The Venue for Day Two is Rich Mix in Shoreditch, a charity and social enterprise that offers live music, film, dance, theatre, comedy, spoken word and a bunch of other cool stuff. All profits support its education, arts and community activities – which aim to nurture local talent. In other words it invests in people, and community by creating architectures of participation.

I love the place, frankly, and I am sure you will too. Its very modern, and very Shoreditch. And I also now have a secret place booked for decompression from 3-5pm. The craft continues!

For details on how to find the venue check out this map.

Finally pinned down what we’re doing the night before Monki Gras – Craft Beer in Clerkenwell.

We have a room booked from 5pm at The Craft Beer Co – which has been getting absurdly good reviews.

Ratebeer.com recently listed it as the 4th best beer venue in the world.

If you want further evidence of quality, and commitment to craft, then look no further than the fact the ‘house’ Lager is made exclusively for the pub by pioneering and astonishingly good Danish brewery Mikkeller.

After drinks we’ll be treating speakers and sponsors to a slap up meal, and of course more craft beer, at the nearby Gunmakers.

Sound like a plan?

image found in Wikipedia

I am extremely pleased to announce that Microsoft let me know this morning that it will be the top level sponsor of Monki Gras. That is – its the Bishop level sponsor. We’ll be making sure that our delegates appreciate the contribution. While not a condition of sponsorship, I am also happy to announce that Steve Lamb aka @actionlamb is going to talk about the new nexus of open source, social media and commercial software, and how its changing development and developers. Lamb is a noted troublemaker- a Mac guy that leads Microsoft open source efforts in the UK.

In other news Shoreditchworks has been incredibly helpful as a sponsor. Thanks for the design help and merchandising introductions J&J.

We already knew Joyent was sponsoring, and they have chosen to be an Abbot. Well cloud SmartOs Illumos node mongo hosting chaps.

IBM also confirmed a couple of days its going to be an Abbot, which is fantastic. This decision was driven by the excellent folks at IBM Hursley. So things are going well.

One of the pleasures of organising RedMonk Brew: The Monki Gras has been watching the steady flow of sales through Eventbrite, a great platform for event billing and technology.

I may not exactly be Hadoop, but I did notice one interesting trend – we seem to be doing rather well in attracting Irish architects developers to the event.

So in the last few days we have signups from @oisin aka Oisin Hurley 

Co-founder Vigill, software product construction expert, open source contributor, five for fifty the war stories.

Then there is @boobboo aka Chris Kernaghan

So many things to so many people, some good and some bad, pick your ratio

@darachennis signed up early.

Chief Solutions Architect at Push Technology. Square peg. Round hole. No problem!

My friend Tara Simpson had been considering coming, and last night he clicked “purchase ticket” (top twitter moment, that), even with travel and hotel from Ireland. Thanks for seeing the value Tara.

CEO Instil. Programmer. Trainer.

If we’re talking Irish we shouldn’t forget our very own @tomraftery aka Greenmonk

Lead Analyst at GreenMonk, the Energy and Sustainability practice of industry analyst firm RedMonk

My founding partner @sogrady aka Stephen O’Grady is American, but supports the Sox so I guess he’s an Irishman by proxy. What’s more he sensibly married a good Irish girl (she has a passport)

i helped found RedMonk. if you see someone at a tech conference wearing a Red Sox hat, that’s probably me. married to girltuesday.

Me? My gran was a Lapin. Irish again.

So the Irish are coming. I would say (and indeed did so last night) National Achievement! Award Unlocked. I am pretty sure there will be more Irish at MonkiGras, and if so I will update this list.

If you’re an Irish developer nerd you should sign up.

Great news. Google UK has just signed up as a MonkiGras sponsor – it is going to cover wifi and is making a contribution to lunch.

Talking of lunch – I am really excited about our supplier for lunch. It will be an experience. A yummy experience.

And we’re off.

Building bridges within and across communities is what RedMonk has done online for years, and now we’re fostering an event series to do the same thing. Our core thesis for RedMonk Brew is that social is changing how tech is designed, built, managed and paid for. We want to get under the skin of this trend towards putting the practitioner front and center, the social revolution in tech. This is the beginning of the social journey, and the beginning of the Brew series. The social trend won’t slow any time soon, in terms of how its making life better for practioners. And of course its only practitioners that can actually make life better for users.

The final part of the puzzle is beer, which goes so well with Social, and the fact we’re Monks. So the events will have great food and beer-tasting. The presence of beer may make it slightly harder to push through corporate procurement, but we’re optimising for fun, insightful events. Nerds tend to be fussy, so why not give them a new corpus of knowledge to geek out with?