It’s been a long-standing ambition for Sheffield Digital to create some kind of annual event that celebrates the city’s digital scene and helps to put us on the map. This year, we’re finally getting something off the ground.

The Sheffield Digital Festival is a collaboration between Field Design and Sheffield Digital. The theme for the Festival is “where creativity meets technical excellence”. The Festival is made up of a main event on Friday 17 May and a platform for people around the city to create and promote their own Fringe events during the week of 13–17 May. This is similar to the highly successful Leeds Digital Festival (we’re not shy about learning from other people’s successes). For Sheffield, we’re planning a half-day event on the Friday that will act as the anchor for what we hope will be a whole week of fringe activity.

The Main Event

On the afternoon of Friday 17 May, there will be a mini-conference at the Ko-Host event space in Castle House – we are extremely grateful to Kollider for being our venue sponsor. We’re aiming for a combination of local speakers plus an exciting keynote speaker from out of town. We hope that the afternoon will be full of inspiration and digital design goodness. Alongside the speakers, there will be some exhibits by other local companies to show off some of their recent work. There will, of course, be plenty of mingling and socialising as well.

Get involved: Fringe and Exhibits

The Festival needs to be much more than an afternoon event though and we hope that people will join in by holding their own Fringe event during Festival week. It could be a meetup, some lightning talks, an exhibition, an open house, a film screening, a game-a-thon, a mini-hack, a debate – anything goes.

If you need help finding a venue, or people to collaborate with, please get in touch by emailing festival@sheffield.digital and we’ll do our best to help. When you’ve got your event organised, you can add it to the calendar on the Festival website so that other people can find it. We’ll also be promoting all the Fringe events through our Festival publicity efforts and via the hashtag #SHFDigiFest19.

We also have a very limited number of showcase spots available in the main event at Kollider. These spots are specifically for showcasing new products or unveiling something you’ve been working on, that deserves its own special place. If you’re interested, please contact Jonny Briggs at Field.

This is just the beginning

The plans for May are the start of something that we hope will grow year on year until we have a Festival that stands with the best in the country. We welcome your ideas and involvement and really hope that you will join us for a great afternoon on 17 May as well as hosting an event of your own.

There is a lot more information on the Sheffield Digital Festival website, so please take a look and get in touch with your ideas for Fringe events and Exhibits. For any general enquiries, you can always contact me (mel@sheffield.digital) of course.