IMPORTANT UPDATE: Location changed to 5th and Cambridge this Saturday (evidently they have too many people coming to Penn Treaty Park)
This Saturday April 5th at 10am join Indy Hall and 10,000 other enthusiastic Philadelphians as we work side by side with Mayor Nutter in giving our city some well deserved TLC
The Challenge: “During my 2007 mayoral campaign I pledged to clean up Philadelphia. As your Mayor, I am going to fulfill this promise by reducing the amount of litter and trash that plague our city’s neighborhoods, streets, parks and recreation centers. I have made litter reduction a priority in my administration and am committed to making Philadelphia one of the cleanest cities in America.” - Mayor Michael Nutter.
The Oppurtunity: We need to give our city a good Spring Cleaning! On April 5th, join thousands of your fellow citizens in neighborhoods across the city as we try to make Philadelphia a more beautiful place.
The Plan: A group of Indy Hallers and friends will meet at Penn Treaty Park, under the statue,5th and Cambridge, at 10am to get their delicate coding/design/writing/typing hands dirty making Philly cleaner. Stay as long as you can, wear your Indy Hall T-shirts and follow @davespeers on twitter for news and updates through out the day.
Thanks to everyone who played along with yesterday’s little April Fools joke. IndyHall is NOT sold to anyone. Not even close. We love our space, we love our community, and its valuable beyond measure of money.
Just to show you how ridiculously awesome this group is, 22 people from IndyHall and supporting organizations (including WebLinc and Philadelphia CityPaper) donated blood on this past Saturday. Thanks to the push from friend of IndyHal, Reed Gustow, we had a great turnout AND this awesome video documenting the experience.
HUGE thanks to everyone who came out and supported. Even the few who could not donate for various reasons, we’re so grateful for your willingness to donate. And a big thanks to the Red Cross staff who ran the event efficiently and professionally, despite the guitar hero going on in our upstairs lounge. I’m fairly confident that was a first for them.
The other huge benefit to this event is the new configuration for IndyHall. New configuration? We’re not posting pictures just yet…you’re going to have to stop by to see it yourself!
That’s what Gary V says, anyway. But I get that you’re a little attached to your face.
But giving is definitely an important theme for all of us to remember. Luckily, there’s no easier way to give, than to give blood. No ‘face falling off’ required.
Thats why I’ve been working with the American Red Cross, with the help of Reed Gustow, to organize a Blood Drive at IndyHall. We also have the support of Marc Steel from the Citypaper to bring additional donors to the drive from his organization. We’re looking for 45-50 sign ups, between the two organizations.
The donation drive will take place on Saturday, March 29th starting at 9am and running until 3pm. We’ll be re-organizing the “production floor” at IndyHall the night before to accommodate. If you’ve never been here before, check out our “locate” page.
Please consider giving to this cause, this is one of the easiest and most generous things you can do.
You need to reserve a spot, and since this is nearly an entire month in advance, setting aside a time should not be difficult. The Red Cross makes it easy (yay! webapps!) to register and select a slot ahead of time online. You can visit our donor registration page to find out more.
I’d say “race you to the first donor spot”, but I’m already registered myself. Join me!
Last week we started getting inbound traffic from a new listing that was added to the NotForTourists website. The original “On Our Radar” blurb (seen in the left hand side of belows photo) was humorous but accurate, though unfortunately I cannot find it on the website any longer. In the mean time, you CAN see our listing on their services listing. Also, they sent us this really cool welcome package congratulating us on making their list and even included a sticker to put in our window. What a nice touch! We’re honored to be a part of your directory.
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!
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!
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!
Back before we had opened our doors, but right after we signed a lease on the space that is now IndyHall, I got a phone call. Member Dave Speers was asking me if I thought it was feesable to have a brainstorming session here for a client project he was working on, mere days after we got keys to the office. At the time, I was hesitant, but said, “heck, sure Dave. I can promise you 4 walls, a ceiling, and a whiteboard or two. Maybe even some chairs.” We got down to business and thanks to the pressure of the press, actually had a number of desks and chairs put together, too.
5 days after our first day setting foot in the office, we had Dave’s brainstorming session, and it was not only a big hit with the attendees but the client was thrilled with the response.
Now, 3 months later, we’ve hit a much steadier stride in events and aren’t always scrambling for chairs (ok, sometimes we are). We’re trying another round of brainstorming, and you’re invited!
I’m working on a new project with a local t-shirt printing company, and we’re looking for feedback. You can read more about my client, ChoiceShirts, and the idea that we’re working on together, The Choice100 on their respective websites. Long story short, this is an evolutionary process that will call for input on what graphic designers are looking for in the design communities that they join. The first opportunity for you to get involved will take place on December 11th at 6:30pm, here at IndyHall.
As in the past, brain-food will be provided, as well as some brainstorming leadership and a construct for keeping the discussion focused. If all goes well, we’ll likely pop over to our usual spot at National Nechanics for a cold one after to continue the discussion.
Also, if you’re a designer and would like to see what your designs might look like on a shirt, please send vector art to alex@thechoice100.com by Friday, December 7th and we will use ChoiceShirts’ super awesome direct-to-garment printer to print it for you, at no charge!
Bring your questions, your ideas, and most of all, your willingness to be open and thoughtful. We’re looking forward to another exciting and productive event, and hearing your feedback!
Paul White, a Temple Fox MBA student and Adam Dotson, an MFA from UArts and current Temple Fox MBA student, are putting together an inaugural chapter of what they are calling a Creative Business Group.
Paul calls this group:
“a community of individuals interested in business thinking and practices for the creative economy. Our goal is to bring together like minded individuals with diverse
backgrounds from the creative arts and business and to explore creativity and design as drivers for innovation.”
Sounds a whole lot like a student group with shared goals with IndyHall, eh? Well, we’re happy to host them!
Their first meeting is this Friday, 11-2-07, at 6pm at IndyHall. Come by at 6:00 to meet others and mingle, followed by a presentation from Alex (thats me) about the shared goals of Independents Hall and this new student group, then we’ll stroll around Old City to experience First Friday and finally converge at National Mechanics for a cold one.
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 
