This week I noticed tweets about #themeet140, which seemed to be a meet-up in Glasgow. Further investigation revealed, via Mark Jennings’ Click to Exit blog, that it is a gathering of friends and acquaintances, and they have had events in London, Cheltenham, and TONIGHT in Aberdeen.

It seems to be an informal thing, Thursday or Friday evenings at about 6pm. The after-work format is something I might consider for future events in Stirling. Here, the Coffee Morning’s before-work slot, which mirrored Edinburgh Coffee Morning, proved an inconvenient time for many.

People involved who you may have noticed in the twitterverse are: Mark Jennings and Ali McGill, who seemed to be organisers(?) and Ange77 from round Stirling way who I have tweeted up with before (at Mark Beaumont’s talk at the Albert Halls).

They were using twitvite to organise the invitations, a service I had not seen before.

Could be good to try an informal gathering like this, in an evening slot, in Stirling one day.

Place: Crema Cafe
Time: 08:45-09:45
Date: Friday 20th August

Benedikte Ranum, a technical editor in the construction industry, may be coming too, and anyone in publishing, design, technology, the creative industries or with an interest social media should come along!

Stirling Coffee Morning (#StCM) has been on hiatus during the summer, and meet-ups are currently on an ad-hoc basis, but post on this blog or message me on twitter if you are interested.

I have been wondering what wasn’t working about it. There were a small number of people who were keen to foster a local networking community but the Stirling Coffee Morning did lack a certain pull. There none of the commissioners and people with contacts in venture funding that the Edinburgh Coffee Morning enjoyed for example. Although I’ve used my contacts to get some work (hopefully) for one #StCM member, I wasn’t able to bring people together to do business together, which is the real tangible benfits after all, on a weekly basis. Maybe Stirling is just too small a pond.

I did draw in some interesting people through twitter and 38minutes, and some useful ideas and enjoyable social interaction were shared. But maybe I didn’t work hard enough posting on this blog and engaging the local community, such as the hubs at the University, Innovation Park, Tolbooth and Macrobert. The relative success of my cycling blog might not have helped.

I’ve made some good face-to-face contacts though, in IT, publishing, web usability and design, as well as some virtual ones in the IT and recruitment world.

I am still keen to network with people and share ideas locally- please leave a comment on this blog (it’ll still reach me), or message me on 38minutes, Linkedin or twitter to arrange a time.

There was nobody to network with this morning so I enjoyed coffee and some noo meeja.

There is an attention to detail in these drafts- Egils has converted the font to a vector graphic and modified certain elements to see which would work best visually.

Although he revised his work I thought I’d post them all to show the progression of it.

The first version has outlines that will be removed but the idea of a coffee cup with the outline of Stirling Castle in the cappuccino froth is born.

After some input from illustrator @rich_mitch, Brian dropped the outlines and added some shadows that give form to the cup, and trying to get the ‘chocolate dust’ effect on all the froth bits.

172px wide, suitable for use as the 38minutes group logo. Blue halo made smaller to make the text more readable.

192px high version, suitable for wordpress header.

I need a simple logo – the blog header is 192x740pixels and the 38minutes icon looks to be 171×171.

My initial ideas are for something representing Stirling, networking and coffee. I don’t want to focus on one industry or another (e.g. tech or design) because the Coffee Morning should be open to all.

My graphic design skills don’t amount to more than intermediate Photoshop, with a heavy emphasis on photo and image processing rather than graphics or illustration. If anyone has any links or ideas for how a logo could or should look, please post here and share- thanks!

A recent success has been Egils Grikis’ job interview in Edinburgh, following initial contact from an interested party through twitter. Stirling Coffee Morning is starting to offer tangible benefits, but we need to find ways to impirove this.

The blog post below (30 April) is still relevant. If anyone has contacts at the university, Tolbooth or Innovation Park, please try to use these to expand our network.

We already have a hashtag on twitter (#StCM – not to be confused with the band Smash the Control Machine) that is used occasionally, and I have a small list of people who expressed an interes. The real-time nature of twitter means that information is only up-to-date for a very brief period, so this has been a difficult tool to exploit well. The fact that I tweet about cycling all the time might have something to do with it too.

38minutes is a creative/media/tech network for Scotland, the North and Northern Ireland that has spurred some interest.

Joining more social networks can be a bit of a time-drain but Linkedin is something that Stirling Coffee Morning hasn’t used up to now, that could maybe generate some more interest.

There are other business and creative communities around Stirling that we could make contact with- does anyone have any links with these that could be developed?

Stirling University
Stirling Innovation Park
The Tolbooth
The Macrobert Centre

Egils Grikis shared some anecdotes about his hunt for a graphic design job and brought to my attention an BBC article about Job Centre Plus, concerning fake vacancies and speculative vacancies that are created to boost Job Centre targets.

Steve Dixon started to have doubts about the kind of service his local job centre in Redcar offered when a print-out from a Jobpoint terminal in the centre advertised the post of submarine designer – no experience necessary.
…
Steve, 42, who trained as a graphic designer, had received 12 “local” job leads. One was for Scotland, another based in the North West, one in the South West and one was nationwide. Another was based 45 miles away. The Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) maintains that vacancies are on the increase nationally but Steve doubts if some of the jobs advertised at job centres really exist. We only have 20 submarines in the whole of Britain, it said no experience necessary, which sounds ridiculous.

He added: “Often employers pull the wool over Jobcentre Plus’s eyes and Jobcentre Plus has a performance regime where getting the maximum number of vacancies in on the books is a sign of success, so I think there may be people in Jobcentre Plus who aren’t probing those vacancies quite as well as they should be.

Stirling Coffee Morning’s jobseeker has been uninspired by the Job Centre: after a 13-week review they suggested he takes his year of birth out of his CV (Egils is not ‘just out of university’ shall we say). They said he was probably suffering “age discrimination”. He was surprised that they were telling him this after such an amount of time.

An ambiguous piece of advice that was given was to ‘think about widening the job search’ although it was denied that this meant lowering expectations or increasing the distance that he’d be willing to travel.

Egils is an experienced graphic designer and artworker specialising in print work, but who has also worked in web design. He can be contacted through the 38minutes network, on twitter or by posting a comment here.

Links
BBC News – Jobcentre Plus is ‘failing customers’