A community learning project exploring Rochdale's most famous daughter — her persecution, her exile, and what she might make of the town today. Mixing history, critical dialogue, digital art, audio recording, and Raspberry Pi hardware, the group created Gracie From Beyond the Grave: a haunting delivered, naturally, via a fish and chip box.

There are conferences, and then there is OggCamp. For two days in Manchester I sat in rooms full of people considerably cleverer than me, had conversations that will fuel months of work, joined the Open Rights Group, gave away a few Heltecs to strangers, and came home with an alarming number of new Raspberry Pi projects. This is the story of my third pilgrimage to this awesome gathering, but more importantly, my first real gathering of high order geeks since the infamous year of 2020.

We've been running MigiDigi Geeks Retreat sessions at the Lighthouse Project in Middleton for a while now — and week after week, the results make the case better than any course ever could. A retired Ferranti engineer with 51,000 views on his Arduino projects. A self-organising maker group that nobody asked anyone to start. This is what happens when you bring the kit, step back, and let curiosity do the work. Read about what we're building at the Lighthouse — and come and join us on a Thursday afternoon.

Socrates never wrote a word, yet we only know his ideas because someone did. Every generation panics about the new cognitive tool that will make us all stupider. Every generation is wrong. So why is AI any different — and what happens when it gives you the one thing most of us never had access to: a genuine sparring partner for your ideas? Most of us who think deeply have learned to do it quietly, alone. This post is about what changes when that finally becomes available to everyone. And yes, the irony of writing it is fully intentional.

A blog post about Paulo Freire, the banking model of education, and why No Worries IT does things differently. 

Most websites look fine and work fine. It's the content that lets them down — walls of jargon, navigation nobody asked for, and blog sections gathering digital dust. Here's why content design, good information architecture, and the right platform make all the difference.

Finland came to Rochdale and said "we'll have that."

Then our funding quietly disappeared.

I designed a digital inclusion programme with no curriculum, no classroom, and no lesson plans. Just a kettle, some toast, and boxes full of Raspberry Pis. People who wouldn't answer the phone ended up running maker workshops in Manchester.

Here's what happened — and why it's time to bring it back.

Your software bill is a choice, not a fact of life. We've migrated hundreds of users off costly proprietary licences, repurposed laptops the council had written off, and built community computing infrastructure for next to nothing — all on open source. Here's what's possible when you stop paying the rent.

From handloom weavers to the Linux kernel, the story of open source is older than the internet. We trace the parallel between the historic enclosure of the commons and today's corporate capture of the digital world — and ask who really controls the fences in your technology stack.

There's a particular kind of person who walks into a Heritage Hackers dropin session for the first time. They've usually been talked into it by someone. They're not sure it's really for them. They sit down quietly, watch what everyone else is doing, and say something like "I'm not very technical."

That was Paul Owen, not so very long ago.