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# Brighton, Edinburgh and the Elgg Meet
- URL: https://werd.io/brighton-edinburgh-and-the-elgg-meet/
- Published: 2008-10-16T18:51:53.000Z
- Updated: 2025-06-12T11:00:59.000Z
- Author: Ben Werdmuller
- Tags: General, #ben-684a32da145d7d001be71dae, #Migrated-1749693130536, #wp, #wp-post, #Import 2025-06-11 21:52

[![Night on the beach](http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3181/2931505889_21dd774879.jpg)](http://www.flickr.com/photos/benwerd/2931505889/)

Last Thursday I found myself in Brighton, which is a revelation - a concentrated community of tech entrepreneurs who get to live by the sea, drink at awesome cafés and have the kind of social values I love. As well as some consultancy at the University of Brighton, we were there for an Elgg Meet, where cool people like [Tom Kiss](http://www.tomkiss.net/), [Steve Purkiss](http://purkiss.com/) and the crew behind [the Brighton Gallery](http://thebrightongallery.com/) hung out and talked social media with us over a couple of beers.

As a result, I'm heading back in a couple of weeks, spending a healthy portion of my monthly salary on [a cheesy novelty hotel room](http://www.hotelpelirocco.co.uk/) for a couple of nights so I can be there over the Hallowe'en weekend. Tom's annual [Crawl of the Dead](http://crawlofthedead.com/) takes place on the Friday night - it sounds like it'll be better than ever, so I'm toying with finding myself some zombie makeup and joining them. Before then, I'll be hanging out at [the Werks](http://thewerks.org.uk/), an awesome coworking space that resembles Chris Messina's [Citizen Space](http://citizenspace.us/) in San Francisco.

Right now, I'm in Edinburgh, which is a very different sort of place. I moved away from here four years ago, and it's interesting to see how it's changed; in particular, the computer science students are no longer forced to do their work in the basement of the maths and physics block, next to the boiler room. The new [Infomatics Forum](http://www.inf.ed.ac.uk/building/) looks like a piece of science fiction utopia has landed where a grotty old pay-and-display car park used to be, and I've been told that they plan on having lots of events and programmes to develop a thriving tech community here. Having left in part because there weren't those opportunities, I'm going to keep a very close eye on it.

As I said in my previous post, if you're in Edinburgh on Saturday October 18 and are in any way curious about Elgg, I'll be at [an Elgg Meet at the Peartree from 3-5pm](http://upcoming.yahoo.com/event/1165225). Please join us! I'll be shamelessly wearing a heavily-branded Elgg T-shirt, so you should be able to spot me.