Independents Hall Philadelphia

Two Years Later: The Progress is Bittersweet

Filed under: Announcements, Community Support, Education/Workshops, From the Business Side, Independents Hall

This past week, we celebrated our 2 year anniversary of IndyHall opening its first location, the office on the 2nd floor of 32 Strawberry Street. The event was incredible, as we had the opportunity to celebrate another milestone, the 100th episode of IndyHall born Two Guys on Beer. A few hundred of our closest friends came out to share in the festivities, with nearly 300 people RSVPd. Our friends at National Mechanics and Flying Dog made sure that for the first few hours, the Dogtoberfest was flowing freely.

A huge thank you to our supporters, our friends, and everyone who’s helped make the last 2 years possible.

The same date marked the 4 month anniversary of us moving into our NEW home, at 20 North 3rd Street. An upgrade in every sense, square footage, street access, balcony, full kitchen, bigger lounge, more than twice the desks and LOTS of room to move around…we’re extremely proud of the space that this community has been working every day to make its own.

Our membership has nearly doubled since our Town Hall in in March. We’ve had some great friends move on from Philadelphia, as well, which is always sad, but we are happy to have had them be a part of IndyHall while they were here.

With a mix of sadness and excitement, last week I announced to our members that we’d be retiring 32 Strawberry Street, recently known as “IndyHall Classic“. Our goal, as mentioned in that Technically Philly article, was to couple our expansion with an educational element. The vision was something of a community classroom, much like IndyHall has become the community workspace.

Unfortunately, our runway of cashflow to keep IndyHall Classic as a standalone event space wasn’t long enough to get the space self-sustaining with users, coupled with the usual summer lull. We decided to look outside of our own efforts for partners, and ne of the people I spoke to with was Alex Urevick-Ackelsberg, partner and business lead at Zivtech. Zivtech is an open source development shop that specializes in Drupal as a platform for both technology and open source education.

Zivtech had been one of our sponsors for the party IndyHall partnered with Mashable to throw back in the spring, the very one that celebrated the opening of our new office. A few of their employees had even become members of IndyHall since moving into the new office, sharing desks several times a month and joining us for events over the summer.

Alex was interested in utilizing IndyHall classic for some Drupal training and classes, but when I asked Alex if he’d be interested in moving Zivtech’s offices into IndyHall classic, the response was positive. We worked with them and our former landlords and came to an arrangement that worked for everyone.

We’re working with Zivtech to pass the torch (and some of the furniture) over the next couple of weeks, but as of this weekend we’ve closed a chapter in IndyHall’s history.

This fall, we’re going to be ramping up our classes and events once again, but on the smaller scale that we used to run them on. We’ve kept a ~600 square foot breakout room at the new space available for events, and over the next several weeks will be using it to host everything from our own workshops and daytime events, Blame-A-Thon, and a couple of user groups such as Cocoaheads. We’ll also be utilizing it during the BarCamp Philly pre-part BeerCamp.

The retirement of IndyHall Classic is hardly the retirement of events and classes at IndyHall, but instead the evolution and progress of our ever-growing community.

Congratulations to Zivtech on your new home, to Two Guys on Beer for 100 episodes, and to all of you, for continuing to show Philadelphia, and the world, what we’re made of.