Tech events in birmingham

UKCharityCamp returns to thestudio on Cannon Street for a full day, 09:30 onwards, run by the digital agency dxw. It is an unconference, so there is no fixed programme: participants pitch sessions on the morning and the grid gets built in the room. The subject is how the third sector uses digital, data and technology to do more for the communities it serves, and the attendees are the people doing that work inside charities, foundations and the agencies that support them. It is not-for-profit, free to attend and open to anyone. Why go: the unconference format means the agenda is whatever charity digital teams are actually stuck on this year, which is more useful than a programme set six months ago. Best for charity digital and data leads, service designers and developers working in the sector.

The fifth workshop in the Birmingham NatWest Accelerator's Sales Accelerator, at 2 St Philip's Place from 09:30, on organising and using sales data. It covers why a CRM matters, how to structure one so it tracks leads, customers and performance rather than becoming a graveyard, and which metrics are worth measuring for your business. There are exercises to identify your own key numbers, real founder examples of where better data changed the sales outcome, and an Action Lab session to set up or improve your own CRM before you leave. The Sales Accelerator is a twelve-week programme of six workshops; individual sessions are open without joining the whole thing. Free. Why go: you leave having actually configured something rather than with notes about configuring it. Best for founders and early sales hires whose pipeline currently lives in a spreadsheet.

An afternoon on UK fintech hosted by Mastercard at the University of Birmingham, with fintech founders, regional fintech associations, industry experts and policymakers in the room. The programme covers the future of UK payments and Mastercard's role in it, account-to-account and agentic AI payment models, fraud, trust and financial inclusion, a growth story from a founder who went through a Mastercard Start Path programme, BIN sponsorship from a business actually using it, and a policymaker's view of what is coming. 13:15 welcome and lunch, main session 14:00 to 16:30, at the Green Heart Forum in Staff House. The registration page states no price. Why go: a corporate host talking partly about its own capabilities, so read the Mastercard-services sections for what they are — but the founder and BIN sponsorship sessions are operational detail fintechs rarely get in public. Best for fintech founders and payments people in the Midlands.

A long-running monthly meetup for Birmingham founders and people still at the idea stage, upstairs in the front room at 1000 Trades in the Jewellery Quarter. There is no set format: you turn up, introduce yourself and talk shop. Testing an idea on people who will be constructive about it, comparing notes on raising investment, swapping the practical details of starting something. Second Tuesday of the month, 18:30 to 20:30, free, hosted by Dave Evans. The group publishes a code of conduct and explicitly refuses sales pitches, crypto and MLM marketing, which is a large part of why it has stayed usable across 719 reviews. Why go: it is the least performative founder room in Birmingham, and the no-pitching rule is actually enforced. Best if you are early enough that you still want to say an idea out loud before committing to it.

The annual UK conference for rehabilitation engineers, clinical scientists, clinical technologists and technicians, in its second year, at STEAMhouse. The 2026 theme is "Developing an assistive technology device, how?": the practical route from prototype to a device you can legally put on the UK market or into clinical use, with invited speakers on digital manufacturing and on applying the medical device regulations. Paul Hewett opens at 09:45 and Abigail Attwell follows at 10:00 on designing assistive technology for the future. There is an Innovation Space, an attendee-chosen hot-topic session, and an exhibition with around three and a half hours of contact time. Doors 08:00, sessions 10:00 to 16:00. Tickets GBP 50, no refunds, paid parking on site. Why go: assistive-technology regulation is where most NHS and university AT projects stall, and this is the one UK room where the engineers and the regulatory specialists are both present. Best for clinical engineers and medtech founders building hardware for care settings.

with Rosie Ginday MBE (Founder, Miss Macaroon)

Rosie Ginday MBE, founder and CEO of Miss Macaroon, in conversation at Aston's John Cadbury House on Corporation Street, 17:30 to 19:30. Professor Paula Whitehouse, Director of the Aston Centre for Enterprise and Entrepreneurship, hosts. Welcome drinks and networking from 17:30, the conversation itself from 18:00 to 18:45, audience questions until 19:00, then networking. Ginday built Miss Macaroon as a social enterprise, training young people out of work or care alongside running a commercial food business, and the session covers the business journey and what running a company with a social mission actually demands. Why go: a founder who has held a double bottom line together for years, in a format with real audience time rather than a stage interview. Best for social enterprise founders and anyone building a business with a mission attached.

fizzPOP, Birmingham's makerspace on Coventry Street, turns its second-Wednesday open night into a software and microelectronics social, 18:30 to 20:30. It is a working session rather than a talk: bring a home automation project, an empty breadboard, a coding problem you are stuck on, or turn up and see what other people are doing. Members work in Python, JavaScript, Go, Rust, C and 6502 assembly, and the hardware ranges from Raspberry Pis and Arduinos to ESP32s and robot vacuums. The space has a stocked electronics room and benches to work at. Beginners are welcome and you do not need to be a member. Free. Why go: one of the few places in the city where you can get unstuck on a hardware problem with someone looking over your shoulder. Best for hobbyist and professional embedded and electronics people.

The Birmingham .NET and MAUI user group runs a watch-and-discuss evening around .NET Conf 2026, the launch of .NET 11 and the latest .NET MAUI release. The group picks the session, live or recorded, once Microsoft publishes the full programme, and the room then works through what the changes mean in practice for C#, .NET and MAUI codebases. At Bluetel Solutions on Temple Row, next to Snow Hill station; ring the bell. Food and networking from 18:30, introductions 18:45, session and discussion from 19:00, close 20:30 and on to the pub. Free. Hosted by Dave Evans and Ryan Glenn Smith, with the venue from Bluetel and food from ParentPay. Why go: watching a release keynote alone tells you what shipped; watching it with the people who maintain .NET estates in Birmingham tells you what will actually bite. Best for C# and MAUI developers and anyone responsible for a .NET upgrade path.

A free half-day martech event at Edgbaston Stadium, 10:00 to 14:00, built around a format the organisers call 5inTwenty. Speakers are given twenty minutes and challenged to deliver five genuine strategic takeaways, with product promotion explicitly ruled out. Around the sessions is The Marketplace, set up as a consultation hub rather than an exhibition hall, where you can take a specific technical problem to vendors and specialists one to one. Framework Media expects more than 200 marketing professionals, mostly in-house teams from across the Midlands. Free. Why go: the time limit is the point, and it makes this denser than most free vendor-funded events. Best for in-house marketers with a concrete martech problem and half a day to solve it.

with Steve Wade (Platform engineering consultant, )

Steve Wade takes over the DevOps Society's Birmingham evening at AND Digital on Brindley Place, 18:00 to 21:00 - three acts rather than a speaker line-up. It opens with a 15-minute keynote on what is changing across Kubernetes, AI and platform engineering. The main talk, The Human API, asks why engineers who communicate fluently with machines struggle to explain an architectural decision to the person next to them; it is participatory, so you practise on the people around you. The last hour is a presenting workshop in small groups, closing with PowerPoint Karaoke. Wade founded Platform Fix, is a Kubernetes Ambassador, a former Flux maintainer and Istio contributor, and has trained over 6,000 engineers. Free. Why go: communication training for engineers is usually corporate and generic; this one is run by someone with 15 years in production infrastructure and KubeCon talks behind him. Best for DevOps, SRE and platform engineers.

A regional forum for freelancers and micro-businesses working in creative technology, at BOM on Dudley Street, 10:00 to 12:00. It is part of a series of four free gatherings across the West Midlands, run through the CreaTech Frontiers programme, delivered by the University of Warwick with sector lead Amy Dalton-Hardy. The organisers are clear about what it is not: no skills programme, no funding workshop, no application clinic. It is a room for people working independently in games, immersive tech, digital arts, creative AI, tech-enabled performance, motion capture and spatial design to meet each other and shape what the regional sector looks like. CreaTech Frontiers cohort members and everyone else equally welcome. Free. Why go: freelancers in this field rarely have anywhere to compare rates, clients and pipeline. Best for independent creative technologists anywhere in the West Midlands.

A morning for founders in their first one to three years, at The Jointworks in Birmingham's Jewellery Quarter. The organiser's framing is peer support rather than pitch-and-swap: no sales pitches, no corporate scripts, just founders comparing notes on what is working and what is not. Charles Snape speaks on setting up business finances from day one - the decisions that are cheap to make early and expensive to unpick later. Around that, open conversation over breakfast-style refreshments. Free, 10:00 to 12:30, in person, with free parking at the venue. Run by A Burden Shared. Why go: one of the few Birmingham rooms aimed squarely at founders who are past the idea and into the grind, where the point is an honest conversation rather than lead generation. Best for first-time founders one to three years in.

A monthly half-morning for women building businesses, at the NatWest Accelerator hub on St Philip's Place. Coffee and informal introductions first, then a facilitated conversation led by founders talking about their own experience rather than a taught curriculum - mindset, confidence, leadership, resilience, scaling and funding. Co-working in the hub stays open for the rest of the day if you want to stay. Dani Grieveson is the named speaker; the page publishes no further billing. 10am to midday, free. The Accelerator welcomes female founders, non-binary founders who feel aligned with women's spaces, and allies. It runs at every NatWest Accelerator hub, so this is the Birmingham edition of a national programme. Why go: the value is the room rather than the agenda - founders at very different stages talking candidly, and a free desk for the rest of the day afterwards. Best if you are early enough to want peers rather than a playbook.

The IRSE's technical event on railway signalling, telecommunications, train control and operations, hosted at the University of Birmingham's Edgbaston campus across one and a half days from 18 November. The headline session comes from the team in China behind Virtual Coupling Technology and Its Application in Urban Rail Transit, which won the 2026 IRSE Global Industry Award for Innovation of the Year: trains running as coordinated formations without physical couplers, using train-to-train communication, cooperative control and intelligent dispatching. Other presentations come from the UK and China, including work applying quantum techniques. The event also runs in York with a partly different programme. Tickets 65 pounds. Why go: Birmingham hosts the UK's main rail research centre, and this is award-winning work presented by the people who built it. Best for signalling and control engineers, and rail technology suppliers.

A three-hour practical workshop at Aston's John Cadbury House on getting useful work out of ChatGPT and Microsoft Copilot, 10:00 to 13:00. It is pitched at business owners and leaders rather than engineers. The session covers which everyday tasks these tools genuinely improve, how to get better results from them, and how to spot the opportunities worth pursuing in your own organisation, working through real examples, discussion and hands-on exercises. The emphasis is on leaving with something you can apply rather than a survey of the market. Free, run by the Aston Centre for Enterprise and Entrepreneurship. Why go: most AI sessions for business owners are either sales pitches or futurology, and this is neither. Best for owner-managers and team leads who have a Copilot licence and are not getting much out of it.

with Gavin Hale-Brown (Founding partner, Henley Halebrown)

The Birmingham Architectural Association's autumn and winter lecture series, Crafting the City, continues with Gavin Hale-Brown, founding partner of Henley Halebrown. The format is a one-hour lecture followed by a Q&A, with food and drink provided. Doors open at 18:00 and the lecture starts at 18:30, in The Shell at Birmingham City University's Parkside Building on Cardigan Street. Free, and open to professionals and students across the built environment rather than to members only. Refunds are available up to seven days before. Why go: a proper lecture-and-Q&A on how buildings and cities get made, which Birmingham does not get much of outside the universities. Best for architects, designers and anyone whose work touches the physical city.

Birmingham's node in CNCF's global Cloud Native Sustainability Month: two 45-minute talks on the energy and waste cost of running Kubernetes, then a community Q&A. Published topics are resource optimisation, rightsizing and autoscaling, energy monitoring and carbon estimation, GreenOps and where it meets FinOps, and efficient workload design, with lessons from production environments. Hosted by Cloud Native Birmingham at Bluetel Solutions, who sponsor the venue. Doors 6pm with food and drinks, welcome 6:30, talks at 6:45 and 7:45, Q&A 8:30, close 9:30. Free, capacity 100. Both talks are still open - the call for speakers runs to 15 November - so the line-up does not exist yet. Why go: GreenOps is mostly conference talk, and this is a room of platform engineers and SREs comparing what they actually changed in their own clusters. Best for anyone who owns a Kubernetes bill.

The Birmingham chapter of The Marketing Meetup, back at Assay Studios on Newhall Street. Doors at 6pm with snacks, a hello at 6:30, then a talk or two, and from 7:15 open conversation until 8. The speaker for this edition is still to be confirmed. What is fixed is the format: the community runs on 'come in listen mode', with an explicit no-selling, no-networking-bingo rule. Sponsored by Squibble, with The Keynote Club, TCNUK and HighLevel supporting. Tickets are pay-what-you-like from GBP 5 to GBP 50 - the average chosen is GBP 11.38 - and there is a published hardship route if the minimum is a stretch. Three unnotified no-shows and they prioritise someone else. Why go: it is the least transactional marketing room in the city, and the one most likely to be useful if you are new to Birmingham or to marketing. Book now and take the speaker on trust.

The Birmingham chapter of the Dynamics 365 and Power Platform User Group meets in person at the Wesleyan building on Colmore Circus Queensway from 18:30. Sessions are practitioner-led, covering D365, Power Platform and Copilot for the people who administer and build on them. Food and refreshments are provided and the organisers encourage arriving early to meet other members, with time to stay on afterwards. The detailed agenda is published closer to the date. Parking is available at the B4 car park and it is a short walk from any city centre station. Free. The group is actively looking for speakers for future events. Why go: the only regular in-person room in the city for people whose job is the Microsoft business applications stack, and small enough that you can actually ask about your own tenant. Best for D365 and Power Platform developers, admins and consultants.

A one-day conference at the ICC on Centenary Square on the technology going into the operating theatre, 08:00 to 17:30. The themes are robotic surgery systems and how to scale a programme safely, innovations in laparoscopy, data science in surgery and using actionable data to drive outcomes, digital surgery with immersive platforms and intraoperative data, wound closure and surgical site infection, and building sustainable theatre pathways. Run by the Global Surgery Unit at the University of Birmingham, it is aimed at surgeons, trainees and healthcare leaders. The ticket covers full access, lunch, CPD points and a networking drinks reception from 17:20. Tickets 49 pounds. Why go: surgical robotics and intraoperative data are where a lot of medtech money is going, and this is the clinical side of that conversation. Best for healthtech founders, clinical innovation leads and medical device companies.

Start Up Day is the British Library's national programme for new businesses, and the Library of Birmingham runs the local edition from its Business & Learning floor. This year's Birmingham theme is creative businesses: how to protect what you make, how to tell customers who have never heard of you what you actually do, and how to put together a growth strategy rather than a wish list. It runs 11:00 to 16:00 in the library on Broad Street, free, with sessions from the Business & Learning team alongside working creative entrepreneurs on how they got started. No speaker line-up has been published yet. Why go: Birmingham has no shortage of networking and very little practical founder teaching, and this is five hours of the second kind from the people who run the city's business library. Best if you are close to registering something and want the IP, positioning and pricing basics in one sitting.

An IStructE Midlands Counties evening at SYSTRA's offices on floor 5 of Alpha Tower, with light refreshments from 17:30 and presentations from 18:00, followed by the regional AGM. The billed talk covers the design of Fern, the world's first post-tensioned bronze dinosaur, and the structural problems that had to be solved to build it. The organisers also list three presentations on earthquake engineering reconnaissance, with first-hand accounts of damage assessment missions in Turkiye and Morocco, the tools used in the field and how engineers work under those conditions. A Teams live stream runs alongside the room; the joining link is only on the event page, not in Eventbrite's automated emails. Free. Why go: unusually concrete engineering content, from a post-tensioned sculpture to post-earthquake assessment. Best for structural and civil engineers in the Midlands.

An RTIG day at Millennium Point on what Enhanced Partnerships are actually delivering for bus passenger information, from 10:30. Enhanced Partnerships give authorities and operators a framework to improve information across local bus networks, and this session is about what is realistically achievable within one and what is already running. Coverage spans stops and real-time displays, digital channels, accessibility work, disruption information and network-wide consistency. Practitioners present real schemes with the lessons learned from across England, and there is a strand on how suppliers can support delivery. The room is local authorities, bus operators, technology suppliers and industry bodies. Paid ticket; the price is not published on the listing. Why go: transport data is one of the West Midlands' genuine technology strengths, and this is the delivery detail rather than the strategy deck. Best for transport technology suppliers and authority data teams.

Not a hackathon you compete in — this is the showcase at the end of one. Teams of young people who have spent the programme building AI tools for real public service problems present their prototypes to a judging panel, with local authorities, employers and technology partners in the room. Run by the West Midlands Combined Authority with Cloud Crew, and billed as the region's first public sector AI and automation hackathon. Millennium Point's auditorium on Curzon Street. Welcome at 2:00pm, team presentations and prototype demos 2:10 to 3:40, judging panel to 3:50, then networking aimed explicitly at employers, education providers and technology partners. The listing publishes no ticket price. Why go: the public sector AI pipeline in the West Midlands is small enough that one afternoon shows you most of it. Best for anyone hiring junior AI talent, or selling automation into local government.

A hands-on product workshop rather than a talk. Teams take on a single product and play out the thing that actually breaks roadmaps: competing stakeholders, shifting priorities and trade-offs nobody wants to make. Forty minutes of that, then a group discussion on how the roadmap held up. Hosted by Janice and four other ProductTank Birmingham organisers at x+why Foundry on Brindleyplace. Doors 6:30pm with food and networking, welcome at 7:00, workshop 7:10 to 7:50, roadmap discussion to 8:15, then networking until 9:00. Pizza and drinks from sponsor Stablezact; AND Digital and x+why Foundry also back the group. Free. Why go: Birmingham's product community is small, and this is the one room where PMs, designers and engineers argue about prioritisation with each other rather than at their own stakeholders. Best if you own a roadmap, or have to sell one to people who didn't write it.