The second meet­ing of UPA North took place last night at Cafe Muse in the Manchester Museum. It wasn’t as well atten­ded as the first meet­ing in Janu­ary, but there were some famil­iar faces as well as some new; Hi Roy!.

I arrived early and grabbed myself a sand­wich and cof­fee before wan­der­ing around to shake a few famil­iar hands and say ‘Hi’ to some new faces. People con­tin­ued to drift in for the next half an hour or so.

Dave Hawdale kicked of the meet­ing giv­ing us some inter­est­ing and occa­sion­ally amus­ing ‘inter­net’ related facts from recent news, before intro­du­cing the nights guest speaker: Louise Fer­guson.

Louise intro­duced her­self and her sub­ject ‘Eth­no­graphy’. Her talk was very inter­est­ing, if a little rushed. It was clear she had a lot more to say on the sub­ject than time allowed. I felt she could have got some of her points across more eas­ily with con­crete examples, but she seemed determ­ined to skirt around job spe­cif­ics and cli­ent details. Louise fin­ished with a brief ques­tion and answer session.

After another ‘shame­less self-promotion’ ses­sion (which I bottled again!), Dave gave a round-up and men­tioned some ideas for the next couple of meet­ings. He is try­ing to arrange a couple of speak­ers on Access­ib­il­ity which should be very interesting.

After­wards a small group of us retired to Kro Bar where we all chat­ted about all kinds of stuff; from music and record col­lec­tions, to the Semantic Web and social soft­ware, to museum exhib­its, cat­egor­iz­a­tion, folk­so­nom­ies, and more. Talk­ing to Louise, it sounds like there are some inter­est­ing things afoot, UK-centered for a change.

I think every­one gained some­thing pos­it­ive from the night. Some use­ful con­tacts were made and even some tent­at­ive agree­ments made for the future.