Byte Night: Bringing tech together

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For the past 11 years, something a bit strange and wonderful happens as autumn rolls around. Hundreds of IT workers leave the comfort of their desks to spend a night on the streets.

While sleeping rough isn’t normally something to be celebrated, Byte Night raises funds for Action for Children, a charity which helps keep troubled teenagers off the streets.

People sign up to sleep on the day – 2 October this year, so pray for dry weather – to experience something of what homelessness is like, but the real work happens in the weeks and months leading up to that day, where teams and individual sleepers fundraise on behalf of Action for Children.

Byte Night kicked off in 1998 with 35 “sleepers” raising £35,000. This year, a record 700 sleepers are taking part, with 400 in London alone. Since the event started, it’s raised more than £2 million for Action for Children – much of that in the past few years.

That cash goes to help teens dealing with homelessness. There are 75,000 kids who find themselves without a place to sleep each year in the UK. Of those, one in three will attempt suicide, and one in seven will be sexually assaulted. If they stay on the streets longer than a week, that figure rises to one in two.

With those frightening statistics in mind, this year IT PRO and sister title Know Your Mobile will be taking part – you can help us with our fundraising here – and we’ve been speaking to Byte Night founder Ken Deeks to find out more about this unique and worthy event.

“It’s the one day of the year you really see the best of the industry,” said Deeks.

Buggy origins

It may come as a surprise, but Byte Night was one of the positive side effects of the Y2K bug. Back in 1998, the IT industry and society as a whole was obsessed with it – and doing rather well from the fear that everything run by computers would crash and stall when the millenium arrived, according to Deeks.

At the time, Deeks was working in public relations in the sector. While traveling on the underground one day that year, he saw a poster about Action for Children, asking the country to try to end youth homelessness by Y2K. He loved the idea and the parallel with the IT sector – and even the deadline. “What a wonderful thing a deadline is, it’s really a call to action,” he said.

With the success the IT sector was enjoying from the Y2K bug, Deeks figured it could help with Action for Children’s campaign. “I came up with the idea of getting well-heeled, comfortable people to experience homelessness for a night while raising money at the same time,” he explained.

Is this really homelessness?

Deeks added that the rough night is purely symbolic. “No one really believes we truly experience homelessness,” he said, noting that sleepers have security, first aid and other amenities – and a warm bed to go home to the next morning. “Nobody’s kidding themselves that this is what homelessness is like.”

“But you’re cold and wet when the wind comes off the river Thames, with cold bumpy ground underneath you,” he added, “it’s not that comfortable.”

Ian Snadden, vice president for EMEA sales at Intermec, is taking part for the second time this year.

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