CultureTECH: Northern Ireland’s Innovation Festival

This year, CultureTECH festival is being held on 11-20 September 2015.
The event takes place each September in Derry-Londonderry. Every year the organisers work closely with a variety of partners who help design the programme. The festival is open access, so there's room for anyone who wants to go and get involved!

First edition in 2012 was organised in a little over 4 months and focused on industry with a fringe of public facing events; it lasted 3 and a half days and attracted around 8.000 people.
For 2013, the CultureTECH team decided to up the ante in line with Derry's term as the inaugural UK City of Culture. They ran for a full week, shifted the focus to incorporate more public events and carried out their first “Junior” programme for schools. Around 24.000 people attended, including 8.000 students.
2014 was undoubtedly the best event to date, attracting over 43.000 attendees across 200+ events hosted by 134 partner organisations. The festival brought the education strand into the main fold of the programme (with 16.000 students taking part) and shifted even further towards a family-friendly programme that encourages everyone to get hands-on with technology. Highlights included an enormous Minecraft event, a conference designed and delivered by young people, a HD video dome, Friday Night Mashup, DANI Awards and the launch of the NW Regional Science Park.

For 2015 (Sept 11-20), CultureTECH has even more ambitious plans. The festival is now squarely aimed at an audience of young people and families and the team is planning for in excess of 60.000 people. They are partnering with the BBC's Make It Digital for a huge public engagement programme, they will host CoderDojo's annual global conference and will crank up the volume on their gaming events. Attendees can expect 5 industry conferences and Ireland's largest Maker exhibition.

For more info visit the Culture TECH website