Manchester — Week of 2 Nov 2026

with Dr Alexander Thompson (Workshop lead, NIHR HRC in Emergency and Acute Care) · Dr Matthew Parkes (Workshop lead, NIHR HRC in Emergency and Acute Care)

The first of a two-part workshop on building the evidence the NHS actually buys on, rather than guessing at it. Part two follows on 20 January 2027. This day is about the problem rather than the study design. Short talks and discussion work through how patients, clinicians, NHS payers and investors each define an unmet need differently, and participants apply those four lenses to their own technology. The rest covers what is already known in your area, which study your project needs at its current stage, and how to show the NHS the problem is worth paying to solve. No economic modelling background is assumed. Led by Dr Alexander Thompson and Dr Matthew Parkes. At the Core Technology Facility on Grafton Street. 100 pounds covers both workshops, lunch included. Why go: the gap between a working healthtech product and an NHS purchase order is an evidence gap, and almost nobody runs a workshop on it. Best for founders and clinical leads heading towards procurement.

A workshop for parents to give you the skills, knowledge and confidence to support your child or teen with the tricky world of modern AI.

The monthly meeting of NSManchester, the city's Swift, iOS and Mac developer group, held on the first Monday at Neo on Charlotte Street. The format is short talks from members followed by time in the room. Speakers for a given month are usually confirmed close to the date rather than in advance, and the group publishes the decks afterwards in its public talks repository on GitHub, which doubles as a record of what the Manchester iOS scene has been working on. Hosted by Tim and Chris B. 6pm to 8pm. Why go: it is the only standing Apple-platform developer group in Manchester and it has kept going for years, which matters more than any single month's line-up. Best for iOS and macOS developers who want local people to ask rather than a forum.

The monthly drop-in coffee morning at the NatWest Accelerator's Manchester hub in Spinningfields, open to accelerator members and local founders. Free, one hour, no speakers or agenda published.

Join us at The Performance Academy Meetup for an evening of tips, tricks, and networking with fellow paid marketers!

Manchester's AIoT Hub meets online for a session on re-engineering AI - rethinking how AI systems are designed and built into connected products rather than bolted on. The group's monthly format covers applied AI and IoT topics for engineers, data practitioners and product people.

An interactive scenario-based experience where you will walk through what goes on behind the scenes when a major cyber attack strikes.

The fortnightly Manchester Tech Network evening drinks at Slug and Lettuce on Deansgate. Informal, no presentations - software engineers, product managers, designers, UX practitioners, data and AI people, and startup founders and operators from across the Manchester tech community.

The fifth workshop in the Manchester NatWest Accelerator's 12-week Sales Accelerator, on organising and tracking business data well enough to make sales decisions from it. The session covers why a CRM matters, how to structure one so it tracks leads, customers and performance, which sales metrics are worth measuring, and real founder examples of data changing a sales strategy. It closes with an Action Lab where you set up or improve your own CRM. Coffee and networking from 09:30, intro and key concepts at 10:00, a CRM implementation case study at 10:30. Free, at the NatWest Accelerator hub in Spinningfields. Individual workshops can be taken without joining the full programme. Why go: practical CRM hygiene rather than sales theory, and the Action Lab means you leave with something actually configured. Best for early-stage founders still running sales themselves with no system behind it.

with Anthony Davies (, Smokeball)

A lunchtime session for small law firms on where AI actually saves time in fee-earning work, run by legal software vendor Smokeball at The Black Friar in Salford. Two parts, led by Anthony Davies. The first works through realistic legal workflows and sample documents - property and conveyancing, wills and probate, family law - rather than slides. The second covers what changes in a firm's compliance and governance obligations once AI is in the workflow, and what has to be in place before anyone relies on it. Free, 13:00 to 14:00, in person. Aimed at partners, fee earners, practice managers and compliance leads at small and mid-size firms. Why go: the compliance half is the part most AI-for-law sessions skip, and it is the part that decides whether a small firm can use any of this. Worth knowing that the host sells practice management software to exactly this audience.

A ninety-minute workshop at the NatWest Accelerator's Spinningfields hub for business owners and leaders who know AI matters but have not worked out where it fits in their own operation. The session explains the technology in plain English, walks through ways it is already being used in ordinary businesses, and then works with attendees to identify where it could save time in theirs. It is a working session rather than a keynote, and it runs over lunch, which keeps it to a single slot in the diary. Part of the Accelerator's Catalyst Events programme, open beyond the accelerator cohort. Why go: most AI sessions in Manchester are either vendor demos or deep technical talks, and this is neither. Best for owner-managers and senior leaders at non-tech companies who want a shortlist of candidate use cases they can act on.

A peer roundtable for health and medtech founders run by Western Advocates for Health and Medtechs, hosted by WAHM founder Paul Forster with Grant MacCalman and Phoebe Wakeman. Discussion covers NHS adoption, procurement and scale, building inside complex regulatory systems, collaboration and collective voice, the grant funding and equity investment landscape, and international commercialisation. Participants are invited to bring their own problems to the table. Strictly for health and medtech founders and C-suite. Tickets are 15 pounds and registration is subject to host approval. A founder ticket includes free entry to the Healthtech Ecosystem Social: From Research to Market, 17:00 to 20:00 at the same venue.

with Phoebe Wakeman (Co-founder, Vitmedics) · Paul Forster (Founder, Western Advocates for Health and Medtechs (WAHM))

A fireside chat on getting healthtech out of research and into the market, followed by an open social for Manchester's health and medtech community. Phoebe Wakeman, co-founder of Vitmedics, is interviewed by WAHM founder Paul Forster on turning research into a product, finding a route to market, and the lessons learned on the way. The organisers' framing is blunt: they want to show healthtech products can reach market and be honest about what that takes. The room is mixed by design, with founders and startup teams, university researchers and NHS innovators, investors and ecosystem supporters. Tickets are Roundtable Attendee or Ecosystem Supporter, some requiring host approval, and anyone holding a ticket for the afternoon founders' roundtable gets in free. The exact address is shared on registration. Why go: the one Manchester room this month putting NHS innovators, healthtech founders and investors in the same place, with a founder being specific about what her route to market actually cost. Best for anyone commercialising health research here.

with Laura Hughes (Head of Data, Softwire)

Laura Hughes, Head of Data at Softwire, on why data transformation projects fail in ways software projects do not. She spent her early career as a full-stack engineer before moving into data strategy, governance and data engineering about five years ago, and the talk comes out of noticing that data projects are run differently from the agile software teams she came from - and that the problems they hit are rarely the ones anyone planned for. She covers what good data architecture looks like in practice and what separates a business transformation that lands from one that stalls. Architecting Manchester's meetup at the Department Bonded Warehouse. Doors 17:00 with pizza and drinks, talk at 18:00, finished by 19:30. Free; tell the organiser in advance about dietary requirements. Why go: data governance talks are usually given by consultants selling a framework. This is a practitioner describing what went wrong. Best for data engineers, architects and anyone being handed a data migration to lead.

with Harry Chyshkala (CTO, IC Studio) · Valdis Strautiņš (Founder & CEO, WD Market) · Rob Pickering (Founder, Polite.ai)

A lot of what people build with AI comes down to conversations - chat, voice, messaging - and this is Twilio's Manchester builder meetup on what that looks like in practice. Three talks from people shipping it. Harry Chyshkala, CTO at IC Studio, on what a real SMS pumping fraud case taught him. Valdis Strautins, founder and CEO of WD Market, on getting AI agents to write code you would actually merge. Rob Pickering, founder of Polite.ai, on using agents to build, review and improve user-facing voice services. Doors 18:00 with food and drinks, welcome 19:15, talks 19:30 to 20:30, networking until 21:00. Free, at Colony King Street. The second ticket release requires host approval, so register well ahead. Why go: voice and messaging agents in production is a narrower and more useful conversation than the general AI-meetup circuit manages. Best for developers, tech leads and founders already building with LLMs.

A one-day conference on what schools actually do with assessment data, run by Equin as part of its Data In Schools Conference series and pitched at primary schools. James Pembroke, Director of Strategy at Insight, and Richard Selfridge, education data consultant at the same firm, lead the keynote sessions. Joshua Perry of Smartgrade and Carousel runs a step-by-step session on stripping work out of school data processes, and a Making Data Meaningful panel brings in Hilary Fine, Assessment Lead at Smartgrade, and Vicky Merrick, CEO and founder of Merrick-Ed, with further panellists still to be announced. There are slots for delegates to put their own experience in the room. 08:30 to 15:00 at The Studio on Lever Street. GBP 75 including lunch and refreshments, refundable up to seven days before. Why go: the people building the tools and the people using them in the same room, arguing about workload rather than dashboards. Best for school data leads, and for edtech builders selling into primary education.

with Drew (Rusty) Carroll (Innovation coach, Independent)

A small-group coaching session on moving an innovative idea towards an actual outcome: a new partnership, a commercial route, or a bigger funding bid. Drew (Rusty) Carroll, an external innovation coach Manchester Digital met at its Digital Environment conference, facilitates. The format is deliberately open. Attendees can listen, or put their own problem in the room and draw on the group's experience. It is the first of a planned monthly series, so expect a small, repeat-heavy room rather than a one-off audience. Two hours, free, in Room 4.204 at University Place, with capacity capped at 30. Manchester Digital asks anyone who books and then cannot attend to release their place in advance. Why go: coaching rather than content, with a cap low enough that you will actually get airtime on your own idea. Best for researchers and founders stuck between a promising idea and a route to market.

A Canonical Day session on open-source infrastructure, covering cloud architectures and migration off proprietary platforms, scalable data systems and AI inference, software supply chain security and compliance, and bridging the IT/OT divide for distributed factory and IIoT estates. Sponsored and run by Canonical, with venue and catering provided. Venue not published at the time of listing - check the registration page.

with Krithika Subramanian (SQL Engineering, Microsoft) · Pooja Kamath (SQL Engineering, Microsoft)

A Microsoft community call hosted by the Manchester Data Platform User Group, with updates straight from the SQL engineering team. This session covers Semantic Index, presented by Krithika Subramanian and Pooja Kamath. Online, free, one hour.

The weekly Venture Café Thursday Gathering, this edition on Focused Research Organisations and where they sit in the UK funding landscape - the model built for science that is too large for a single lab and too early for a company, and the question of what funds that work here. Venture Café evenings run as a set of sessions plus open networking across three hours rather than one talk, at SISTER on the Renold Building site. Free, with registration through the Venture Café community platform. The full session list is published closer to the date. Why go: focused research organisations and the money around them get discussed far more in London than in Manchester, and this is the city's standing room for research-heavy founders. Best for deep tech founders, university spinouts, and anyone raising against a science roadmap rather than a revenue one.

WordCamp Manchester returns as a barcamp rather than a conference: no fixed speaker programme, and the sessions are shaped by whoever turns up on the day. The format is built around structured conversations between the people who build, design and run WordPress sites, rather than talks delivered at them. It takes place in the Storehouse at Whitworth Locke on Princess Street, signposted from reception and fully accessible, with discounted overnight rooms for attendees. The Manchester WordPress User Group is the local community behind it. Timings beyond the morning start, and the ticket price, are not yet published, and the schedule page is still thin. Check both before booking. Why go: WordPress still runs a large share of Manchester's agency and client work, and a barcamp is where the unglamorous problems get discussed honestly. Best for agency developers and freelancers who want peers rather than a keynote.

with Jonathan Catton (Head of Data & Insights, Hallam)

A morning session for B2B SaaS marketers running account-based programmes, and for anyone trying to get their marketing data into a state an AI tool can do something useful with. Jonathan Catton, Head of Data & Insights at the agency Hallam, walks through how his team pulled scattered marketing data into one place and what changed once they had. Attendees then take their own questions to small tables with hosts, and the morning closes with open networking run by Silicon Mingle. Organised by Overfunded. Free, in person at Department Campfield, and no technical background is assumed. Why go: most ABM sessions stay at strategy level and skip the data plumbing that decides whether any of it works. Best for B2B marketers and growth leads at SaaS companies who own the numbers themselves.

UniCS, the University of Manchester's computer science society, runs the city's flagship student hackathon: a single-day build at the Nancy Rothwell Building, free to enter and open to undergraduates and postgraduates from any university. Check-in opens at 09:00, hacking runs 12:00 to 18:00, and judging and the closing ceremony finish around 21:30. Sponsor workshops run through the afternoon from NatWest, Reply, Tether and Neptune North. Food is provided. Over £70,000 in prizes is advertised, £3,500 of it cash across the top three. Everyone applies individually and teams form on the Discord or on the day. Hacker applications closed on 17 October. Why go: a complete idea-to-demo cycle in one day, judged, with engineers from NatWest, Arm, Codethink and Google in the building. Best for students who want something finished to show at interview rather than another coursework repo.

Weekend Film School Manchester's audio and sound design module at 1853 Studios in Oldham - hands-on production technique for people working in screen and creative tech.