Open Coffee Coleraine Website/Blog

Open coffee meeting are becoming a more and more popular way of connecting the business community together. They are informal, no pressure and there's usually a good supply of coffee.

The Belfast gatherings are always popular and the excellent Derry meetings are starting to take shape in the early stages. Your truely is now looking at the Coleraine area (Lisa Clarke organised a meeting in March at the University but now she is back in Belfast).

So if you are in Coleraine and have an unlimited supply of coffee and don't mind some business types nattering on your premises just drop me a message. The blog is here.

Open Coffee Derry meeting tonight.

The location has moved from Starbucks to Da Vinci's on the Culmore Road. Start time is 6.30pm. More updates and info can be found on the website or on their twitter.

Open Coffee Derry - Next Meeting

After the successful meet up in Starbucks (we basically took over the place) the next Open Coffee Derry meeting will be on Wednesday 27th May @ DaVinci's on the Culmore Road, Derry.

You can stalk OCD on Twitter @opencoffeederry

Awakening Creative Entrepreneurship Conference

Something interesting if you are a hitech sort of person and want to see where how the landscape is going to pan out. The Awakening Creative Entrepreneurship conference is being held in Londonderry from 25th-27th March, best of all the registration is free.

In sum: (or the blurb as I'd like to call it).

The Awakening Creative Entrepreneurism UnConference sets itself apart from the conventional conference with a facilitated participant-driven format. It combines peer-to-peer expertise sharing, networking, hands-on bootcamp learning, and demonstration labs, all underpinned with world class panels setting topics and angles to stew over before sessions begin. ACE condenses those activity threads and intensifies instruction by focusing sessions on creative business opportunity creation, and emphasizing interactivity by making it easy for people to participate through facilitation.

Unconferences may not have a set agenda, but they still posess a defined structure that provides attendees with a set of tools to navigate the events. And because everyone at the unconference participates in some fashion, networking and the exchange of ideas is a given. The biggest challenge is that unconferences can be unpolished and raw, because participants speak about topics they're passionate about, not ones they are necessarily experts in. The secret sauce of the ACE unconference is its coupling with instructional expert panels, which provide themes to guide the happenings of the day.

Awakening Creative Entrepreneurism is also hands-on learning opportunity bootcamps, demonstration labs, and PitchStop platforms for startups to develop and promote their businesses. World class speakers in creative and innovating industries promise timely insights for attendees navigating challenging economic waters. Virtual conference platforms, real-time streaming, online access and collaboration facilities deepen the participation levels, and extend creative audience reach nationally and internationally. Those unable to attend physically will be served virtually online through streams to the virtual conference platform, and encouraged to participate.

In his book The Rise of the Creative Class, sociologist Richard Florida describes the evolution of occupations such as designers, programmers, and creatives that drive the economy. According to Florida, the Creative Class is not only the catalyst for economic activity in the information age, but is actually reshaping the way our society is organized. The nature of work is changing: Creative occupations require longer hours, but also feature perks such as flexible schedules and increased mobility. This means that we require and demand a different set of support systems. The ACE unconference seems an obvious step in that direction.

This is all looks good, but to be brutally honest is three years late. I'm booked in already :)