Going on 6 months – call for Basic Member Renewals
Filed under: Announcements, From the Business Side, Independents Hall
At the end of February, IndyHall will have been open at it’s location on 32 Strawberry street for 6 months.
6 months. Wow.
We can look at that one of two ways. In one respect, it feels like only yesterday. 6 months has totally zipped by.
A little history
In another respect, the amount that this entire group has accomplished in 6 months is astonishing. Looking at growth alone, it’s mind blowing. We signed an initial 15 member agreements only days before signing the lease for our office. Those members (2 Full Time, 3 Lite, and 10 Basic). As of today, we have 44 active memberships (8 Full Time, 5 Lite, and a whopping 27 Basic Members!).
Thats 3x growth of membership in 6 months, and we’re thrilled and proud that so many people have benefited from use of IndyHall as a coworking space and as a resource for learning and exchange.
How our Basic Membership Helps
When we decided to offer the $25/month basic membership last summer, it served two purposes. One, offering it for 6 months prepaid helped us build a pot of money that helped defer our startup costs. For the bootstrap-style operation we’ve run, we think that this was a huge portion of the reason we were able to make ends meet and stabilize as quickly as we have. Second, it gave the folks in our very active community an opportunity to contribute, for a nominal fee, to make sure that we’d be able to continue what we were doing: offering highly productive environments for people to collaborate on many, many different levels. Even if they weren’t using a desk, their contribution helped the other, very important side of what goes on at IndyHall in hosting and running of events.
What’s the problem?
We’re fast approaching the end of many people’s first 6 months of prepaid basic membership. While we’ve grown to a point where our more regular members help us stabilize the operating costs, the increased interest in the educational and social events that we’ve been ramping back up this month. In order for us to keep moving in that direction, we really need and appreciate your support in renewing your basic memberships.
The Deal
To thank everyone for their support, we’re going to be offering a 6 month basic membership renewal like the first time. If you renew your membership in February, we’re tossing in the free bonus day (7 free days over 6 months, use your floater day any time you like) AND a free IndyHall t-shirt. All Lite and Full members will receive a free shirt as well. The only way for Basic members to get a shirt for free is to pre-pay for another 6 months. This time, it will be $150 since no security deposit is necessary on the renewed membership.
We’ll be selling the IndyHall shirts for $20 each for non-members.
If you’re interested in renewing, please send an email letting us know. We will be accepting Checks and Google Checkout as before. If you’re already a member, you know how to get a hold of us. And of course, nothing says renewal like stopping by IndyHall for an in-person visit!
Thank You
Thanks in advance for all of your support, and here’s to many more successful 6 month anniversaries!
WordPress Workshop Wrapup
Filed under: Community Support, Education/Workshops, Events, Independents Hall
Last night’s wordpress workshop Kickoff was a success! We had 20 people at IndyHall, as well as another 8-10 watching and listening on our uStream feed, which we recorded for playback convenience. Our hope is to record more sessions in the future, and properly mic the audio so that our remote listeners can enjoy the presentation more. We’ll get the kinks worked out over time.
For those who attended, I promised a summary of plugins/tools that we spoke about.
WordPress.com – Free, hosted WordPress. Not as customizable
WordPress.org – Where you download WordPress to install yourself
WordPress Auto-Update Plugin – This bad boy automatically backs up and upgrades your wordress solution (plugin updates are on your own).
CForms II -A very robust form/survey plugin. Even lets you allow users to upload files!
Firebug – A SUPER useful firefox plugin for if you do any template work, wordpress or otherwise. Lets you “inspect” other people’s XHTML/CSS.
Slideshow Pro – a great (and cheap) flash slideshow for displaying photos from flickr streams or your own uploads. Very flexible and customizable, and you don’t need to know any flash
If I missed anything we talked about, feel free to ask in the comments.
As far as events moving forward, we learned a lot about the diversity and needs of the community. Our goal is to design a program that allows the current experts to help the novices get up to speed, and then as we have more background behind everyone, move on to more advanced topics. Some of the proposed topics were:
- Multi-user/multi-blog installations
- Advanced/custom theming (as opposed to “hacking” or tweaking existing themes)
- WP best practices exchange
- Plugin/tool demos
- Boilerplate code exchanges
- WordPress for “sites” instead of blogs
We’re excited to see the interest in the new educational track, and are looking for people to volunteer to lead and organize topics moving forward. If you have anything, please contact us and we’ll do our best to help arrange it!
Thanks to the attendees and Johnny and Jason for putting the presentation together!
Upcoming Events!
Filed under: Community Support, Events, Independents Hall
Purple Cow Brainstorming Circle – Tuesday 1/22 6:00pm
From the monthly Purple Cow mailing list:
PURPOSE
To pitch your idea, get feedback, exchange resources, and help others manifest their ideas as well.
WHO SHOULD PARTICIPATE?
Anyone who has an idea to pitch and/or who would like to listen and share advice/resources. Starting your own business, non-profit or community organization? Interested in transforming your brand? Looking to launch an exciting initiative or project? Have an idea that’s so “out there” you just don’t know how to categorize it yet? Come Join Us!!
This Circle’s intention for its members is to:
- Engage us in a supportive open forum for the incubation of ideas , including those that are unorthodox, non-traditional, and transformational;
- Help us to network & collaborate with fellow creative change agents, gaining access to and learning about resources that may help us to manifest our ideas through ethical, socially / financially profitable, values-based (business) practices;
- Foster ideas that will positively impact the community and environment
WordPress Workshop – Wednesday 1/23 6:30pm
Check out the details at the previous post. This discovery meeting will be critical to deciding curriculm for the future.
PANMA January Social – Triumph Brewery
This is where we’ll be after the WordPress workshop (though the actual PANMA event kicks off at 6pm). Triumph is RIGHT around the corner from IndyHall, so before, during, or after the WordPress workshop you should consider stopping by to meet with the PANMA peeps. There’s an RSVP on the PANMA website.
Hacktory Events!
I recently spoke with Vanja Buvac, one of the bright minds behind Make:Philly and The Hacktory, and learned that things are coming along nicely! They have a couple of events coming up in early February that you should mark off. A geeky “valentine heart” project session will take place on February 2nd, and a repeat of their popular Arduino course on February 9th.
If you’re in to hands on “geek-craft”, the make meetings and Hacktory classes are not to be missed!
IndyHall WordPress Workshop – Wednesday January 23rd
Filed under: Announcements, Events, Independents Hall
It’s no secret that blogging is important. You’re reading a blog right now. Everyone has their blogging platform of choice, and a lot of us here at IndyHall have chosen WordPress as our go-to utility…not just for blogging, but for lots of managed content sites.
Much like our recent Illustrator workshop, we’re going to be discovering the varying experience and interest levels of developing sites powered by WordPress. Jason Tremblay and Johnny Bilotta will be leading this series of events together, and I’ll likely chime in a bit with my own experiences with building WordPress sites that don’t look like blogs.
Whether you are a seasoned WordPress developer or you are a newbie trying to get your feet wet, come and discuss your experiences and find out how to step up your development and creativity. Future workshops (which will be longer, and probably on the weekends) will center on WordPress set-up, plug-in use, plug-in development, theme development, best practices, and much more. So come join us at 6:30pm Wednesday Jan. 23rd at IndyHall.
Also that night is a PANMA social meetup at Triumph Brewery, just around the corner. After the workshop (7:30-8:00) we’ll roll over to Triumph for some frosty brews.
[tags]wordpress, blogging, managed content, workshop, jason tremblay, johnny bilotta, indyhall, independents hall, PANMA, triumph, social[/tags]
IndyHall in Austin, SXSW08 Or Bust!
Filed under: Announcements, Community Support, Events, Independents Hall
Back in July, I received a ping from Patrick Tanguay from Station-C coworking in Montreal suggesting that we should band together and submit a panel for SXSW Interactive 08 (the conference at which we had met, in fact).
Over the course of the next week, we shared ideas and, with input from Chris and Tara of Citizen Space, about how we might approach this topic to be a bit more general to appeal to the entire audience. We came up with a title and synopsis!
Coworking and the evolution of the independent worker:
A few years ago everyone wanted to work from home. Now we realize, working alone sucks. What new resources and communities, both online and off, are enabling workers to really step up their game. Coworking spaces are opening everywhere and playing a central part in this new way of doing business.
After submitting the panel and having it voted on, weeks passed. Months passed. Panels began being picked and posted for the conference. Our expectations were set appropriately (we’d be first time SXSWi presenters), and we weren’t shocked to not hear back.
As the last few weeks have been filled with lots of twitter-chatter and question-asking about our SXSW plans, I decided to email the event director, Hugh Forrest, to see if he had any news since we never really got an official “no” on our panel.
As it turns out…we weren’t out of the running! I found out this morning that we’ve been slated to join the list of Core Conversations, a new format to SXSW that reads a bit more like an unconference (see BlogPhiladelphia). This format, rather than a panel, is more of an opportunity to converse and share experiences and knowledge about our journeys in the “indy” workforce.
I’m SUPER excited about this, as it will give us a platform to unite the coworking community as it converges on the city of Austin from all over the world. Last year we had a really fun coworking meetup at Barcamp Austin, this year, we get an official session and location, as well as a spot in the program, to hold it!
I’d like to work with a handful of key people to help make sure that the 1 hour session we have is loaded with interesting and valuable information, so for those of you attending who have something in particular you want to share, drop me a line.
I’ll be posting more as I hear more about the time and date. We’ll also have to organize a coworking lunch or brunch or something like that. I know there are currently ~8 people from IndyHall who will be attending the conference, and many more from Philadelphia I’m sure. If you’re going to be attending and interested in coworking (or Philadelphia and our social/creative scene on any level), drop a line in the comments and we’ll be sure to look you up once we’re in Austin!
[tags]coworking, station c, montreal, citizen space, indyhall, independents hall, philadelphia, philly, sxsw, sxswi, sxswi08, core conversations, austin[/tags]
Welcome to 2008…EVENTS!
Filed under: Events, Independents Hall
A belated Happy New Year to everyone! The first 2 weeks of the new year were whirlwind for all of us, as we are getting things in order for a very exciting year. For those of you following our calendar (look over on the left for the links, if you aren’t already subscribed), there’s a lot going on in the next 2 weeks. Here’s a quick synopsis of THIS week’s activities:
Illustrator Workshop Discovery Meeting – Wednesday, January 16th – 6pm
Our very own Johnny Bilotta has wanted to do a series of Adobe workshops or quite some time, and we’re going to be kicking them off this Wednesday at 6 with an opportunity to ask the questions you’ve been dying to learn. We’ll answer some of them at this week’s meetup, and any we don’t get to answer will be noted and used to build future curriculum. From Johnny:
Independents Hall Illustrator Workshop is set up to provide designers and developers a better understanding of the uses of Adobe Illustrator and its powerful tool set. For designers it is a chance to learn new skills, discover some of the advancements in CS3 and obtain information on Illustrator as a web design tool.
For developers it is a chance to learn the language of the designer, see what processes are preformed by their pixel pushing counterparts and gain some insight into the procedures of front end design.
The workshop is intended to be an interactive exchange of lessons and ideas. The initial meeting will be a discovery of what the participants would like to learn, and how each individual would like to use illustrator in their tool set.
Since this is a fairly informal event, no registration is required and it is expected to last about an hour and a half.
Junto – Music Distribution – Thursday, January 17th – 6:30pm
The first Junto of 2008 sets expectations high as the crew at P’unk Ave have lined up several awesome topics and presenters for the beginning of the year. This first topic, which will be discussed starting at 6:30pm on Thursday, is on the future of content distribution for musicians. From Junto.org,the panel includes:
- Mike Kiley, musician, The Mural and the Mint. He is giving his music away for free.
- Kristin Thomson, Education Director for the, Future of Music Coalition She co-founded the independent record label, Simple Machines, and was in the band Tsunami.
- Terry Tompkins, President,
As always, P’unk Ave provides the beer and city’s best tomato pie. You bring yourself and something to share (if you feel up to it.)
Likemind – Friday January 18th – 8-9am
It’s been a while since we had one of these, thanks to the holidays, but we’re back in full swing. We’ve moved the event to Old City Coffee, but the same casual coffee-chat format applies. Just show up around 8 and have an hour to chat about…whatever we feel like chatting about! If you’re already in Old City for Likemind, it might be a good opportunity to spend the rest of the day working from IndyHall, if you weren’t already planning on it, since Old City Coffee is right around the corner from our office. Our (delicious) coffee tab is covered, but food is on you!
Next week, we have Purple Cow Brainstorming Session, and a WordPress workshop similar to this week’s Illustrator event…maybe some more surprises!
And once more…happy 2008, it’s going to be a great one!
[tags]illustrator, workshop, junto, music distribution, p’unk ave, likeminds[/tags]
