IndyHall Member Profiles: Bill Jones
Filed under: Community Support, coworkers, From the Business Side, Independents Hall
Meet Bill Jones. Bill is an IT guy. He’s not just any old IT guy though; he’s the incredibly bold and savvy IT guy who’s not afraid to tell you your IT solutions suck. See for yourself.
“When I would go to my doctor, my dentist, or any small business in my area it would stand out to me that they had substandard IT solutions and I would point that out to them.”
Harsh, I know. Did I mention he has a kind side too? He would always follow up by helping them out.
“When I stopped working for a huge company and was trying to figure out what I wanted to do, I thought that it would be easier for me to be engaged and understand the value I was delivering to people if I worked directly with customers in a smaller context.”
Consulting the IT civilians, empowering the little guy, it all makes sense. However, there isn’t exactly a wealth of substandard IT solutions floating around Indy Hall so what does “Mr. Savvy IT Guy” do here?
“The plan has always been for me to mine that area for a product or two and then focus on building those products because that’s what I really enjoy doing. Consulting and products are two different areas and I’m more of a product guy. Right now I’m actually moving away from the consulting side of small business to work on three products I have in development.”
If that’s not livin’ the dream, I don’t know what is. Naturally, I was curious as to what role coworking has played in Bill’s ability to create this situation for himself.
“When I was looking for office space I ran across this idea called coworking which sounded good to me. I quickly found that Indy Hall was one of the leaders in the area but living in Jersey I didn’t think I’d want to come to Philadelphia all the time. I came in one day just to do research and I realized that I really would be better off just hangin’ out here.”
Ok, but… why?
“The first day I had a six hour conversation with Jason Allum and I said to myself, ‘Ok, this is a good place to be.’ There was a lot of excitement about Indy Hall Labs and the business model that Alex, Jason and the guys were figuring out and that was very interesting to me. I realized there were people here who could teach me stuff and that was better than being alone in my basement office.”
There you have it. Indy Hall: The perfect alternative to your substandard workplace solutions.
IndyHall Member Profiles: Dr. Greg Wilder
Filed under: Community Support, coworkers, From the Business Side, Independents Hall
I’d like you to meet Dr. Greg Wilder.
Greg is a classical conservatory trained pianist and composer whose works have been performed on prestigious stages across the globe. He is known by many different titles including but not limited to musician, composer, professor, and more recently co-founder of Orpheus Media Research.
I, however, know him by a very different title:
Speed Chess Nemesis.
It is for precisely this reason I challenged him to conduct this interview over a match. The opening move was simple; I wanted to know how Greg came to be a part of the Hall.
“I met Alex through PSL (Philly Startup Leaders) and I was very curious about him and his ideas about Indy Hall. I put myself on the waiting list and as soon as they relocated I became a member.”
I couldn’t help but wonder how a classically trained pianist composer wound up sitting in front of a computer as opposed to, well, a piano.
“I haven’t been hands on with any music for a number of months now and it’s been very difficult. I made a conscious decision to focus on my business and it has completely changed my life. Instead of attending an orchestral rehearsal for example, I’ll go to a business meeting.”
I still wasn’t quite sure as to why exactly he was here, a deceptive tactic perhaps. It was time to make a developing move. I had to know what could be so important to someone that they would put aside everything their life had revolved around thus far in order to pursue it.
“I’ve spent my entire life listening to, performing, and studying music. I’m fascinated by the way in which the human mind interacts with music and what I’m doing here at Indy Hall is giving computers a human-like sensitivity to music from both the listening and compositional standpoints.”
Boosh. Check. A bold move indeed, but would it pay off?
“My first morning here I really didn’t know if this would work but by the end of the day my mind was blown. There are so many brilliant people here that you really can’t be the ‘smart kid in class.’ I’ve been fortunate to have the opportunity to work with quite a few of them and they’ve done a lot to help make my vision a reality. What we’re doing is as much about coworking as it is about music innovation.”
Checkmate. Well played, Dr. Wilder. Well played.
IndyHall Member Profiles: Bart Mroz
Filed under: Community Support, coworkers, From the Business Side
Meet Bart Mroz. Don’t feel bad about the last name, he’ll teach you how to say it so long as you ask him nicely. Bart is one of the original members of Indy Hall. He recounts the noble tale of Indy Hall’s first days.
“The four of us worked on the floor…umm…borrowing Wi-Fi from a neighbor while we waited for our broadband to be installed.”
Did I say noble? I of course meant humble.
I was curious to know if Indy Hall, a truly collaborative workspace, had collaboration at its roots.
“Its roots are all in collaboration. Some of us were working together before Indy Hall opened its doors, during our ‘Cream Cheese Sessions.’”
A statement I found to be a particularly nice way of saying “Duh.”
Having been coworking for nearly 3 years now I wanted to know if Bart could ever see himself working any other way.
“I couldn’t work in a traditional office or even an office share. That just doesn’t appeal to me. This space is very open and creative. I keep to myself most of the time but I’m aware of what the people around me are doing, it’s part of the deal.”
How about from a business perspective?
“We couldn’t do it any other way. Very early on we realized that this model works really well for us. It’s not the case for everyone but for us there’s really no other way.”
A statement I found to be a particularly nice way of saying “I’m not going anywhere.” We’re glad to hear it because we sure do like having Bart around.
IndyHall 201: How IndyHall Communicates with it’s Community
Filed under: coworking, FAQs, From the Business Side, Independents Hall, IndyHall 201
This week, I got an e-mail from Julie Z. Rosenberg of the Brooklyn Creative League in Park Slope, asking about our newsletter. First off, I always appreciate when people reach out to others for a hand as well as Julie did, as she a great job by asking specific questions and keeping her message brief.
I decided that it could be valuable to share what I shared with her on the blog for others, for future reference and posterity.
Specifically, Julie was asking about format, frequency, content, and distribution.
The rest of this post contains a modified version of my response to her.
—
When IndyHall began as a community, and didn’t have a space yet, we operated almost entirely out of a public google group (now defunct), and on Twitter. Once we had a space though (beginning in mid-late 2007), there became a need for public, and semi-private correspondence to happen on different channels. It didn’t make sense to bother everyone with office goings-on, but we also didn’t want people left out!
Right now, our communication stack looks like this, but we’re still experimenting and things change all the time.
Internal:
- We use Basecamp as a message board for all members. Everyone who’s on the roster can post messages to everyone else who is a member.
- We use Campfire as a real-time chat that’s mostly populated by members, but is also open to the public (http://campfire.indyhall.org)
- We still use Twitter a lot
External:
- Our blog (this thing you’re reading) has always been our first line of defense, along with Twitter.
- We’ve used Facebook and AnyVite for event RSVPs, and link them from blog posts and twitter. AnyVite rocks because it doesn’t require a login to RSVP, which Facebook does.
- At some point, we realized that not everyone is following Twitter (or their RSS reader) as religiously as they do e-mail, so a traditional e-mail redux would be valuable.
At this point, we’ve had to work ourselves into a bit of a production schedule to get one e-mail out every other week. One of our full time members, Stephen Winkler, has taken the reigns of the project and is in charge of organizing stories for the newsletter, rallying/drafting content. Dana, our office manager, supplies a couple of specific segments. Other community members have taken ownership of specific segments of the newsletter.
It’s finally gotten into a groove (I think we’re 4 editions in with an actual production timeline), and we’ve only missed the ship date once :).
Bottom line is that we’ve found that no single channel is effective enough. We’re always morphing along with our community and trying to find the balance, and expect that the balance will always be changing!
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By the way, are you subscribed to our bi-weekly newsletter yet? It’s easy, just head to IndyHall.org if you’re not already on the site, and the sign up is on the left hand side of every page!
IndyHall Town Hall 2
Filed under: Announcements, Community Support, Events, From the Business Side, Independents Hall
In last week’s newsletter (you are subscribed, right?) we announced our 2nd IndyHall Town Hall.
We held one of these back in March when we were first thinking about moving from our Strawberry St. office into something bigger. It proved to be an extremely valuable format for getting the community up to speed, introducing people, and seeing progress forward.
On Tuesday, October 27th, we’re doing it again. The first of what we hope to continue as quarterly Town Hall meetings will allow the entire community, not just the paying membership, to come together to find out about IndyHall’s progress & growth, and continue to be a part of the shared vision.
We’ll be hosting it at our office, 20 North 3rd St. It will begin at 5:30 sharp and we expect it to take 60-90 minutes.
The goals of the Town Hall format are twofold: first, to open up as much information as we can about the business and community operations. Second, to provide a proper sounding board for the fast growing community that inhabits our clubhouse.
Imagine a hybrid of a “state of the union” from some community leaders, as well as an opportunity for your voice to have an impact. Of course, with the same level of approachability and authenticity you’ve come to expect from IndyHall.
We have some exciting announcements. But don’t we always?
Attendance isn’t mandatory for members, but its’ strongly recommended. Also, as I mentioned, this is a COMMUNITY town hall, which means it is open to the public. Because of this, we’re asking people to RSVP to make sure we can plan/arrange the space appropriately.
In the past, we’ve had good response and a significant turnout, and we’re hoping for the same this time.
Please help spread the word to other community members and organizations that might want to attend, and encourage them to RSVP.
We look forward to seeing everyone on the 27th.
Say Hi to Parker and Michelle
Filed under: Announcements, Community Support, From the Business Side, Independents Hall
A few weeks back, we put out a call for an intern to help out at IndyHall. We wanted to frame it carefully to make it an opportunity not just to help with IndyHall operations, but to give someone the opportunity to grow and learn as a member of the community.
We lucked out, and got two of ‘em.
Honestly, the response we got to the post was overwhelming and positive. All of the candidates we interviewed were incredible, and we had a hard decision to make.
Last week, we were joined by Michelle Nugent, and this week, she met her new cointern (that’s right, I went there) Parker Whitney.
They’ve already done a great job working out their own schedule to make sure that our front desk is always attended, and are planning projects to improve quality of life around the office. They’re already becoming a force to be reckoned with, and I can’t wait to see what they accomplish. We’re lucky to have some extremely capable help…Dana may actually need to worry about being outdone! Ok, just kidding. Dana still rocks, too.
While they’re working here, they’re also both exploring their personal aspirations of creativity, business, communications, technology, and truly owning their place in Philadelphia.
Please say hi to Parker and Michelle when you come in the door, and don’t hesitate to grab them, take them to lunch, and learn more about them!
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.
The IndyHall Internship
Filed under: Announcements, coworking, From the Business Side, Independents Hall
Lachlan wants YOU to come work with IndyHall!
- Being a morning person: you’ll be in charge of opening the space every morning, starting the first pot of coffee, and making sure everything is ready for members to arrive.
- Being a people person: you’ll be a go-to person for people with questions throughout the day. You won’t need to know *everything*, but you’ll know who to go to to find out. You’ll also be giving new visitors and members tours around the space, and getting them acquainted and acclimated.
- Being an organized person: you’ll be keeping tabs on our reservation system, and our daily attendance records.
- Being a self-starter: the status quo will get you by, but we’re looking for someone who’s going to look for problems, and fix them.
- A free desk at IndyHall. Since you’re there full time, you get a full time membership to IndyHall (worth $275/month) to work on your own projects between things you’re doing with IndyHall.
- An incredible network of mentors. This position is perfect for someone who’s interested in being a freelancer, small business owner, or entrepreneur but doesn’t know where to start. The IndyHall community is known for being an incredibly valuable support network for anyone who wants to work independently. You’ll have the collective mindshare and experience of nearly 100 members at your fingertips, as well as any organizational or personal contacts IndyHall has in this city, and others.
- The most fun you’ll ever have at work. IndyHall is a productivity powerhouse, but it’s also a blast. Fun people, great music over the sound-system, bright spaces, bean-bag chairs…seriously. Show and Tell. Saturday Morning Cartoons. You get to call this your job.
- An opportunity to be a part of something big...and potentially make some money doing it. This internship is unpaid to begin, but that doesn’t mean forever. We believe in rewarding performance, and if you’re doing a great job, IndyHall will be growing and we’ll be able to allocate money for this position. The amount of time this takes is 100% in your hands.
- A chance to take Dana’s Job, and make it your own. Dana has completely taken ownership of creating the perfect job for herself, and this is your chance to do the same. The entire point of this position is twofold: to garden yet another successful independent contributor to the community of Philadelphia, and to have someone to fill Dana’s shoes when she’s ready to expand the business she’s grown while being our office manager. We’re looking to complete the cycle, and start it all over again. With you.
IndyHall gets a Weekly E-Mail Newsletter
Filed under: Announcements, coworking, Events, From the Business Side, Independents Hall
After nearly 2 years of being open, IndyHall finally has a regular e-mail newsletter.
We haven’t really actively communicated in public via e-mail since the earliest days of IndyHall’s community building, when we had a rather active google group. Over time, that e-mail list fell into the typical form of most of the regional e-mail lists, being primarily job-postings.
Multi-way communication improved within the community despite the loss of the Google group, mostly thanks to Twitter. We no longer had the need to clutter up each others’ inboxes. We extended that with the relaunch of the IndyHall website, including an aggregate Twitter feed of IndyHall members on the home page.
Internally, the IndyHall community continues to use e-mail as an extension to BaseCamp, which we use for community discussions, to-d0s, sharing, ideas, announcements, etc. The problem with Basecamp is that it’s private, only available to IndyHall members.
And so, we move back to e-mail for announcements of weekly activity in the local tech, creative, independent, and entrepreneurial community. We’re using Newsberry, an email newsletter application built by Wildbit, who are active members of the IndyHall community. Our mailings will be weekly (well, that’s the idea anyway) and will include things like:
- Weekly Events. Events coming up soon, both IndyHall and throughout the Philly creative, tech, and entrepreneurial landscape. We can’t link to everything, that’s why we have a calendar (and anything we miss, Technically Phillyand Philly New Media Hub catch). Consider this your weekly “here’s what you’ll find IndyHall folks doing” redux.
- Event Tips. Events you should “save the date” for. Maybe not coming up this week, but coming up soon. Watch this spot if you like to be in the know BEFORE Technically Philly. ;-)
- New Member Welcomes! We’ve got new folks coming by every week, and sometimes it can be a few times to IndyHall before you catch someone’s name. We’re gonna try to put the kibosh on that problem by welcoming new community members every week in our newsletter.
- Event Recaps. Missed an event? Feeling guilty? Went to an event, think it was awesome? We’re going to start taking community submissions of short event recaps of local events so you can feel, or at least act, like you are in the know.
- In the News. Any mentions of IndyHall activities, or mentions of our community members, in press. Local or national. You’re getting ink, and we wanna spread the word.
The newsletter itself is meant to be collaborative from the perspective of content, meaning we are welcoming community contributions, tips, articles, ideas….really anything. We’re not pumping out newsletters for the sake of pumping out newsletters, we want to continue being a conduit for useful information for the community, and e-mail lets us reach a whole group of people who aren’t active participants in the social networks we usually use to share.
We’ll be posting a link on the blog to each weekly newsletter as well, for those of you who are more into RSS than you are into e-mail.
Check out this week’s inaugural newsletter!
So any thoughts, tips, article ideas, or even just kudos and high fives…drop us a line.
Oh, interested in subscribing? It couldn’t be easier. Toss your name and email into the form on the left column of any page of this site, or just visit the simple sign up form.
Hat tip to our friends at Caroline Collective in Houston, Texas for the inspiration on the execution of the newsletter.
How IndyHall got the best office manager, without hiring an office manager
Filed under: coworking, From the Business Side, Independents Hall, IndyHall 201, IndyHall U
Posted first to the Coworking Google Group, mostly copied here for sharing/recordkeeping.
The question was in response to something rather timely, as we’ve been discussing the issue quite a bit recently.
I wanted to talk about the issue of hiring a space manager from our experience in the last 2 years.
We took a fairly holistic coworking approach to bringing on someone to help me run IndyHall day to day, and here’s how and why.
Dana, our office manager, came on a year ago as an assistant to me, with the job of taking administrative tasks away from me as she saw fit, and finding ways to improve things around the office. That meant I paid her (and still do) a portion of her income out of my pocket, as she helps me…be effective at being me.
At the same time, rather than employ her, we brought her on as a contractor to help administrate IndyHall.
This was important for two reasons:
1) it helped us keep our overhead low
2) it gave us the opportunity to cultivate another successful independent as a part of the IndyHall community
Dana knew that IndyHall could only afford to pay her a certain amount per month. Having a desk to work from is an obvious perk, but a perk nonetheless.
Most importantly, the rest of the time, she needed to find other things to do to make ends meet. Most of you haven’t met her, but Dana is exactly who you’d want to be greeting you when walking into …well, anywhere. She’s smart, friendly, outgoing. She’s the perfect person to have at the other end of the phone lines, email, or on the other side of the desk.
She also had a wealth of skill-sets and mentor-ship at her fingertips in the IndyHall community, a resource that someone with a little gumption and focus can do some real damage with.
And she has.
Rather than be cornered into an admin job, Dana took advantage of the fact that her skills also make her an awesome candidate for doing support work alongside the other talent in the room. She took on the role of doing email support for one of the products born at IndyHall, RipIt. Since then, she’s grown that role to supporting 4 products (including RipIt, Beanstalk, Freckle Time Tracking, and another that I don’t even know anything about) which is now consuming the majority of her time and she’s looking at ways to grow and scale that business of providing affordable customer support to indie products.
What does that mean for IndyHall, now that she’s dedicating more time to her own ventures?
Well, for one, it means we succeeded in cultivating a successful independent (some would say that I’ve ruined her for any “real” job. i consider that a success as well). Not only that, but along the way Dana has single handedly contributed to a sizable chunk of our growth in the last year, by not just being a “desk admin” but someone who makes it part of her job to make sure people in the office are happy. Things like cupcake Thursdays. And that awesome mural many of you have seen in pictures of our old space, was painted by her. And comic relief, of course.
Furthermore, she helped me get my life back, because I was dedicating all of my personal time to running IndyHall AND my own consulting business. Now, I focus on vision and strategy and leadership for IndyHall, and less on the management of it.
But she’s growing this support business. So now what?
With her able to dedicate 20% or less of her time to the office, our admin needs an admin.
So the cycle repeats itself. We’re about to start looking for an intern to repeat the cycle we’ve gone through with Dana in the last year. We’re splitting Dana’s role into two, a general manager and an admin. The best part? Dana figured this out on her own. She split up the role like this:
Indy Hall Administrator - 8:30a – 5:00p Monday – Friday
Responsibilities would include:
- opening the space every morning
- being available at the front during the day to answer any questions
- give tours of the space
- in charge of reservations
- keep daily attendance records
- daily invoicing for drop ins
Indy Hall General Manager- 5-10 hours a week
- monthly invoices
- membership management
- planning events (show and tell, 2 hr. workshops, etc)
- contact form emails
- general management of things that need to be done / improvements to IH
- cupcakes on Thursdays ;)
The plan would be for the admin to report to her, and in time, have the admin become the GM as Dana continues to grow her support business.
And then the cycle continues.
Geoff and I are really excited about this process and how it has worked out, and think it’s great for the long term sustainability of the management of the space. It lets me focus on the stuff I need to focus on, and it creates a constant cycle of opportunity for new people to build their careers in creative management roles.
Of course, if your cashflow allows it, you can just pay someone outright. But we think this aligns more with the goals and values of coworking than just hiring an employee. We truly wanted that person to be a part of the community, rather than a service for the community. By going the route of empowerment rather than employment, we achieved a lot of goals together.
Oh, and if you ever meet Dana at IndyHall, SXSW, or anywhere else…be sure to say hi.
