Manchester Digital Laboratory

Like the best things in life, it started small. One hundred and forty characters small. It started with a tweet.

The first teawitter event happened on Sunday 28th February. The purpose was to have a tea-party and a tweetup all in one. All invitations went out via twitter, and all people had to do was turn up and bring their cake stomachs. People brought those, and cake, and good cheer, and a lot of love for the event!

A total of 30 turned up, and each got send home with enough cake to last them a good while!

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Thanks for everyone who came up the inaugural book club meet.

We are now #mcrsf on twitter. Seemed the tag was a group consensus, so the Ominbus has been donated to the MadLab library.

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Thanks to everyone who turned out for the inaugural Science Fiction Book Club! There was plenty of enjoyable science fiction discussion to be had, and some really great suggestions for an initial reading list. After much debate, we settled on:

• The Forever War by Joe Haldeman
• The Drowned World by J. G. Ballard
• Neuromancer by William Gibson
• The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula LeGuin

For the first few months. In addition, we all decided that it would be a good idea to supplement the reading list with some short stories from A Science Fiction Omnibus which covers a wide range of classic science fiction authors such as Clifford Simak, Isaac Asimov and Philip K Dick.

The next meetup is on Tuesday the 16th of February and it’s not too late to get involved, just pick yourself up a copy of the Joe Haldeman and get stuck in!

Ryan has generously volunteered himself to administrate this group for the first meeting, and Tom will be the advocate for the first book. Also, there’s now an official Google Group which you can find here.

In addition, the person who comes up with the twitter #tag for this group will be presented with a copy of the Science Fiction Omnibus, so flick the switch on  your thinking caps to WIN.

Calling all Science Fiction, Speculative fiction & Fantasy aficionados in Manchester! Madlab is starting a book club for the Sci-fi.

We will have a preliminary meeting to establish a the group: the agenda will cover

• scoping out a reading list
• direction of the group and format of meetings
• deciding when to meet and at what regularity

Manchester Library are helping us out and will be at the first meeting to lend their support and expertise in starting us off in the right direction.

If you are interested in being part of the group, please leave your name and a date that would suit you in January for this meeting; we’ll thrash out a date in the comments and get this thing rolling!

Equally, if you’d like to take a lead organising the group, also let us know – Madlab is for the community, by the community.

Girl Geek Dinner, a world wide celebration of women in science, technology, and anything else has a little sister, Girl Geek Afternoon Tea. Madlab was honored to host the birth of this new group, a idea hatched by @bunmagazine at last Manchester Girl Geek Dinner.  As a new group, the first event was held around introductions and a bit of show and tell. A common thread throughout the discussions were love of shiny things and the “glass ceiling”.

Talks were held over tea, coffee, and delicious home made cinnamon buns by @cookclever

We had ladies from computing science, programmers, developers, and a few crafters interested in Arduinos and quilting.

Next month’s Tea we will hold a workshop, perhaps around Ardunios, as we had a good introductory by @cyberspice

A mailing list will soon be created.

More pictures of the event can be seen here.