IT themed groups and communities in (and around) Bristol and Bath. Home of Bristol and Bath Perl Mongers.

This site has been created to serve the local IT communities. If you are a part of, or run a community please contact us to have your link added to this site. You are also welcome to have your own page. Those looking to start a new IT group, we can provide you with a subdomain, free site design and a mailing list.

COMING SOON

Local IT groups:

UWE Computer Science & Creative Technologies Department
UWE has a strong Computer Science department. With a range of undergrad degrees and a flexible MSc, suited to people from an unconventional or business background as well as the traditional school leavers.
Bristol & Bath Perl Mongers
User groups in the Perl community are called Perl Mongers. The local group holds monthly pub based meet ups, where they talk about a number of IT and non IT related topics, and sometimes a little Perl.
PHP South West
PHP User Group, meets 2nd Wednesday of every month in Bristol, UK. We typically have one or two speakers each month. Topics cover PHP or related technologies. In the past we've had talks on Doctrine 2, Zend Framework optimisation, redis, BDD with Behat, unit testing database code with DBUnit, experiences with Amazon Web Services, etc.
Bristol Web Folk
Bristol Web Folk aims to bring together everyone from the web, tech, and IT communities in Bristol. We hold regular free events including talk nights, hack nights, and social nights, to which everyone is welcome. We have a Twitter feed (@bristolwebfolk) and a calendar where we try to include all groups and events that are going on in Bristol and the surrounding area. We're always interested to hear about and help promote new groups.
Django Bath and Bristol Users Group
The Django Bath and Bristol Users Group is a place for local developers and companies to come and talk Django, Python, and web development in general. We run events every couple of months, with a mix of socials and technical meets.
Bristol Usability Group
The Bristol Usability Group is a community of individuals who are interested in the fields of user experience, usability and human-centred design. Our members include academics, freelancers, students, and employees of SMEs and multinational corporations.
Currently, we have more than 500 members signed up on our online community, and regularly get 40-50 people attending monthly events. All events are currently run on a voluntary basis, with individual members or corporate sponsors covering costs such as venue hire or web hosting.
Bristol Functional Programming
BrisFunctional is a support group for users of functional programming languages. Comprising experts and beginners alike we meet on the last Tuesday of every month to listen to talks, participate in lab exercises and eat pizza. All welcome to come and learn about functional languages such as Haskell, Scala and Clojure or how to apply functional techniques in other inferior languages.
Bristol Girl Geek Dinners
Bristol Girl Geek Dinners is a local community of women interested in engineering and technology. We meet every month to enjoy conversation in good company with food and a talk by an inspiring female speaker.
Bath Digital
Bath Digital represents a collaboration between a range of tech-focused groups which meet regularly in Bath. These include:
- Bath SPARK - a networking group of tech entrepreneurs which meets quarterly,
- BathCamp - an annual barcamp as well as a monthly meetup where invited speakers give short talks,
- openMIC - a mobile-focused barcamp which meets quarterly
- Creative Bath - a group for creative people and industries in and around Bath
Most recently, we have also run our first Digital Festival, a series of 28 events which ran over 10 days and saw around 2,500 people coming along.
Bristol Ruby User Group
The B.R.U.G (Bristol Ruby User Group) is a free group gathering the Shouth West Ruby community around monthly events. Our events usually includes talks/presentations, beer and super friendly chaps.
Bristol Java
Linked-in Java group for local Java developers
Trinity Community Arts
Our mission is to use the Trinity Centre to engage the local community of all ages in imaginative and socially inclusive projects, using a mixture of modern technology and creative urban energy. As part of this remit we provide software development and hosting as well as training and support, and power the centre almost entirely on Free and Open Source Software.
Bristol SkillSwap
Free to attend technical talks on a wide variety of computing topics.
The .NET Developer Network
The .NET Developer Network (aka DotNetDevNet) is a free user group with monthly meetings aimed at .NET developers in the South West of England. Started in 2007 we have over 800 members with an average monthly attendance of 45 members. Each meeting includes grok talks (10 minute presentations by members) and a main presentation of 90 minutes. Speakers come from across the UK, Europe and the US. Most meetings cover a .NET related subject but many are also generic to software engineering. Recent generic meetings covered subjects such as Selenium, Node.js, SOLID, Software Performance and Continuous Integration. You can watch a short video of our group and sign up for free meetings at www.dotnetdevnet.com or follow us on Twitter at @DotNetDevNet.
Bristol Hack Night
The Bristol Web Developer/Designer Hack Night is a weekly gathering every Wednesday for Geeks to meet up. It provides an opportunity for people to work on their pet projects, bounce ideas around, look at a problem as a group and find people they can collaborate with. It's aimed at people interested in the Web, however, anyone who's involved or wants to get into software is welcome. We draw people in from startups, freelancers, agencies, large organisations through to telecoms companies so it's a great way to meet people and get an idea about what else is out there.
underscore_
underscore_ is a collective of individuals working in New Media in and around Bristol. We are a thriving online community in the form of our mailing list and we also get together occasionally to meet, discuss, learn and play.
We are not another top down initiative run by a committee with little real understanding of the medium, but rather a grass roots gathering of people with a real passion for our industry. We feel that by sharing our experience and insights we can create a community that fosters a spirit of pride and innovation, and begin to put Bristol on the New Media map.
Software Testing Club - Bristol
A relatively new but hopefully growing test community, organising social events/talks in the Bristol area, supported by the Software Testing Club. Most recently we've teamed up with the BCS for a series of talks, from speakers like Gojko Adzic, or David Evans. We haven't evolved a regular meeting schedule yet, so the best way to find out what's going on is to check the Meetup group - there are also meetups in Cardiff too!
BCS The Chartered Institute for IT
BCS is the only chartered UK professional body purely focused on IT. It has branches around the UK and across the world, and specialist groups covering areas of technology, IT practices and business sectors. BCS brings together all sectors of IT (industry, practitioners, academics and government) to share knowledge and promote new thinking. It is also an awarding body for professional certifications & qualifications that are internationally recognised, including Chartered IT Professional (CITP), Chartered Engineer (CEng) and Chartered Scientist (CSci).
Bristol Hackspace
Bristol Hackspace is a social enterprise which aims to open up technology to anybody who takes an interest in it.
We want to 'open' technology both in the sense of taking things apart to learn how they work, and how to mend or adapt them; and in the sense of sharing the knowledge we gain from doing so. We are committed to the principles of Open Source and Open Knowledge.
Drupal SWDUGs
The local Drupal groups South Wales Drupal User Group (based in Cardiff) and South West Drupal User Group (based in Bristol) both host a monthly meetup for people to talk all things Drupally. Whether you're new to Drupal and looking for an introduction, or interested in learning more about advanced topics, everyone's welcome along.
South West Usability Discussion Group
A new group formed for open discussion of usability.

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