McFilter

A Footnote on Tech North

Tom Forth recently wrote about his perspective on Tech North and the following Tech Nation. When he tweeted about it he said it would get him into trouble. If such low-level criticism is troublesome then we really have got problems.

In his piece, Tom says that we need "strong institutions" in the North. On another day, and in another blog post, I'd probably argue that DoES Liverpool, a community and organisation that I co-founded, is (on its way to be) one of those institutions.

I had thought I'd fold my anecdotes about Tech North into one of those other blog posts, but I'm not sure it's important enough. However, I'll jot them down here to give me something to point at if it is useful to include in the future, and to make an entry in the public record on how ineffective Tech North was. They're not unique in that, I could write similar tales of meh about IoT UK (in fact, I got part-way through telling that tale as part of the Dataviz for Artists course that I worked on for Ross Dalziel) or Innovate UK or...

tl;dr - when Tech North finally deigned to come and chat with DoES Liverpool—two-and-a-half years after they started—and asked what they could do to help, I had one request. That their community engagement manager work from our co-working space every now and then, to get to know the community. A pretty low bar, that they failed to clear.

And the longer version...

In August 2015, Tech North arrived. I gave them a cautious welcome, and pointed them to my thoughts on what they (or anyone like them) should be doing to contribute.

They organised some events and programmes that didn't reach the piquing-my-interest threshold, as I didn't attend any. Maybe one? I have vague recollections of a startup pitching evening in the Baltic that I went to. They didn't, to my knowledge, attend any of the events being run at DoES Liverpool.

They appeared to do very little from what I could see, but made lots of noise about it.

As someone the CTO of IBM UK called "IoT king of the North", maybe they'd want to see what I thought about tech. As someone who runs a tech business in the North, maybe they'd want to talk to one of the companies they were set up to support. As someone who volunteers at DoES Liverpool, maybe they'd want to hear about our perspective on the Liverpool tech scene, from our four (at that point) years of experience with it.

Talking to me isn't the only marker of whether or not they were doing a decent job, but it wouldn't be the worst one. I keep my ear pretty close to the ground to try to find out how others are finding such support (among other things). If I'd been hearing lots of good things about Tech North on the grapevine then they'd be getting a better write-up too.

It's not like Tech North didn't know about me. Whenever they had something of their own to tout, I was on the mailing list. It even stretched to a phonecall when they were frantically searching for local startups to persuade to pitch at one of their events.

It seemed to take them over a year to work out that they should talk to the communities across the North, although having "community engagement managers" didn't result in any engagement with the communities I'm part of.

Eventually, in July of 2017 I actually got to chat to the head of Tech North. He came to find me in the break at a conference, because I'd asked difficult questions from the audience when he was on a panel. Fair play to him.

He wanted to come and visit DoES Liverpool and have a chat, and a couple of months later we'd got it arranged and he visited with the Liverpool community engagement manager.

It was a perfectly pleasant visit. I showed them round, and we had a discussion about what they were up to, who was in the community and the tech scene in Liverpool and beyond.

They explicitly asked what they could do to help and I said that they should work from the co-working space every now and then. It's not a new idea, Andy Goodwin used to rotate round working at all of the tech co-working spaces in the city so that he was available for people to chat to him and he'd get to know the people working at them.

Great idea, they said, we'll definitely do that. And we'll get a feature written about DoES Liverpool and published on the Tech North blog.

Neither of those things have happened.