Birmingham Gathering

Saturday 10th July, 2pm, Old Joint Stock

Share a pint or two with local web designers and developers! Discuss what’s happening in the industry, swap tips and tricks and generally enthuse about all things web!

If you’re new, keep an eye on @multipack for last minute updates. More event info at: Brum Meetup on Upcoming

Leamington Gathering

Thursday 27th July, 7.30pm, The White Horse Leamington

Grab a pint in the Warwickshire sun and talk development, design and UX.

Leamington Meetup on Upcoming

StartupMill Brum

Monday July 19th, 6.00pm, Free

The StartupMill is a free community driven event for aspiring entrepreneurs and creative minds. Our aim is to create a network of young fresh thinking talent to collaborate, share knowledge and experiences to help each other get ahead in business.

Hacks and hackers

23rd July, All Day, Free!

Join Journalists and the 4IP funded scraperWiki in building cool stuff with Public Data. The aim is to show journalists how to use programming and design techniques to create online news stories and features; and vice versa, to show programmers how to find, develop, and polish stories and features. Hacks Signup

Tech Wednesday

10.00 am, July 21st, Resource Café, Birmingham Science Park Aston

Second of the new weekday events for web, techy and digital types in Brum.

Tech Wednesday

Epic Win?

Ever felt that your task list lacked a certain, well, gaming element? Soon you’ll be able to level up and collect achievements as you finish your daily tasks… EPIC WIN

If you didn’t already know, The Multipack meets twice a month - every second Saturday in Birmingham and the last Tuesday of the month in Leamington (an iCal feed is available). Our little group in Leamington started a year ago so, on the anniversary of our first meet-up, we celebrated with cake:

Our cake, adorned with an iced version of Paul Robert Lloyd’s logo masterpiece, went down very well. So much so that we’re attributing our best ever turn out to its presence. Many new faces, including some who’d previously not been able to find us, but who had a cake to look out for this time!

Sadly, whilst the cake worked in giving some people a beacon to find us, we can’t bring cake every month, so if you’ve got any suggestions on how to help people find us, we’d love to hear them.

Staying with the same format

The reason we formed our group in Leamington was to give those who couldn’t make the Saturday meet-ups a choice of when to attend. It’s worked really well, and whilst we’ve had the odd month where only a handful of people have turned up, there’s usually always a good, friendly crowd at our Tuesday night events.

Over the past 12 months, we’ve been joined by designers, developers, project managers, social media luminaries, other halves and even the occasional prospective parliamentary candidate, and it’s been nicer still when some of our newfound geeks have hooked up with the larger group in Birmingham on the second saturday meet-ups.

We think it’s worked, so we’re going to stick with it - we’ll continue meeting from 7:30pm on the last Tuesday of the month at the White Horse in Leamington Spa, where you can find good ale, good food and a good atmosphere. If you work in or around the Leamington Spa area and fancy joining us, we’d love you to join us!

June Meetups

Birmingham Gathering

12th June, 2pm, Old Joint Stock

Share a pint or two with local web designers and developers! Discuss what’s happening in the industry, swap tips and tricks and generally enthuse about all things web!

This month topics will likely include iPads, what is and isn’t HTML5, and who has a spare dribbble.com invite.

Brum Meetup on Upcoming

Leamington Gathering

29th June, 7.30pm, The White Horse Leamington

The first birthday of our plucky Leamington splinter group. Grab a pint in the Warwickshire sun and talk development, design and UX.

Leamington Meetup on Upcoming

If you're new, keep an eye on http://twitter.com/multipack for last minute updates.

Stuff to Watch in June

Tech Wednesday

10.00 am, June 16th, Resource Café, Birmingham Science Park Aston

A new weekday event for web/digital/tech people for Birmingham and the West Midlands.

http://www.techwednesday.com/

Going Mobile

14th June (TBC), FlipStorm, Evans Business Centre, Oldbury

A free session on "jQTouch: Building Web Apps That Work Everywhere". A developer-focused session focusing on mobile web app development for multiple platforms.

Signup on Facebook

Start ups in Sheffield

7th June 7pm-9pm, The GIST Lab, Grinders Hill / Brown Street

A bit further afield than we normally go, but the UK startup scene needs all the help it can get! A free community driven event for aspiring entrepreneurs and creative minds. Startup Mill

Kicking it off!

Apparently there's some kind of foote-the-ball tournament happening soon. Once again, Si has been busy building his handy Microformat-based calendar for the occasion.

A Post a Week

Dave posts something every week about getting the most from Wordpress. Tips and tricks, and a nice site design too! A post a week

New to Ruby

Joel is finding his way from the wilds of PHP to the lowlands of Ruby on Rails and blogging along the way. Useful reading if you're considering a similar move. http://www.multipack.co.uk/blog/?p=396 Welcome to your monthly roundup of Midlands webby stuff!

If you’re new, keep an eye on @multipack for last minute updates. More event info.

Userlab Openday

The Nice folks at Userlab, part of Birmingham Institute of Art & Design, are having another openday and usability clinic on Thursday May 6, 2010 from 8:00am - 8:00pm.

Pop along if you want to talk about user-research, usability testing and potential collaborations.

Rails for Beginners

Michael Grimes has organised a meetup for people want to try their hand at Ruby on Rails. Tuesday 4th May, 7pm, Venue is at BCU.

Ignite Brum

One to watch for future events, as it’s still in the early stages, the concept is: 5 Minutes and 20 slides…what would you teach us?

Design with Intent

A nice set of cards for helping you think about design problems from different angles, comign soon in dead tree form, but you can download the PDF and make your own.

March Meetup

Share a pint or two with local web designers and developers! Discuss what’s happening in the industry, swap tips and tricks and generally enthuse about all things web! Likely topics of conversation include HTML5, CSS3, interaction design, PHP, Python, recent projects and writing web copy.

If you’re new, keep an eye on @multipack for last minute updates. More event info at Upcoming

Green Thanks

Thanks to everybody who turned up to ‘Hack the Planet’. There was a great atmosphere and some realy neat ideas. Two decent hacks were put together by the end of play. Write-up and live app demos to be confirmed shortly, but there’s a flickr pool of photos to be going on with.

Theatrics

The inimitable Matthew Somerville got in contact to mention his latest project - Theatricalia - a database of past, present and future theatre productions. Of interest to anybody who likes to tread the boards or see a good theatre played…

Jobs Galore!

Over at the forum there are several folks desperate to hire webby types! Jobs on offer include PHP Developers in Leamington and the Jewellery Quarter - and a Frontend Developer role too! So if you’re looking for something and match those skills, pop over to the forums for more info.

Brum Twestival

25th March at Poppy Red is Birmingham’s Twitter Festival thing, your chance to meet some virtual acquaintances in the flesh and raise some money for charity.

Launch 48

Launch48 aims to bring together participants from different backgrounds and levels of experience in the web industry to think/plan/develop and launch one or multiple web apps in one weekend.

Caffeinated Data

Paul Bradshaw, who runs the MA Online Journalism at BCU, is organising the first Brum #data Coffee on 11th March. For people who like their open data, mashups and a good roasted blend.

Multipack Hacks… The Planet

Saturday 20th of February, 10am - 6pm
Offices of One Black Bear, Fazeley Studios

A hackday event about building things to reduce our industry’s environmental impact. Just bring some ideas and a willingness to design, write copy or code!

Can we reduce the landfill-destined swag at conferences with a web app? Can we lower our carbon footprint by highlighting local conferences? These and other ideas to be explored!

There’ll be food and drink courtesy of our kind sponsors Campaign Monitor.

For more information see a.green:focus and upcoming for event signup.

Kicking Off the F1

Si has been busy again with his Microformat-enriched series of sports sites. So if you’re a fan of Rugby or Formula One you should check out Six Nations Kickoff and F1 Calendar to keep up-to-date with all the important dates.

Government Data a Go-Go

You probably heard about the launch of Data.gov.uk earlier in the month, but there’s a Birmingham connection to this new site. Local company Talis provided the semantic web platform which hosts lots of the data. Read more on their Nodalities Blog.

Evolution of a Python Programmer

Funny if you do code, plus bonus linguistic jape for those who don’t.

November Meetup

Old Joint Stock - Saturday 14th Nov, 2pm-7pm

As usual, we’ll meet for a few beers and a chat about creating web stuff. We’ll have some discussion from the Build conference in Belfast and likely talk about Google’s new Javascript toolkit.

More on Upcoming

Advance Christmas Meal Warning

Want to join us for a meal and festive seasonal web discussion? Drop by the forum.

Presents Videos

Missed last month’s Multipack Presents? Worry not, you can watch Bruce on HTML 5 and Nick on Silverlight from the comfort of your own laptop at the Multipack Vimeo Channel. Now also with bonus Geek in the Park videos!

Football Calendar Crazy

Remember Si’s various World Cup and Footie Kickoff sites? They caught the eye of UEFA, who then got him to help them with their own calendars. Read about it on his blog.

For a Usable World

12th November is World Usability Day. Celebrate by toasting St Jakob! Alternatively, why not pop along to Userlab’s drop-in sessions? You get a free half hour’s usability consultation too.

Opening Types

Looking for open source fonts for use with your funky new web fonts? You need the League of Moveable Type!

Poetry in Motion

Have you ever wondered what would happen if you pooled the world’s twitter streams and pulled together random rhyming ones? You’d get the Longest Poem in the World.

Multipack Present : Rich Internet Apps

Join us for a presents event looking at the state of rich
internet application platforms. Nick Harewood talks Microsoft
Silverlight and Bruce Lawson gives us the lowdown on HTML 5.

As usual, we’ll meet in the Old Crown in Digbeth beforehand for
a pint and lunch (from about 2pm). Then move on to the offices
of One Black Bear in Fazeley Studios for the presentations.

More about Presents at Upcoming

NOTE: there’s no meeting on the 2nd Saturday (10th) this month!

Curry in Solihull

Leevi Graham was a Multipack regular, until he headed back to his native Australia and http://newism.com.au/

He’s in Europe for the Expression Engine Conference and decided to pop across the channel to catch up. Join us answering the eternal question of how far you’d go for a good curry. 27th October - 7pm onwards

More about the curry at Upcoming

Doing it Yourself

You’ve probably been watching the, er, interesting reaction to the new Birmingham City Council site across the blogsphere. Some enterprising folks got together to build an alternative in a wiki style:

BCC DIY

Dive into HTML 5

Google’s Mark Pilgrim delivers a great (if not yet complete) introduction to HTML 5 on this niftily designed site, following the grand tradition of diveintoaccessibility.org and
 diveintopython.org

8 Bit Adventures in Canvas

Remember those point n click adventures like King’s Quest and Leisure Suit Larry? Now you can play them online through the magic of HTML 5’s Canvas element.

September Meetup

Saturday September 12th 2pm, Old Joint Stock, Birmingham

Come and discuss the latest in the web design and development worlds. This month we’ll be discussing what happened at dConstruct and our plans for a Hack Day event.

More on Upcoming

Geek Redux

If you missed Geek in the Park, Simon’s talk on Nailing your own projects is up on Slideshare:

Friendbinder is a go go

If you’ve been at recent events, Richard has probably collared you to talk about his project, the social network aggregation tool, FriendBinder. Well, he’s officially launched it!

Apptember

There’s no business model like no business model! A project by Elliot Kember to get people creating cool web stuff in September and thereby deal with app-athy. Oh, and you can log in via Twitter, which is kind of handy. Apptember

UX Bookmarks

A place to find all kinds of useful user experience, HCI and usability bookmarks. Whether that’s strategy articles or analytics advice. Browse the categories or post your own links.

Information is Beautiful

Yes, another blog listing cool data visualisations. What can I say? I’m a sucker for this stuff. Information if Beautiful

Geek in the Park

Our annual out of Brum event, featuring a daytime picnic and an evening of talks. Bring food and drink and Frisbee for the day in Jephson Gardens. Family also welcome.

The Evening features talks by Simon Collison on “Nailing your own projects” and Remi Sharp on “HTML 5 & Friends”. Saturday 15th August, 12pm-11pm

This free event is kindly sponsored by Campaign Monitor, Friendbinder, The Design Frontier and Phurix.

More on the Geek in the Park website.

For a Beautiful Web - Birmingham Workshop

Andy Clarke comes to Brum to teach you all kinds of funky new tricks with the newest CSS. All day event on the 25th September. Owen has some promo codes for the event, e-mail him at fabweb.promo (at) fullcreammilk.co.uk and he’ll send you details.

PHP West Midlands

We’re not the only geeks meeting in pubs. If you’re interested in PHP, PHP West Midlands are having a meetup. Topics probably covered: php5.3, employing/getting employed as a php developer, testing: Shakespeare Pub, 7.30, 11th August 2009.

The Developer Evangelism Handbook

The fine art of getting developers and other alpha adopter folks interested in you product, nailed down on virtual paper by Chris Heilmann

Fonts on Tees

Show your typographic allegiance with these T-Shirts with a sample and attribution. Real type geeks will of course argue that DIN was not designed in 1995, but only redrawn…