The Monki Gras returns in late January.The conference series born from a tweet is back, bringing you great speakers, unique talks – of course – the best craft beer London has to offer.
In an ideal world I would host Monki Gras at the new Shoreditch Works building (more on this later) but for contingency purposes I am putting something else in place. That is, the location is still TBD (yeah I know… 2 months etc) but it will be in London, almost certainly leaning East.
It will be a two day conference. January 31st and February 1st, 2013. In other words- just before FOSDEM.
I already have a few great speakers lined up but the roster will grow over the next few weeks. Given the theme of the event is Scaling Craft I am pleased that Phil Gilbert, just appointed IBM General Manager of Design, will be giving a talk about his new job – trying to instil a design culture in a company of 400,000 people, so that it can start creating products people love rather than (sometimes grudgingly) use. Not much on his plate, then.. He’ll bring a unique operational perspective. Gilbert has a solid startup background, and I think he’s going to fit in well with the Monki Gras community. .
I will have plenty of amazing food for delegates again, with a dinner on the first evening. We will of course be doing plenty of beer-tasting, celebrating the best of the new London craft beer scene, and hopefully hearing from some of the makers. How do you scale a craft brewing operation without losing what made you great in the first place? That’s a question all startups face.
How do you scale craft? Agile and devops attempt to do just that. The tools serve the operator rather than the other way around. Craft culture brings a mindset to technology development that is delivering impressive results- see firms like Etsy and Github as exemplars. This is the rich and fruitful territory we’ll address at Monki gras. What cultural hacks scale? What are the limits of craft, or automation?
And what about knitting, and beer, and cheese, and all the other craft stuff? Yeah- we’ll have some of that.
