Open Tech Calendar

We're excited to announce Mode 2 Meetup episode 5, sponsored this time by Registers of Scotland!

Mode 2 is a regular meetup about IT innovation within large companies across central Scotland.
Each meetup will feature two short talks and a chance to connect with IT innovators in a relaxed environment with free beer/wine and pizza. The talks for this meetup are:


Tom Meade, Digital Director, Registers of Scotland

Edge of the Abyss - Registers of Scotland's rise from the IT depths
Climbing from the depths of explaining IT mis-management to the Public Accounts committee, to becoming an exemplar for Agile delivery isn’t an easy adventure. It’s not to say it can’t also be fun. It’s hard. It takes a lot of bright people and bright ideas. It takes a lot of discipline and a lot of engineering skills. It takes a lot of support, a lot of stamina and it takes a lot of hard decisions. In the last 2 years we have changed utterly and become a great place to work – and critically deliver great outputs to our users. But you can’t have the sexy stuff without the unsexy. I’ll explain.


Greg Urquhart, Founder, Agile 4-12

How to work at scale and remain Agile; alternatives to what we’re told will work but don’t.

Over 3.5 years Skyscanner’s Product Development team scaled from 60 people in Edinburgh to more than 650 people in 8 offices world-wide, launched many new products (such as Hotels search and a travel platform that now powers 400+ partners, including MSN and Yahoo! Japan) and massively increased their agility (from 6 weekly release trains to on demand blue/green deployments). Many of the approaches we tried out to support this transformation are being actively promoted as industry best practice – yet we found they just didn’t work. I’ll tell you about what didn’t work and the alternatives that did.

Getting to the Registers of Scotland

The front door to the building is situated on London Road

Lothian Buses 26, 5, 15, 44, 45, 4 pass the front door of the building.

There is also parking available via the entrance to RoS at Smokey Brae, just round from London Road

Contact Us:
Mail: mode2meetup@gmail.com
Twitter: @mode2meetup
Periscope: @mode2meetup


What is Mode 2 Meetup about?

Technology is evolving at an amazing rate, and customer expectations with it. Headlines are dominated by tech companies disrupting the world with new technology and fearless business models.
However many of the organisations we work in are far older than the Internet. Legacy technology, organisational silos and hierarchies are all around. Every decision involves many stakeholders and complex processes are everywhere. Change of any kind can be slow and difficult.
Can Silicon Valley thinking translate to our established, risk-exposed, regulated organisations? Should it? In any case, how can we apply technology and creativity to delight our customers and avoid being overtaken by competitors or disruptors?
We're aiming to create a friendly, relaxed environment where we can discuss the reality of innovation in larger organisations. There will be two short talks per month, with plenty of opportunity to network afterwards over free beer/wine and pizza. The talks will cover a broad range of topics about technology, business and culture change.
We need ideas and volunteers for future talks, although the golden rule is: no sales pitches! We're also looking for venues for future events, so please let us know if you are able to host a meetup.
We'd love to build a diverse audience representing the increasingly blurred line between IT and business across different industries: financial services, public sector, energy, consultancies etc.
Hope to see you there!