With a cameo from coworking mentor Brad Neuberg and a guy from the “Institute of the Future”. Congrats everyone!
coworking
Posted by Alex Hillman on 02-19-2008 under Community Support, In The News, Independents Hall, coworking
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.
Thanks NFT!
I just found a really nice (and entertaining) post from David reflecting on their first year, which was marked yesterday. Congratulations on a successful first year to Eva, David, and the entire CubeSpace crew!
I really appreciate what David has to say about learning process as you go. It’s interesting when no one has written it down for you and you have to figure it out for the first time!
p.s. this is the shortest blog post from me, maybe ever.
Tags: coworking, cubespace, portland, anniversary, birthday, one year
Posted by Alex Hillman on 10-09-2007 under Announcements, Community Support, Events, Independents Hall, coworking
I have a confession to make: we’ve been slacking a bit in the social scene.
After spending all of those months explaining the importance of the “social workplace”, we finally made it happen. Got some awesome press. Lots of interest. New members. But nearly forgot about one super important thing while we were so wrapped up in the IndyHall work space: the social stuff that got us here! Well it’s time to get that back on track, so here we go!
Purple Cows at IndyHall - 10/16
Next Tuesday, October 16th, the Purple Cow Brainstorming Circle will be resuming with a new format, and this time, at IndyHall! For more information about how that works, check out the Purple Cow wiki and my post about my first Purple Cow experience at my personal blog.
Junto and LikeMind - 10/18 & 10/19
After our grand opening party, the only events that have managed to sustain through the in-office growth were the ones that Geoff and the P’unk Ave crew had their hands all over: LikeMind and Junto. The last round of those was great, and they will be taking place again this month, later next week in fact: Junto is October 18th and Likemind is the next morning at Bennas, as per usual. For Junto, P’unk Ave will provide beer and tomato pie as usual. Delicious! For LikeMind, coffee is covered by Anomaly. Food is on your own!
But wait…there’s more in the works!
Social Media Club - 10/23
“Social Media Club is being organized for the purpose of sharing best practices, establishing ethics and standards, and promoting media literacy around the emerging area of Social Media. ”
This month’s meeting (the first in Philly since August) will be an opportunity for folks to exchange lessons and learnings from conferences and meetups they have gone to in the last 2 months, lead by Annie Heckenberger and Steph Fox. Should be a good time. Kicks off at 6pm at IndyHall. Drinks afterwards? Probably.
Open Source Frameworks - 10/25
Developer type? Want to get your feet wet with better rapid development utilities? Want to learn more about what else is out there besides your framework of choice? Then this event is the place to be!
Philly PHP, Philly Drupal, and PANMA are putting this one together and will have experts going over the strengths (and weaknesses) of frameworks like Code Ignitor, Symfony, Zend, Cake, Ruby on Rails, and Drupal.
This event is free, but does require registration at the PANMA website. It will take place at the Science Center in University City. More information is available at the event website!
The rest of October - ???
So next week is pretty busy, but after that, my calendar is pretty slow as far as social media events in October go in Philadelphia, so if you know of any PLEASE let me know so I can add them to this post as well as my calendar. Also, there’s nothing that says we can’t have less formal get togethers at bars and restaurants, it happens often enough on its own. If you’re in old city, looking for some company, and on Twitter, send out a note and see who shows up! Be sure to follow @indyhall and I encourage others to check out who is following @indyhall and see if you can find your friends.
October wraps (any good Halloween parties we can crash?) and November starts out with a bang!
November isn’t just for Thanksgiving
So if all goes as planned, this bizzare 80 degree Philadelphia fall will be over and we’ll be full swing into a REAL fall event schedule. Along with the Likemind and Junto that will be taking place that month (dates to follow), November will be the initiation of 3 more awesome new events at IndyHall.
Double Feature Movie Night (with a new partner!) - 11/10
I love member-planned events (ahem), and the first big member-planned event coming up is a movie night! Roz, myself, and several others joked about having a Teen Wolf/Teen Wolf Too double feature. Then, Bear and PhilaFoodie approached me about a movie night. I brought Roz back into the conversation, a date was set, and Saturday November 10th is it!
The exact films are still TBD by the planning group, but we do expect to have a nice big screen, food, wine, and beer, and lots of good friends. Also…this is the inaugural event (hopefully first of many) with a new, very exciting partnership: Philly Car Share! I don’t want to give away all of the goodies yet, but I can say that I’ve talked about doing something mutually beneficial with PCS for almost a year now, and am SO excited to have their support, and be able to help support their growth as well. But again…more on that later. I’m such a tease.
Oh, there will be an RSVP on upcoming for this very soon to help get a head count.
Philly Alt.net 11-14
One of the pillars of coworking is Openness, and ASP.net is notoriously NOT an open platform. Having worked in two .net shops in the past, one of the most frustrating bits was the lack of open standard support. Well…I wasn’t the only one complaining, the only one looking for a better way. Enter Alt.net, a group of asp.net developers looking for better use of open standards and best practices in dot net. Right up our alley!
When I found out that my buddy Brian Donahue was working on a Philly chapter of Alt.net and was looking for a venue for their first meeting about Monorail. The meeting will be held on Wednesday November 14th at 6pm. If you’re a dot net developer wanting to expand your mind, or another type of developer looking to see what the dot net folks are up to, stop by. More info and an RSVP at the Philly Alt.net website.
Also, big ups to our friends at WebLinc for kicking in for consumables for this one.
Hacktory LED Classes - 11/17
The Hacktory is a new group that has sprung out of the Make:Philly crew with the goals of promoting technology through the arts. While a lot of their events will be more “dirty” (power tools and messy products), some are clean enough to do here at the Hall, so we’re happy to host them!
On Saturday, November 17th there will be two LED programming sessions.
The beginner class begins at 10am, costs $30, and runs for about 3 hours. All material will be provided for the session (most of that $30 goes to materials). The intermediate class goes from 2pm-5pm, costs $50 (slightly more costly materials), and should be a great add-on to what was learned in the first class.
More about both classes, and registration (spots are limited) on The Hacktory website.
Also, at the bottom of that page is a waiting list for a now-full advanced electronics class that is taking place on November 3rd. Check it out, and if there’s enough waiting list sign ups they might consider re-running the program (my words, not theirs!).
Philly Drupal Meetup - 11/27
This meetup isn’t new, in fact the last one was a mashup event with Philly Standards and Philly PHP that I attended and had a really good time at! The next iteration of the Drupal group will be taking place on November 27th at 6pm, here at the hall. There will be 3-4 short presentations organized by members of the group, and then an exodus to our favorite oasis of imbibe-ment, National Mechanics, for a social wrap-up.
Thanks to Nate Gasser from Rock River Star for putting this one together!
“What about mine?”
Did I miss your event? Let me know in the comments because if it’s not on my calendar, I don’t know about it!
There are a few more events in the works but we’re keeping them quiet until details are worked out. Stay tuned.
Summary of Events (with hCal)
October 16th 6pm — 5th 8pm, 2007 — Purple Cow Brainstorming Circle— at IndyHall HQ
October 18th 6pm, 10pm 2007 — Junto— at Punk Avenue
October 19th 8am, 9am 2007 — LikeMind— at Benna’s Cafe
October 23th 6pm, 9pm 2007 — Social Media Club— at IndyHall HQ
October 25th 6:30pm, 9pm 2007 — Open Source Frameworks Presentation— at The Science Center
November 14th 6pm — November 14th 9pm, 2007 — Philly Alt.net— at IndyHall HQ
November 17th 10am — November 17th 5pm, 2007 — The Hacktory LED Classes— at IndyHall HQ
November 14th 6pm — October 13th 9pm, 2007 — Philly Drupal— at IndyHall HQ
Tags: events, indyhall, independents hall, purple cow brainstorming circle, junto, punkave, likemind, teen wolf, philly car share, Philly Alt.net, Philly Drupal Meetup
For anyone in the office yesterday, today, or tomorrow, there is an unusual lack of…well…Alex. :-)
Most of you know that I’ve been at the office (along with Bart) pretty much every day since we’ve opened. Well, I’m not out of the office for no good reason…today, I’m attending BlogOrlando along with a handful of others from the Philly crew, as well as a bunch of friends that I made at BlogPhiladelphia.
I’m going to be playing wingman for my buddy Alex Rudloff (who is also cool enough to pick me up at the airport AND let me couchsurf at his place), and is one of the social media leaders down here who are heading up a coworking effort. Alex will be leading session on that at 11:10am today. From catching up with him on the “state of affairs” yesterday, it sounds like O-town has a lot of the same challenges that Philadelphia had, and still has, to overcome some of the social barriers keeping its workers and social scene apart. I’m really excited to hear first hand what people are up to down here, and what kinds of things they are trying to do to make it better…and with any luck, together, we’ll come up with a few new things that BOTH of our cities can benefit from!
There was a really good piece in the Orlando Sentinal about what’s going on down here, with a little quote from me about how coworking is heavily populated by people making a living doing what they love. That one’s for you, Speers.
One last bit: huge thanks to BlogOrlando host Josh Hallett for a) putting together what is shaping up to be quite a series of sessions and b) yesterday’s NASA and Universal City Walk festivities. It was a great time, and a really fun opportunity for some of us early arrivers to get acquainted with each other.
Tags: blogorlando, alex rudloff, josh hallett, social scene, orlando, coworking
Recently, Citizen Agency/Citizen Space put together their 4 pillars of coworking:
- Collaboration
- Openness
- Community
- Sustainability
Tara mentioned that sustainability may be unique to them, and were met with a flurry of “no, we’re working towards sustainability, too!” . Luckily, the term “sustainability” itself has enough connotations to come along with it that we can interpret what that means. The 2 most common, in my opinion are environmental sustainability and business sustainability (does this model allow us to stay in business?).
Another really important part of sustainability is HUMAN sustainability. As business owners and entrepreneurs, we’re super susceptible to overworking and burning out. Most people are generally harder on themselves than on others, so just think how that translates when you are your own boss? High stress, poor sleep and eating habits, and something that I’m most notorious for…forgetting to take time for yourself. In the theme of sustainability, we need to remember to spend some time on ourselves.
Lucky for us work-a-holics, there’s some wonderful wellness structures we can work with. P’unk Ave has been doing Yoga on Friday mornings for a few months now and the entire team has expressed how much they enjoy it. IndyHall member Jennifer Lim has offered to come on Friday Mornings and provide Reiki Energy Therapy. In full disclosure, Bart and I were provided a complimentary session to see what Reiki was all about. For those of you who saw us in the week prior to our opening, you saw two grown men on the edge…minimal sleep, high stress, and tons to do by September 1st. Jen came and gave us each a 30 minute session, and I can confidently say that the structure of the Reiki session put me back on the level to make it though the rest of the week.
From Jen’s literature:
Reiki is a very gentile practice of using light touch to deeply relax your body, allowing it to heal and rebalance itself naturally. Benefits include: stress reduction, pain management, increased focus, and general wellness.
Starting this Friday, Jen will be running 15, 30, and 60 minute sessions at $20, $40, and $75 respectively. Jen is providing 5% discounts for 30 and 60 minute sessions for IndyHall members, too! Sessions are by appointment: we have limited availability so let us know if you are interested!
I highly recommend a 15 minute “reboot” at the very least. You may find yourself glowing for the rest of the weekend! We hope to move forward with this, if there is interest, in an entire regiment of “Zen Hall” wellness programs. If you have any ideas or suggestions, let us know!
Tags: wellness, reiki, p’unk ave, yoga, collaboration, openness, community, sustainability, indyhall, coworking, independent work, stress
I knew that Amy was interviewed some time back when she was in NY working from Jelly with Amit, she mentioned that she had given IndyHall a shout out. There was a pretty well done piece on NPR today about Jelly as a solution to independent worker/work from home issues. Give it a listen, if you haven’t gotten some of the background on the event before (or even if you have).
Of course, I’m excited that Philadelphia was mentioned, as well as D.C.
Congrats to the crew on the coverage!
Tags: amy hoy, slash7, hyphenated people, amit gupta, NPR, jelly, coworking, NYC, Philadelphia, washington DC
After almost a year of conversations. 9 months of grassroots team building. 3 weeks of blood, sweat, stress, name-calling, goofiness, power tools, moving trucks, and absolutely no sleep. And for what? Oh yeah…this:
