Three-day, fully-funded innovation workshop for Greater Manchester SMEs. Day 1 of the May cohort runs at NERIC, University of Salford. Designed to take new product ideas, sustainability initiatives or in-house innovation capability from concept to plan, with structured tools and a peer cohort.
Manchester's long-running Swift / iOS / Mac developer group meets on the first Monday of each month at Neo in Manchester city centre. Talks followed by an informal social at the pub. Organised by Tim and Chris Barker. Past talks and speaker decks are kept on GitHub — a community that takes continuity seriously.
Dot Net North hosts Martin Thwaites, Developer Advocate at Honeycomb, for a deep dive on OpenTelemetry Weaver. Martin brings 20+ years of .NET experience and specialises in observability at scale. The session covers treating telemetry as a proper engineering artifact — semantic convention registries, type-safe code generation, CI policy checks, and Live Check verification against running applications. Sponsored by Microsoft, JetBrains and Uno Platform. Free, with refreshments.
Two-day conference for the North of England's agile, lean and flow-based development communities, in its 14th year and hosted by Software Acumen. Talks, workshops, case studies, lean coffees and discussions — with an explicit commitment to accessibility including quiet spaces for neurodivergent participants and rooms for nursing parents. £361–£685 for two days. The longest-running Northern conference for engineering leads, agile coaches and delivery managers — the definitive room for Northern agile practice.
The UK's compute capacity is concentrated in London and the Southeast — DIN26 is the day the North sets its own agenda. Manchester Digital convenes around 100–120 senior invitees with CNI, Greater Manchester Combined Authority and LINX for a discussion-led forum on shared infrastructure, compute sovereignty and sustainability, and infrastructure that supports regional growth. Keynotes and panels from government, infrastructure operators, tech companies and research. The single most important infrastructure-policy room of the Northern tech year.
Recurring, capped-size networking evening for Manchester's startup founders, tech entrepreneurs and investors. Paid format limits numbers to keep conversations substantial. Corn Exchange location, 50% early-bird discounts available. A consistent monthly room for deal-flow conversations outside the MTW noise.
MaxContact hosts an honest, panel-led evening on AI in contact centres — and whether it's earning customer trust or eroding it. Exclusive Voice of the UK Consumer data, a solo session on moving from AI frustration to AI confidence, and a frontline-moments panel. Explicitly no vendor pitches, no hard sells. Aimed at contact centre leaders, ops, performance, compliance and L&D. Free, with drinks.
Manchester's product community meets at the Renold Innovation Hub café space. Three 20-minute talks with Q&A, food, drinks and extended networking. Organised by Andy Birds and Michael Palmer, welcomes senior product leaders, startup founders, new PMs and engineers/designers working with product teams. 146 RSVPs — one of the fullest product rooms in the city. Sponsored by Amplitude.
GM Connected Health Ecosystem half-day on moving remote patient monitoring from NHS pilot to routine clinical practice. Central to the government's 10-year NHS modernisation agenda. Policy makers, healthcare providers, academia, SMEs and citizens together — focusing on scalable integration of patient-generated data into clinical workflows and electronic health records. Hosted by Digital Futures at The University of Manchester.
HER+Data MCR's May evening meetup at Auto Trader. Talks on data deployment and responsible AI from Manchester's women-in-data community (2,000+ members), with networking and pizza. One of the strongest diversity-in-data networks in the city.
Venture Café Manchester partners with GM Business Growth Hub for a three-hour Thursday evening that refuses to flatten AI into hype. A headline session on contrasting perspectives on AI's future — opportunities and risks. Two practical workshops on agentic AI in Sales, Marketing and Finance. Ends with guidance on responsible organisational AI adoption. Free, with networking and drinks at SISTER on the University of Manchester's North Campus.
Monthly informal meet-up for Manchester's network engineering community at Northern Monk Refectory. A consistently well-attended, low-ceremony room for infrastructure engineers, network ops and cloud networking practitioners to trade war stories over a pint. Organised via TechNW.