bit of help organising?

Barcamp / Wordcamp / Brumcamp. Basically I think we should fly someone like Kathy Sierra over to talk to us about the future, and base a nice unconference around it. Wordcamp has been mooted, as has another Barcamp Birmingham. Who’s up for it?

All in all it was good just to meet up and bounce ideas with people doing similar things.

I say we do this more often. You?