Thanks to IndyHall’s Painting Crew
Filed under: Community Support, coworking, Education/Workshops, Events, In The News, Independents Hall
Over this past weekend we spent almost 20 hours working on giving the new office a paint job. Thanks to the help of over a dozen volunteers, we made quick work of over 5000 square feet of wall that needed painting, and the new spot looks AMAZING!
Big thanks to:
And SUPER special thanks go to Kara LaFleur for not only painting during all of the shifts, but for providing IndyHaul, her Subaru Forrester that was used for many, many trips to Home Depot to replenish paint reserves.
And finally, to Natalie Nagele and Dana Vachon for planning the entire event including picking colors, designing their placement on the walls, and getting the paint, and most of all for Dana being an extremely successful foreman (forewoman?) and really doing a great job of managing tasks. It was phenomenal to spend my weekend working on getting paint on walls, and being able to reply to almost any question “I don’t know, you should probably ask Dana”.
Great job everybody, thanks for all of your hard work!
The Painting of IndyHall 2.0: THIS WEEKEND!
Filed under: Community Support, coworking, Education/Workshops, Events, In The News, Independents Hall, Kudos
Our brand new office is coming together, and we’re a little more than a week away from moving in! Our desk building party was a huge success, with 25 desks coming together in under an hour (that’s GOTTA be some sort of Ikea record).
This upcoming weekend, we are planning three painting sessions. Colors have been picked out and organized. Supplies have been gathered. It’s time to make IndyHall look amazing.
Dana has organized three sessions this weekend, and we’re looking for volunteers to help out.
Session 1: Saturday 9am-12:30pm
Session 2: Saturday, 3pm-7pm
Session 3: Sunday, 9am-2:30pm
We have all the paint, a bunch of rollers and some trays, but if you have your own roller, or other painting supplies, feel free to bring them along. And of course, dress appropriately.
As with the desk building party, you’ll need to call to get into the building. Please send us an email to let us know you’ll be attending, which session(s), and we’ll respond with instructions on how to get inside.
IndyHall-U pilots “Mac Programming Foundations” class with Philly Cocoaheads
Filed under: Education/Workshops, Events, Independents Hall, IndyHall U
Education is core to IndyHall. Specifically, peer education. We’ve said (and not just Geoff and I, but our members) that it’s hard to not learn something while working at IndyHall. The diversity of skillsets and experiences, along with a group over people who truly love their craft, makes for some really unique learning experiences.
Take that, mix in Geoff’s University professor background and our shared flare for seeing education reformed into a more hands on format, and something starts to bubble.
For a while now (at least since the first IgnitePhilly), we’ve been musing around the idea of having a more formal workshop series than the evening workshops we’ve held over the last 2 years. Something where the model for organic peer education we already know works, but we have a chance to really focus on it and figure out a way to institutionalize it without killing it with bureaucracy.
With the move to the new office space on 3rd street, we’re left with “IndyHall Classic” (the new pet name for our Strawberry street location) for the next 10 months as an experimental classroom workspace. We’ve got lots of ideas, and will share more as things evolve. Things are likely to start design and tech heavy, but that’s only because that’s who’s volunteered to work on developing classes. IndyHall U is NOT meant to be a tech shop, much like IndyHall isn’t. Diversity is welcome. Deviation from the norm is encouraged. Seriously.
In the mean time, we’re excited to announce the very first beta class from within the Tech Department of IndyHall U: Mac Programming Foundations.
Bring an Apple for the Teacher
As a natural evolution of the monthly Cocoaheads meetup that convenes at IndyHall once a month, Mac Programming Foundations grew out of a desire to develop a higher baseline of knowledge for Cocoaheads attendees. Cocoaheads organizer Andy Mroczkowski banded together with Jason Allum, David Martorana, Aaron Evans, and Michael Zornek to put together the two-session class, and urged us to let them hold it almost immediately after we’ve migrated our office to our new location.
The class will consist of two sessions on Saturday May 9th and May 16th. $100 gets you not just the two sessions, but a copy of “Learn Objective C on the Mac“, a companion book for the class.
$100 is a steal even without the curriculum and the book: to get to learn from 5 extremely bright Cocoa Developers for 8 total hours is well worth the c-note.
You can visit the Mac Programming Foundations page for more information.
Space is limited, so if you are interested in the class please register as soon as possible!
Dex’s Coworking Road-Trip visits IndyHall
Filed under: Announcements, coworking, Education/Workshops, Events, From the Business Side, In The News, Independents Hall
Scott Annan and Scott Lake, two startup entrepreneurs from Ottawa Canada are doing a roadtrip to co-working spaces in Toronto, Montreal, Boston, New York, and Philadelphia to connect with local startup communities and share their story about a new method of open and collaborative development to create Dex, their recently launched personal and social CRM system.
Join us Thursday night January 29th at IndyHall, from 6pm-8pm, to hang out, meet the founders, and talk about their trip to coworking and their product. It’ll be fun and casual, and all are invited! Please RSVP on Garys Guide.
Scott Annan is a founder at Mercury Grove. Scott Lake is a co-founder of Shopify.com and ThinkSM. They also both write for StartupOttawa.com.
Coworking meets Media Production Studio
Filed under: Community Support, coworking, Education/Workshops, Events, Independents Hall, Kudos, Library
It’s been a while since I waxed philosophic or daydreamed out loud on the IndyHall blog, and as I’m looking back on 2008 and into 2009, I thought it was a good opportunity to empty my brain a bit.
Growth
IndyHall has seen exceptional growth and stability over the last year. While we were operationally break even quickly (before the end of 2007, in fact), we didn’t have a lot of working capital and we did have a little bit of debt. And while we also had a really robust and active community all along, our desk usage and membership has seen tremendous growth as well, with all 12 of our full time desks occupied since August 2008, a paying membership roster in excess of 50 members at various levels, and very exciting activity from our non-permanent memberships.
Specificity and Specialization
One of the things that I’ve prided IndyHall on has always been zero exclusion. Unlike incubators, we don’t require you to have a “business model”. Unlike associations, we don’t require a you to be a member of a specific industry. If you can work from anywhere, we believe you SHOULD be working from a place like IndyHall.
That diversity is important to the ethos of our coworking space. I wouldn’t change that for the world.
But I remain curious what happens when a specific set of under served needs get specific attention, and how diversity can be approached in a new way.
The plot thickens
One of the smaller, but still certainly present, demographics at IndyHall (and many other coworking spaces) is media production. Audio/video editors, producers, photographers, videographers, podcasters, so on and so forth. I admittedly know very little about this industry from a production standpoint, what the roles are and how they inter operate. However the limited knowledge I do have suggests something that is really intriguing to me: could a coworking space designed for independent media producers thrive? I think the answer is yes.
One of the biggest reasons I find that media folks tend to not be the best fit for IndyHall is the difficulty in being mobile. Even with field equipment becoming smaller and more accessible, that’s only one piece of the equipment equation. As great as a Macbook Pro can be, it doesnt come close to a Mac Pro for video work, and a number of potential IndyHall coworkers have expressed that if it wasn’t for the thought of lugging their rig across the city, they’d be all over coworking. We’d either need to provide some machines as part of membership, or be a bit more geared towards full time members and less for migrant workers. Most likely some combination of the two approaches would be ideal.
The other side of the equipment fence that could be approached, though it comes with its own set of complications, is equipment rental. As we’ve done with IndyHall, making an office in Old City with a conference room available for $275/month or less is only possible when a bunch of people are sharing the resources. High end, otherwise unapproachably expensive equipment could be shared in a similar fashion. Again, this comes with a whole set of liability questions to be answered (the cost of replacing and maintaining office equipment is much less than high end A/V equipment). But that’s a technical problem with a solution, I’m sure.
Diversity within Specialization
Thinking further about the types of people who might use this space: even though they are a more focused group than the “types” of workers who hang at IndyHall, there’s still a good deal of diversity in workers, process, etc. The way I think about it is there are writers who don’t like to direct. Directors who don’t like to edit. Editors who aren’t as good at digital effects and prefer working directly with footage (and of course the other way around). Basically, at every step of the production process there’s the opportunity for a handoff if someone more specialized is available. A similar “stick to what you’re good at and find complimentary partners” strategy as is employed often in software and web at IndyHall can apply to media production, making everyone’s end product supremely higher quality. At the risk of sounding trite, it’s like a production company without the company. The powerful “small pieces loosely joined” model strikes again.
I’ve admittedly thought about and talked through a lot of this model already, but have my mind open to how it will best serve this community. My ultimate goal is to enable the independent media creators in Philadelphia to up their game and produce even better content for themselves and their clients. I need you, those independent media creators, to tell me what’s missing.
So, whaddya say?
Are you an independent or remote media producer who’s looking for comradery, business development opportunities, opportunities to learn new skills from peers, and above all, put on some pants and get out of your house? In Philly, and interested? I’m going to follow my own roadmap and host a meetup to talk about this idea, and I’d like to do it before 2009 is here.
ACTION ACTION!
Let’s meet at National Mechanics Next Monday, December 22nd. 6:30pm. RSVP on Upcoming, or heck, just show up. Tell your friends. Invite anyone who might be interested. It will be an open forum discussion with the goal of having actionable next steps to walk away with. Maybe identify some new leaders in this community. Let’s rock and roll into 2009.
The Junto has been Rescheduled
Filed under: Announcements, Community Support, Education/Workshops, Events, Independents Hall
Apologies for the confusion, P’unk Ave’s Junto IS returning…but not tonight, December 4th. Instead it’s been rescheduled to Next Wednesday, December 10th. All of the other standard rules apply: starts at 6pm, discussion begins at 7pm. P’unk Ave provides beers and tomato pie, guests are invited to bring pot-luck snacks.
This months topic is Health, riffing from a great BarcampPhilly session Geoff and I both attended, as well as the upcoming HealthCampPhilly.
I hope you join us next Wednesday for the long-awaited return of The Junto!
One Nation, Under Cupcakes
Filed under: coworking, Education/Workshops, Events, Independents Hall
If one thing was going to bring the east coast and the west coast together, it certainly would be cupcakes!
To celebrate the launching of Open Source Cupcakes, the home of IndyHall’s now famous Cupcake Thursdays, we will be hosting Cupcake Camp East! The original Cupcake Camp was started June 2008 in San Fransisco.
Bring your favorite cupcakes! We will be eating and sharing cupcakes all afternoon. For just a few hours, IndyHall will TRUELY be the happiest place on earth!
If you’re baking, please bring copies of your recipes to share! We will be posting them on opensourcecupcakes.com.
When: Nov. 16th 3-5pm
Where: IndyHall
IndyHall Lectures #3 – Playing with Power: from classic gaming consoles to powerful creative tools
Filed under: Announcements, Education/Workshops, Events, Independents Hall
Lectures is BACK in action! This month’s lecture is being presented by Don Miller, also known as NO CARRIER. If you’ve been to IgnitePhilly 1 or 2, or to the IndyHall Birthday Bash, you’ve seen the Don’s work. Now’s your chance to learn more about it!
Don’s going to will focus a bit on his work, the history of the scene, and some more technical stuff for people that may have questions. It’ll be a presentation with video, music, and more!
From Don:
Their time in the spotlight may be over, but many have found uses for forgotten video game consoles and computer hardware. Although 8-bit games are a thing of the past, there is a vibrant art scene with retrocomputing at its core. The hardware of the Game Boy, Nintendo Entertainment System, and the Commodore 64 are repurposed and software reprogrammed to turn these aging machines into synthesizers, sequencers, visualizers, and much more.
Don Miller, or NO CARRIER, is an educator, programmer, and live visualist living in Philadelphia. Part of the 8bitpeoples artist collective, he writes new software for nearly obsolete videogame and computer hardware, for use at live music events and installations. He performs regularly in Philly and NYC, and has recently taken his visuals worldwide. Catch him again this year at the Blip Festival, December 4th-7th 2008, in NYC.
The lecture is taking place at IndyHall on October 29th from 6:30-8:30. RSVP on Upcoming!
Also catch Don this saturday at 8-static, an event being organized by our buddies at The Hacktory.
IndyHall Lecutures #2: A peek inside Mozilla
Filed under: Education/Workshops, Independents Hall
One of our newest full time members, Josh Aas, is an engineer for Mozilla. As a good chunk of our community is comprised of web geeks, it was really exciting to be able to get some new insight into the production and business operations side of the foundation that’s brought us Firefox (Josh is involved in the Gecko rendering engine and the rewrite of Firefox 3 for the Mac).
On Wednesday, September 17th at 6:30pm, Josh will be giving a lecture at IndyHall about Mozilla’s software engineering processes, including writing and integrating code, project management, leadership structure, and community involvement. He’ll also give an overview of their goals and their plans for the future.
For those of you interested in how Open Source and a corporation/foundation operate, this lecture should not be missed!
Please RSVP on Upcoming!
PHLedit – Inagural Video Hack @ IndyHall
Filed under: Announcements, Community Support, coworking, Education/Workshops, Events, Independents Hall
Videographers, videobloggers, and video podcasters: come on down to IndyHall and work on all those videos you’ve been meaning to work on for the last 6 months!
Join us for PHLedit, which is being organized by Lauren Galanter (who’s responsible for our namesake, Independents Hall). It will be held at Indy Hall starting at 5pm on Saturday, October 4, 2008.
PHLedit is a free, unstructured video-centric coworking event. Video editors, video bloggers, video podcasters, or anyone who wants to come and edit in a supportive and casual environment are invited to do so. Wifi and power connections, seats, and desks are provided, but you’ll have to bring your own equipment and software.
This event was inspired by similar events across the country–PHXedit in Phoenix, AZ and SF Video Edit and SuperHappyVlogHouse in San Francisco, CA. It is loosely affiliated with Node101, an open-source movement to teach and spread videoblogging.
Some food and drink will be provided, but we’d like to do a potluck of sorts as well. Please bring some snacks (nom nom nom) to share if you are able to.
Please RSVP:
Facebook or Upcoming
Going to reblog about the event? Official event tag: “PHLedit” (for vlogs, blogs, flickr, etc.)
