Launching the New RookieOven Website

Ta-da. Welcome to the new look RookieOven. Over the past few months, we’ve been working to rejig our thinking behind what RookieOven is and how we best serve our goal of creating a more vibrant tech community in Scotland.

We’ve logically grouped our activities into 3 areas:

Let me explain.

Coworking

This one is pretty self-evident. Through our collaboration with Govan Workspace, we have the RookieOven Coworking space in the Fairfield Shipyard Offices.

The road to opening the space started in 2014 when I was looking for a place to base myself. Edinburgh had Codebase, TechCube and Mallzee Towers, Newcastle had Campus North, Manchester had SpaceportX and what did Glasgow have….?

I wrote a blog post asking “where is the heart of the Glasgow tech community?”, and that kick-started the road to opening the coworking space in Govan.

The space opened in early 2015 and since then we’ve had tenants and visitors from all over the world. We’ve hosted meetups, live stream, seminars, hackathons and all manner of events to serve the community.

I’d like to think that our space has become an easy to access, reliable, flexible and affordable asset to the community and long may that continue.

Community

RookieOven started back in 2011 in two ways; a meetup and a blog. Both with the intention of creating a more cohesive tech community in Scotland and that has been at our core.

We still meet monthly in Glasgow in The Raven (the next meetup is next Monday) and we promote all the other great tech events across Scotland through this site and our social media. If you have an event or happening you want to be promoted let us know.

While the meetup has continued to flourish the blog has been in a sorry state - and that’s on me. In the heyday of the RookieOven blog 2011/2012 I was writing at least 3 blogs per week, I ran it pretty much like a business - with commitment and drive. Since then the blog has fallen down my priorities and sadly not been given the attention it deserves but we’re changing that. From now on the blog is going to be filled with regular content and my aim is to have that content be founder generated as much as possible. I want us, as a community to shout about our successes, share our failures and learnings and put Scottish tech on the map.

The community aspect of RookieOven grew a job board which is being relaunched as an affordable way to recruit talent. Our aim here is twofold - can we reduce our reliance (as a community) on recruiters (and their fees) and can we help to highlight opportunities with an aim of retaining talent in the community, with Scottish owned companies.

The last part of our community activity is our newsletter. Every fortnight we drop an email with a summary of what’s going on in Scottish tech.

Across is all, our community activities aim to do that - create and bolster the community. If you have any suggestions or would like to join in let us know.

Academy

Our academy started in 2016. It was a response to the poor state of technology education in Scotland and sadly it’s still the case that teachers are hamstrung by poor IT (ancient hardware, locked down networks and terrible software and services). Teachers too often don't afford the time to develop their own skills and abilities, to keep up to date with the latest trends, technologies and ways of working.

I strongly believe that ‘we’ as a community should step forward. After all, the next generation of talent is essential for our ambitions of having world-class tech companies.

With the Academy going forward we’re going to continue to experiment and try new formats that best serve educators and pupils. But in the immediate term, we’re curating collections of useful content and resources that can be used by educators and by new founders.

This content is again founder generated so I charge you reading this, as a person with interest in Scottish tech - step forward, drop me an email and play your part in developing our talent pool.