Manchester — Week of 11 May 2026

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.

Honeycomb's Martin Thwaites on OpenTelemetry Weaver — a deep, rigorous .NET observability session that punches above its meetup weight.

Test.

The North's flagship agile conference, in its 14th year. Two days of talks and workshops for engineering leads, coaches and delivery managers.

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.

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.

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.

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 × GM Business Growth Hub's sharpest AI debate of the month — headline session plus hands-on workshops on agentic AI in Sales, Marketing and Finance.

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.