Get Involved in the Data Science Community at our Free Meetups

As a data science consultancy, Jumping Rivers are already known for offering help and training to clients in all things data. But did you know that we also organise free, in-person data science meetups?

In this post we will talk through the typical format and topics at our meetups, along with some details for how you can get involved!

Where to find us?

We organise meetups in Newcastle-Upon-Tyne and Leeds, both of which are advertised on meetup.com:

• The North East Data Science meetups (NEDS for short) run every three months in Newcastle-Upon-Tyne.
• The Leeds Data Science meetups (LeeDS for short) run every two months in (you guessed it) Leeds.

Check out the webpages linked above to find out more about these meetups including upcoming and past events.

Later this month we will be hosting:

• 20 November NEDS meetup, featuring a one hour workshop on programming with large language models (LLMs) in R & Python (delivered by our very own Myles).
• 25 November LeeDS meetup, featuring talks on LLM coding tools and explainable LLMs.

Meetup format

All of our meetups are run between 6pm and 8pm. The first half hour typically involves casual networking while enjoying some pizza and soft drinks.

We then have one or two talks from local data science experts. Our previous speakers have come from a wide range of industries including consultancy, government, banking and utilities. Typical talk topics include LLMs, communication in data science, forecasting demand in public health, code review best practices, and setting up machine learning pipelines on platforms such as databricks and AWS.

The meetup host will also provide announcements about internships, job opportunities and data science events taking place locally. Between the announcements, networking and talks, our meetups are a great place to make friends and connections within the data science community, whether you’re a student looking to get into data science or a seasoned professional.

At some NEDS meetups we also run a “pre-event workshop”, where attendees get a hands-on introduction to a data science topic. Previous workshops have delved into machine learning with Python, machine learning operations (MLOps) and statistical modelling with R. The pre-event workshops run from 5pm to 6pm, but do check if there is a pre-event workshop in the schedule so that you don’t accidentally arrive an hour early!

How to get involved

To sign up to our mailing lists, please join the North East Data Scientists and Leeds Data Science Meetup communities. A meetup.com account is free to set up, and you will have access to lots of great local meetups (not just data science). You will then be notified about upcoming meetups that are taking place from communities that you are a member of.

Although our events are free to attend, we still require you to register in advance via meetup.com so that we have an idea of numbers when planning the room setup and catering.

We are always on the look out for speakers and workshop organisers! If you would like to volunteer yourself for a talk or workshop, or have any announcements to share with the community about job opportunities and events, please reach out to the following addresses:

• neds@jumpingrivers.com for the NEDS organising team.
• lds@jumpingrivers.com for the LeeDS organising team.

We can’t wait to hear from you!

Contributing to the data science community

Hosting meetups is just one of our ways of contributing to the data science community.

Over the past few years we have also been organising an annual Shiny In Production conference. This typically involves a half day of workshops followed by a full day of talks from prominent speakers on all things Shiny and web dashboards. Check out our recent Shiny In Production 2025 highlights blog to find out about our latest conference that ran in October.

Next year will be particularly exciting, as we organise our first ever AI In Production conference (4-5 June 2026). This will take a similar format with a day of workshops followed by a day of talks. Expect topics including LLMs and MLOps. For more details about this and how to sign up, check out the Eventbrite listing here.

We also organise a free monthly webinar series. Check out this blog with details of what to expect and how to sign up.

Finally, we also develop software that is freely available to the data science community. Have you heard of diffify.com? This is a free-to-use website that we have developed internally, which allows you to compare any two versions of your favourite R or Python packages. We are proud of how diffify has grown over the years, and are excited to bring you more updates very soon, so stay tuned!

That’s all for this post. We look forward to seeing some new faces at our data science meetups in the near future!