On Monday night we attended Speak The Web in Sheffield. I wasn’t quite sure what to expect from it, as I’ve never been to many networking events beyond a few Open Coffee mornings, and I’ve never been to any BarCamps, GeekUps or any of the bigger conference-type things. So, billing the event as somewhere in the middle of all that didn’t really mean much to me. What did mean something was that Speak The Web was going to be less conference, and more gig. I’ve been to lots of gigs. I can connect with that phrase.

The first thought that crossed my mind as we walked into The Showcase Bar/Cafe was: “oh, they must be letting us into the theatre in a minute”, and then when it slowly dawned on me that there was a projector in the corner of the room – and I realised that this was the place the Speak The Web was taking place – I felt a bit… ripped off. I guess that was a natural response – after all, I had little idea of what these kind of things usually cost.

Around about here in this post I was going to talk about the speakers at the Sheffield event (all very very good by the way) and explain my thoughts, but since it’s taken me nearly a week to collect my thoughts on it, and since we managed to wrangle some tickets to Speak The Web Leeds as well (thanks Rich and Dan), I thought it’d be more useful for me to just outline the good bits, vs the bad bits.

The Good Bits

It’s cheap. £20 doesn’t buy you much these days, and it certainly doesn’t usually buy you an Andy Clarke or Brendan Dawes talk, and nowhere nearly buys you a ticket to one of the major conferences. 3 talks for £20 is very good value.

The talks were very good. Everyone was better than I expected.

The atmosphere was friendly. When people feel comfortable enough to just shout out half way the talks and the speaker feels comfortable enough to have a joke back, you know there’s a good atmosphere going on. It almost felt like a stand-up gig. That’s a good thing.

The Bad Bits

We had to stand up all night (at Sheffield, this was sorted for Leeds so it isn’t that big of a deal).

Not enough opportunities to chat to people. I don’t know if this was just because of the kind of audience that Speak The Web had attracted, or this was because of the structure of the event, but once the last talk finished (both at Leeds and Sheffield), almost everyone left straight away. Maybe longer between the talks to chat to people, more time before the event, or a break half way through the night might help here. Difficult one to solve.

Unfortunately the last bad bit isn’t something that’s got anything to do with Speak The Web at all – it’s that there just isn’t enough of this kind of thing going on in the Yorkshire area. Yorkshire is a hot bed of creative talent, but so few people know about it that far too few of these kind of things get put on around Yorkshire. Sure, everyone knows about Leeds, Sheffield and Huddersfield, but that isn’t it to Yorkshire. There’s a lot of other people out there hidden in the other bits of Yorkshire.

Hopefully Speak The Web might more of this kind of thing happen, and bring some of the talent out in the hidden bits of Yorkshire.

— Craig