From BrightonR to Python – yes, it’s a bit of a tech cult thing!

Silicon Brighton is a community initiative with a mission to support the local tech and community sector in Brighton.

They work with 30+ tech digital meetups, hosting events weekly across the city. Funded by supporters and sponsors, they rely heavily on volunteers to run each of the groups. Hear from a Silicon Brighton supporter and organiser of two of the meetup groups about Cultivating Tech Communities and Embracing Growth in the tech space.

At Datacove, we’ve been working with Silicon Brighton since the start. Well, since before the start to be precise! For a bit of context, we’re a Brighton based data and analytics consultancy, specialising in customer analytics (unearthing your most valuable customers), marketing analytics (to maximise campaign impact) and process automation (taking away those time commanding business tasks forever).

One of the values that’s always been closest to my heart is fostering close relationships by empowering our communities. Before I moved to Brighton and started my business, I’d been a part of some fantastic and welcoming tech communities back in London. I’d longed to find something similar when arriving on the South Coast, but there’s wasn’t much down here and so I continued to travel up to London to fuel that bit of me that craved meeting other like-minded tech professionals – but with my heart set on creating something similar back in my new home. It was therefore fitting that through a London-based meetup, I was introduced to one of the other co-founders of BrightonR – and perhaps twice as fitting that this was at precisely the time Silicon Brighton was setting up on the South coast. Since that day in 2019, we’ve never looked back.

So what is BrightonR, I hear you ask? It’s a local community of people that code or have an interest in the R programming language. It follows on from similar groups held in London (where us co-founders effectively met) and other cities across the globe.

The first BrightonR meetup, in January 2020 was honestly a hundred times the success I think any of us imagined. Over 50 people through the door and we kept having to put the chairs out further and further back! At step one, we’d found our community.

Moving forward, as Datacove continued to grow, I had always made it clear we weren’t one trick ponies. Creating actionable insights from data requires a multitude of skills and it was important we had a team to match it. So, we introduced Python to the mix. Like R, Python is a programming language used by analysts and developers alike (and even taught to kids in schools nowadays). When the local Python user group needed a new organiser, it therefore felt like the perfect fit for our community minded team to take on – and over a year later, it is one of the strongest groups in Brighton if I do say so myself.

But it wasn’t just the Python group that evolved in 2023. As I sit here now, I still need to pinch myself at the direction in which things have travelled. The R user group in Manchester had been looking for a new home since the pandemic and with employees, clients and connections up that way, it felt right that we were the ones to give it that home. It didn’t stop there though – remember that London group – the one that started it all off – well, that needed some love and care too. The group that excited me as an attendee all these years was now all ours. Our re-launch later this month already has more than a hundred sign-ups and it’s likely there won’t be an empty seat in the room.

I know what you’re thinking – this R thing, it’s a bit of a cult, right? Most probably. Every year, hundreds of people (many of whom attend their local meetup) gather in London for a few days of learning, networking and inspiration around R. It’s the big one. People come from all over the UK, Europe and beyond just to talk all things R.

There’s one problem though. Yup, you’ve guessed, it needs a new home! You’ve probably also guessed who’s taken it on – but with a twist. In 2024, to celebrate the 10th anniversary of EARL (the Enterprise Applications of the R Language conference), it’s coming to Brighton! With the main event at the iconic Grand Hotel and an evening reception at the i360, it promises to be just as much a celebration of all things Brighton as it is a celebration of R. Another Datacove and Silicon Brighton classic in the making.

Stay connected with our weekly line-up of events by clicking on this link

www.siliconbrighton.com