There’s something reassuring about going to an event where you know you’ll see a few familiar faces and easily make connections without having to try to hard. To be honest I’ve never been that good at hard-nosed networking, so it was a pleasure to exchange a few thoughts (and cards) at the London launch of bTWEEN 09 without feeling that all the conversations had to start with “so.. what do you do.”
I bumped into Sam from Chinwag on my way in (we’ve just made two films for them at Digital Business China and India and I think he may have thought I was stalking him to get them signed off)! I then had a great catch up with Ghislaine Boddington, my glamorous digi-arty comrade from body>data>space, a quick hello to Anne Longley from Media Edge, who I had a drink (and rant) or two with at i-Design last year; a few other hellos to known media type entities, and then happily introduced to Joanne Jacobs, whose talk I’d seen at reboot replace and was interested to meet this no-nonsense afficionado of all things digital/educational/social; and also I had great random chats with John Newbigin about Brixton and other such strangeness, Steve Taylor who’s about to launch a new book – look out for it – and Karen from BestBefore (who I strangely have only ever met in that very same room)!
I’m not writing all of this to show off – honest – the reason I wanted to write this was just to highlight that Just.b events really do bring all shapes and sizes of folk together, from agencies, creative and cultural industries, music, media and education. On the whole they all seem to have a some things in common: vision, energy, creativity and talent – it’s great to be inspired when there’s all this doom and gloom in there (financial, porcine influenza or otherwise).
You can join bTWEEN people and find out for yourself!
