Independents Hall

Posted by Alex Hillman on 10-09-2007 under Announcements, Community Support, Events, Independents Hall, coworking

I have a confession to make: we’ve been slacking a bit in the social scene.

After spending all of those months explaining the importance of the “social workplace”, we finally made it happen. Got some awesome press. Lots of interest. New members. But nearly forgot about one super important thing while we were so wrapped up in the IndyHall work space: the social stuff that got us here! Well it’s time to get that back on track, so here we go!

Purple Cows at IndyHall - 10/16

Next Tuesday, October 16th, the Purple Cow Brainstorming Circle will be resuming with a new format, and this time, at IndyHall! For more information about how that works, check out the Purple Cow wiki and my post about my first Purple Cow experience at my personal blog.

Junto and LikeMind - 10/18 & 10/19

After our grand opening party, the only events that have managed to sustain through the in-office growth were the ones that Geoff and the P’unk Ave crew had their hands all over: LikeMind and Junto. The last round of those was great, and they will be taking place again this month, later next week in fact: Junto is October 18th and Likemind is the next morning at Bennas, as per usual. For Junto, P’unk Ave will provide beer and tomato pie as usual. Delicious! For LikeMind, coffee is covered by Anomaly. Food is on your own!

But wait…there’s more in the works!

Social Media Club - 10/23

“Social Media Club is being organized for the purpose of sharing best practices, establishing ethics and standards, and promoting media literacy around the emerging area of Social Media. ”

This month’s meeting (the first in Philly since August) will be an opportunity for folks to exchange lessons and learnings from conferences and meetups they have gone to in the last 2 months, lead by Annie Heckenberger and Steph Fox. Should be a good time. Kicks off at 6pm at IndyHall. Drinks afterwards? Probably.

Open Source Frameworks - 10/25

Developer type? Want to get your feet wet with better rapid development utilities? Want to learn more about what else is out there besides your framework of choice? Then this event is the place to be!

Philly PHP, Philly Drupal, and PANMA are putting this one together and will have experts going over the strengths (and weaknesses) of frameworks like Code Ignitor, Symfony, Zend, Cake, Ruby on Rails, and Drupal.

This event is free, but does require registration at the PANMA website. It will take place at the Science Center in University City. More information is available at the event website!

The rest of October - ???

So next week is pretty busy, but after that, my calendar is pretty slow as far as social media events in October go in Philadelphia, so if you know of any PLEASE let me know so I can add them to this post as well as my calendar. Also, there’s nothing that says we can’t have less formal get togethers at bars and restaurants, it happens often enough on its own. If you’re in old city, looking for some company, and on Twitter, send out a note and see who shows up! Be sure to follow @indyhall and I encourage others to check out who is following @indyhall and see if you can find your friends.

October wraps (any good Halloween parties we can crash?) and November starts out with a bang!

November isn’t just for Thanksgiving

So if all goes as planned, this bizzare 80 degree Philadelphia fall will be over and we’ll be full swing into a REAL fall event schedule. Along with the Likemind and Junto that will be taking place that month (dates to follow), November will be the initiation of 3 more awesome new events at IndyHall.

Double Feature Movie Night (with a new partner!) - 11/10

I love member-planned events (ahem), and the first big member-planned event coming up is a movie night! Roz, myself, and several others joked about having a Teen Wolf/Teen Wolf Too double feature. Then, Bear and PhilaFoodie approached me about a movie night. I brought Roz back into the conversation, a date was set, and Saturday November 10th is it!

The exact films are still TBD by the planning group, but we do expect to have a nice big screen, food, wine, and beer, and lots of good friends. Also…this is the inaugural event (hopefully first of many) with a new, very exciting partnership: Philly Car Share! I don’t want to give away all of the goodies yet, but I can say that I’ve talked about doing something mutually beneficial with PCS for almost a year now, and am SO excited to have their support, and be able to help support their growth as well. But again…more on that later. I’m such a tease.

Oh, there will be an RSVP on upcoming for this very soon to help get a head count.

Philly Alt.net 11-14

One of the pillars of coworking is Openness, and ASP.net is notoriously NOT an open platform. Having worked in two .net shops in the past, one of the most frustrating bits was the lack of open standard support. Well…I wasn’t the only one complaining, the only one looking for a better way. Enter Alt.net, a group of asp.net developers looking for better use of open standards and best practices in dot net. Right up our alley!

When I found out that my buddy Brian Donahue was working on a Philly chapter of Alt.net and was looking for a venue for their first meeting about Monorail. The meeting will be held on Wednesday November 14th at 6pm. If you’re a dot net developer wanting to expand your mind, or another type of developer looking to see what the dot net folks are up to, stop by. More info and an RSVP at the Philly Alt.net website.

Also, big ups to our friends at WebLinc for kicking in for consumables for this one.

Hacktory LED Classes - 11/17

The Hacktory is a new group that has sprung out of the Make:Philly crew with the goals of promoting technology through the arts. While a lot of their events will be more “dirty” (power tools and messy products), some are clean enough to do here at the Hall, so we’re happy to host them!

On Saturday, November 17th there will be two LED programming sessions.

The beginner class begins at 10am, costs $30, and runs for about 3 hours. All material will be provided for the session (most of that $30 goes to materials). The intermediate class goes from 2pm-5pm, costs $50 (slightly more costly materials), and should be a great add-on to what was learned in the first class.

More about both classes, and registration (spots are limited) on The Hacktory website.

Also, at the bottom of that page is a waiting list for a now-full advanced electronics class that is taking place on November 3rd. Check it out, and if there’s enough waiting list sign ups they might consider re-running the program (my words, not theirs!).

Philly Drupal Meetup - 11/27

This meetup isn’t new, in fact the last one was a mashup event with Philly Standards and Philly PHP that I attended and had a really good time at! The next iteration of the Drupal group will be taking place on November 27th at 6pm, here at the hall. There will be 3-4 short presentations organized by members of the group, and then an exodus to our favorite oasis of imbibe-ment, National Mechanics, for a social wrap-up.

Thanks to Nate Gasser from Rock River Star for putting this one together!

“What about mine?”

Did I miss your event? Let me know in the comments because if it’s not on my calendar, I don’t know about it!
There are a few more events in the works but we’re keeping them quiet until details are worked out. Stay tuned.