Bristol Technology Festival (BTF) is back for its third edition from October 10th to October 15th 2021. The city will host over 50 events with themes spanning the breadth and depth of Bristol’s growing tech and digital sector. The current plans are to hold the events in a hybrid model with a selection of online talks and others at limited capacity venues.

BTF was born in 2019 with a mission to showcase the sheer scale of technology that had been developed in the local ecosystem, whilst sharing the stories of those entrepreneurs, engineers and creatives behind the tech with the people of the city and further afield. Last year’s festival hosted 53 events, attracting over 5,000 attendees dialling in from places as far flung as Singapore and San Francisco. The target for 2021 to reach an even greater audience.

Bristol has a long-standing history of tech innovation and the ecosystem is booming, with the most productive tech talent in the UK (TechNation 2019). It feeds industries all over the world with breakthrough engineering and digital innovation. The region is famed for its creative approach to technological challenges, and was recently recognised as the best city for startups in the UK outside of London, with notable companies including IMDb, Graphcore, Ovo and Dyson.

Whilst 2020 was undoubtedly a challenging year for everyone, it has underlined the importance of technology in our lives and demonstrated how it can help connect us. BTF 2021 will seek to capture people’s hopes and predictions for the next decade, exploring the prevalent questions such as: in what ways will technology influence how we live and work? What impact will the tech cluster have locally, and globally?

BTF is coordinated by a group of volunteers from across the ecosystem including representatives from Hargreaves Lansdown, Newicon, TechSPARK, and Engine Shed. Events throughout the festival are crowdsourced from organisations across the city. These include tech companies, public bodies, schools, community interest groups and charities. Events are open to people in the tech sector, business leaders from across sectors, visitors wanting to know more about the region, and anyone wanting to know more about the city’s digital industries. Some of events include:

Engine Shed will host a launch of the festival alongside Deloitte Digital to bring together key people in the sector to understand how tech will support the growth of the city in the future.

For the 9th consecutive year, TechSPARK will host their annual SPARKies awards. The awards will gather 500 people to shine a light on the very best people, products and companies that make up the tech sector in Bristol, Bath and the broader West of England region.

FinTech West will host their annual fintech Summit to deep dive into the latest innovations, connect business in one of the UK’s key fintech communities.

2021 will also see the launch of the Festival Community Partner initiative where businesses across the city show their support by becoming one of 50 community partners, with all money invested into giving the festival a long term sustainable future.

Softcat has become the headline sponsor of the festival in 2021. Rob Parkinson, CIO at SoftCat says “We are delighted to be involved in the 2021 Bristol Technology Festival. Bringing together local technology communities and shining a light on all the innovation the region has to showcase is an important way to drive collaboration and industry growth.

“The last 18 months have been tough for many industries but technology has come through as an enabler and has made many re-think how they interact and do business. As the impact of technology continues to grow forums like the Bristol Technology Festival have never been more important and we are pleased to be supporting it.”

Visit the Bristol Technology Festival website.

The wake of covid, demand for data has combined with a democratisation of data; the general public are talking about R values and voraciously consuming graphs and figures. One of the hottest topics right now is the debate around the use and effectiveness of digital contact tracing apps. Data ethics and privacy are key issues when evaluating the pros and cons of a centralised approach versus a decentralised approach. The centralised approach creates a repository of contacts whereas in the decentralised approach all the data is held on individual’s phones and potential contacts are notified on a push basis only. One of the major concerns with centralised apps is the risk of scope creep. Once there is a central repository, there is potential for the data to be used for other purposes, such as identifying and penalising individuals who have interacted with too many other people. However, a central repository could also be of use to epidemiologists studying the spread of the disease – a purpose many people might be keen to support. Existing data protection law obviously requires data subjects to be informed on how their data will be used so theoretically there is already legal provision to guard against the risks of scope creep, but a lot depends on the phrasing of privacy notices. There is also the question of data retention and the dismantling any central repository when the immediate need has passed (who decides when that is and on what basis?).

Digital contact tracing is really only a small part of the contact tracing solution; it is not really that useful on it’s own. As one commentator said on Singapore’s TraceTogether app: “you can’t big data your way out of a no data situation”. Even if half of the population download and use the app, the chances of picking up a “contact” are only 25% (ie. 50% squared), so the majority of contacts will not be detected. There is also a high potential for false positives, eg. a bus passing close to a block of flats might register contacts which have not actually happened. Most contract tracing will therefore still be largely manual, with an army of people (18k across the UK) working to create a repository of people and contacts. These will be fully identifiable and definitely centralised, but surprisingly this aspect does not seem to be getting the same level of scrutiny as the digital contact tracing apps.

The way in which digital contact tracing functionality is used to supplement manual contact tracing is therefore of key importance and there are a number of potential uses – eg. to help fill gaps in people memories or perhaps to help with prioritisation of testing (eg. if you are ill and have had contact with a covid-19 sufferer, you could potentially be prioritised over someone who has not had contact). These are details which are still emerging.

These questions of data quality, provenance, ethics and privacy are issues which data professionals need to consider on a regular basis. Rarely have they been so high on the public agenda. The current debate highlights the importance and value of giving proper consideration to these questions. Let’s make sure this focus is carried forward into other subject areas and industries as we move beyond COVID-19.