Not everything we do is billed.
Biztech grew out of a forum, and the habit stuck: get useful people in a room, and useful things happen. That means two groups in particular — charities, and the technology community around Milton Keynes.
Working with charities
Charities are asked to do more every year with technology that was already creaking. They rarely have the budget for consultancy, and they almost never have someone in-house whose job it is to think about this.
So we run workshops with them. They are tasters, not a free IT department: we bring real challenges their own people are stuck on, work through them together, and show what the tools can and cannot do. People leave able to do a bit more themselves, and they know who to ask next time.
It is also, honestly, how we meet the corporate side. The organisations that sponsor and support this work are often the ones we end up working with properly.
The local technology community
The other half is keeping local technology businesses talking to each other: SMEs, startups, the people who have just founded something, and the ones inside bigger organisations trying to change how they work.
We do that through the events — roundtables, innovation challenge workshops, and panel discussions — and through the Insights newsletter. There is no membership and nothing to join.
The Digital Repair Café
Biztech supports the Digital Repair Café in Milton Keynes, alongside SOFEA and be braver now. It is an initiative supported by the three of us rather than owned by any one.
It is free, and it is deliberately unglamorous: bring an old or slow laptop to SOFEA in Bletchley and someone will sit down with you and help you fix it yourself. No experience needed, nothing to pay, nothing sold. There is a weekly online drop-in too — an hour over lunchtime where you type your questions and someone answers on video, so you never have to turn a camera on.
Two things sit behind our involvement. Working laptops keep people in work and in education. And teaching someone to fix their own is worth more than fixing it for them — which is the same argument we make to every client who asks us to run something for them rather than teach their team to.
Find out more at digitalrepaircafe.org
Get involved
If you are a charity with a technology problem, or a business that wants to sponsor this work, tell us about it.
