Same Yorkshire Mafia. Fresher.

Yorkshire Mafia began with a fairly simple belief: Yorkshire would be a better place to do business if more of the people doing business here knew one another.

That was easier to say than to achieve. Yorkshire is a big place, economically as well as geographically. Its businesses are spread across cities, towns, sectors and industries that often have surprisingly little contact with each other. Leeds has its networks, Sheffield has its own, as do Hull, York, Bradford and everywhere between them. Technology gathers in one place, property in another, manufacturing somewhere else. Founders, investors and large employers inhabit their own overlapping but distinct worlds.

There is nothing wrong with any of those communities. We need them. The problem is the space between them.

That fragmentation has always represented a huge amount of lost opportunity. Somewhere in Yorkshire today, a business needs a supplier it doesn’t know exists. A company is recruiting for a role that the right person will never see. Someone is organising an event that would be useful to people beyond the organiser’s immediate network. A founder is looking for expertise sitting twenty miles away. A business with something genuinely interesting to say will publish it to the same audience that already knows them.

Yorkshire isn’t short of activity. It is short of infrastructure that allows enough of that activity to connect.

For much of Yorkshire Mafia’s history, we attacked the problem physically. We put people in rooms.

Sometimes a few dozen of them, sometimes thousands. Over the years, hundreds of thousands of people came through Yorkshire Mafia events. What made those rooms work wasn’t networking in the conventional sense. It was density. Put enough different people, businesses, ideas and opportunities in one place and useful things start to happen without somebody standing in the middle engineering every introduction.

A conversation leads somewhere. Someone encounters a business they had never heard of. An employer meets somebody they eventually hire. A supplier finds a customer. Two people discover they have been trying to solve different sides of the same problem.

The room is simply the platform on which those things become possible.

That idea sits at the heart of what we’re doing with Yorkshire Mafia now.

The new YM takes the principle that made those physical gatherings useful and extends it beyond a particular venue on a particular day. We’re building a permanent platform for Yorkshire business: somewhere the companies, people, activity and opportunities across the county can become more visible to one another.

This matters because visibility is a prerequisite for connection. You cannot attend an event you don’t know is happening, apply for a job you never see or buy from a business you don’t know exists. Before people can connect, the things worth connecting to need to be discoverable.

That sounds obvious. In practice, we have made it remarkably difficult.

Business information is distributed across thousands of company websites, social feeds, newsletters, event platforms and private groups. Each contains a fragment of the picture. None gives you much sense of the whole. Social platforms help, but they are designed around individual feeds and global audiences, not around making the economic life of Yorkshire navigable.

We think there is value in creating that missing layer.

The rebuilt Yorkshire Mafia will allow businesses to establish a proper presence and contribute their own activity. A job advertised by a company in Huddersfield, an event happening in Sheffield, an offer from a Leeds business and news from a manufacturer in Hull become part of the same environment. Geography still matters, but it stops acting as a wall. You can look locally when local matters and across Yorkshire when it doesn’t.

YM itself will sit within that environment as both curator and publisher. We want to find the people, businesses and ideas worth knowing about and give them proper editorial treatment. Not everything will be about Yorkshire, because people running businesses in Yorkshire don’t only need to know about Yorkshire. Good ideas travel. So should we.

The intention is to create something with enough life in it that you return without necessarily knowing what you’re looking for. You might arrive because of an event and leave having found a company. You might read an interview and notice a job. You might discover somebody working on precisely the problem you have been thinking about. Serendipity is difficult to manufacture, but you can create better conditions for it.

That is also why physical events remain important.

A digital platform can make a much larger community visible, but there is still something unusually productive about putting people together. The difference this time is that the room no longer needs to exist in isolation. The platform can help people discover the event, understand who and what is around it and remain part of the same network after everyone has gone home.

The physical and digital versions of Yorkshire Mafia are really the same idea expressed in different ways.

Both are about reducing the distance between people who might be useful to one another.

This is not an attempt to centralise Yorkshire business or replace the communities already doing good work within it. Quite the reverse. Yorkshire will always contain hundreds of networks, institutions, organisations and informal groups, and it would be poorer without them. The opportunity is to give more of their activity a route into a wider system.

A stronger Yorkshire Mafia should make those communities more visible, not less necessary.

That is the shift we are making. From running a network largely through moments in time to building a platform that is present all year. From creating individual rooms full of opportunity to making more of Yorkshire’s opportunity visible every day.

The technology makes that possible. The community makes it valuable.

And the basic proposition remains exactly where it started.

More people knowing what is happening. More businesses discovering one another. More useful collisions between places, sectors and people that might otherwise remain separate.

Less fragmentation.

More connection.

Same Yorkshire Mafia.

Fresher.