Dominic "The Hodge" Hodgson

On thursday Tim and I recieved an email from AQL asking us to come in and sign some paperwork for the event… there was some insurance items and fire regulation stuff but also an NDA, the NDA was invalid for the current circumstances so we sent it back with amendments, this started some warning lights in our head as NDA’s wern’t usual at this stage in the game (we have signed them before!) there was also a question that all attendees would have to sign it.

We had a chat with AQL on friday and left with matters unresolved and with a real feeling that there was something wrong, we emailed our request that we have a monday meeting to sort everything out.

This morning we received an email that contained the following…

I’m afraid that I have some bad news. We won’t be able to host the
event –  the contractors won’t be finished for several weeks and
there’s no power or sanitation whatsoever at the moment.

….. this is less than 3 weeks before the event is due to happen….

I’ve spent quite a bit of today ringing round venues and seeing if we can move to a smaller one and work something out but its just too tight… with total regret we have to cancel…

The website will be updated shortly with the following statement…

Dear All,

Earlier today we were told by the venue owners AQL that the venue for HackNorth would not be ready in time to host the event.
This close to the event starting we are utterly devastated as we do not believe we will be able to find a venue that can hold 200+ with WiFi in time and so have had to cancel the event.

At this point we want to thank the amazing sponsors, Yahoo Developer Network, Sun StartUps, Paypal, Haribo, Yorkshire Forward, 4IP, BBC Backstage and eBuyer who have been amazing
We plan to source a new venue and look to plan HackNorth 2 for early next year so don’t despair HackNorth will happen just with a little delay. For people who have gotten tickets fear not they are safe and should you wish to come next year will be valid. For those who have booked trains etc we are so sorry that we had to cancel so late in the day but it really is beyond our control.

While we would be happy to run such an event in an unfinished space we did need it to have basic requirements such as sanitation that could stand up to 200 people use over 24 hours.

If you have any questions please do not hesitate to ask

Cheers
Tim and Dom

*sigh* … If you’ve already bought train tickets and are coming down for the weekend, I have enough space for well 10-20 people at our house (if you don’t mind the floor and sleeping bags) and was thinking about doing a bit of a LAN Party / Board game weekend…. its not the same but I still want to put something on…

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