We believe in educating the public about IoT so they can have a say in the smart city agenda where they live. To this end we have worked on several community outreach programmes, including:
- In partnership with Gwynedd Council and Menter Môn we created a Digital Playground for an agricultural college complete with a range of sensors and a highly engaging and playful app to grab the attention of local farmers and businesses.
- Working in partnership with Huduma and The Local Honey Man we developed an outreach programme for 16-24 year old students studying in Oxford, Milton Keynes and Reading, where they could gain work-readiness, technical and practical IT skills around monitoring the health of bees in hives.
- In Hastings on the south coast throughout 2025 we are running a series of public hands-on workshops where they can build their own IoT device to report whenever there are sewage spills in the sea.
We regularly hire students over the summer holidays and get them working on real-life IoT projects. This gives them a brilliant opportunity to experience working in a small business, meet clients, and work on real technology projects. It does us a world of good too – we learn together and some of our best ideas have come from students.
There is solid evidence that the predominantly white, able-bodied, working age, men in IT design and test smart solutions that work best for other white, able-bodied, working, age men. The other three quarters of the population get a second-rate experience. We aim to address this injustice and help make sure the next generation of IoT superstars is more diverse and inclusive, because it will lead to technology that works for everybody.
The Things Network
We are passionate supporters of The Things Network, a fantastic community of 230,000+ people building a global, free to use LoRaWAN network. It started in the summer of 2015 in Amsterdam by Johan Stokking and Wienke Giezeman who set up a free data network with a handful of friends that covered the city. We learned about it in October 2015 and decided there were enough geeks in Reading to copy them, and we have been helped many community groups get started across the UK ever since.
We are recognised as UK ambassador for The Things Network, and we co-organise The Things Conference UK – an annual 2-day conference and workshop programme.