​Beginners Hands-On Workshop: Demystifying OpenClaw, the New Personal AI Everyone's Talking About: The Good, The Bad & The Sloppy

​Hello everyone!

​Due to popular demand we are going to run a full OpenClaw (previously known as Clawdbot/Moltbot) event! Join us on Thursday, 26 Feb. This would be our 5th event in our series of local-first, open-source AIs therefore we will try our best to avoid connecting OpenClaw to any cloud-based AI model and keep everything private. We will focus on the good (useful ways of automating things with it), the bad (the rough edges of OpenClaw, security wise) and the sloppy (the danger of creating too much low-quality content especially since the Internet is full of that type of content).

​This workshop is open to all levels, from beginners to experts.

​Bring your laptop (make sure it's fully charged if possible as local LLMs tend to be power-hungry), and, don't forget to bring your coding gear (hoodie). We will try to run A.I. models on the mobile phone as well so feel free to bring your phone fully charged with a little bit of free storage space.

​This workshop will be accompanied by Sam W. & Joon-sang L. (the founders of Pentaform). Since the recommended way to run OpenClaw is on its own dedicated hardware and since there are people at Encode specialised in building mini-PCs, what better way to close the night than to hear about various hardware options and to see what Pentaform is building. See you there!

​Prerequisite

​First and foremost, VERY IMPORTANT, a VM (Virtual Machine) system like Docker/UTM for MacOs or WSL for Windows. Lastly, a local install of Ollama / LMStudio (but if you don't have any of that, don't worry, come a bit early and we will help set you up).

​Ideally you should check the slides from the previous event to set up Ollama locally: https://andysign.github.io/ai-london-01/

​Not related but still interesting, the second slide deck about flows with LangFlow (you should know how to access it if you've been to the last workshop, if not join the Discord and ask us): https://andysign.github.io/ai-london-02/

​There is a third deck, also not related (about personal RAGs w/ AnythingLLM): https://andysign.github.io/ai-london-03/

​And a forth deck, this one is slightly related (about AI-powered browsers): https://andysign.github.io/ai-london-04/

​Agenda for the evening (Subject to change)

​18:00 - 18:30 Arrival and networking

Mingle with fellow developers over refreshments.

​18:30 - 18:45 Introductions (What is Local-First?)

Learn about self-hosted, local AI models and why we use them.

​18:45 - 19:40 Workshop

​​Hands-on technical workshop (if you are non-technical it's OK, tag along).

​19:40 - 20:15 Pentaform and Local AI

​20:15 - 21:00 Networking

​21:00 - Closing remarks and follow-up

​END: Carry on the fun at a nearby pub which is right @ the corner.

​Event Venue

​We'd like to extend a heartfelt thank you to Encode Club.

​Encode Club has spent over five years fostering a global community of developers, researchers, and founders in Web3, AI, and emerging technologies. The Encode Hub brings everything together under one roof, providing a dedicated environment for collaboration and innovation through meetups, co-working, and in-person events.