With a cameo from coworking mentor Brad Neuberg and a guy from the “Institute of the Future”. Congrats everyone!
In The News
It seems it was a good weekend for press.
On Friday, Peter Key of the Philadelphia Business Journal wrote a story about three of the creative grassroots organizations in Philadelphia that are working together to make a difference, and that included The Hacktory/Make Philadelphia, Philly Startup Leaders, and of course, us! You can read the full article displayed using Vuzit’s (one of our local technology friends) handy viewer.
And then, this morning, a great piece in the Daily Candy Philadelphia highlights our office and community as an alternative workspace for, you guessed it, indies and freelancers. Thanks Daily Candy!
New visitors, welcome, enjoy our site and feel free to contact us with any questions.
Ever since starting IndyHall, it’s been a less than silent dream of ours to grow. Not just IndyHall, not just Philadelphia, but really to take over the world with coworking. It wasn’t until recently, during the massive presence of coworking at SXSW, that we caught the attention of the perfect supporter to really take our coworking empire to the next level.
For the last 3 weeks, since our return from Austin, I’ve been in private negotiations with the global desk share provider Regus. Their widespread reach (400 cities, 70 countries, and thousands of gorgeous facilities) is perfect for our needs to grow. Moreover, we completely align with their understanding of community and their history of creating hip, desirable workspaces that encourage collaboration and creativity by giving each member their own private desk module or office. Why yell across an open loft workspace when you can stay in your office, with your door closed, and call people on your desk phone?
We’re pleased to announce that we’ve sold IndyHall (location and it’s community) for a sum which we cannot disclose at this time.
The acquisition of IndyHall itself is only step 1 of the plan. Since the coworking movement itself is widespread, global, and diverse, we’ve gone ahead and begun negotiations of using the coworking cell-network for a widespread takeover of the global workforce. With the support of the coworking google group, we’re able to leverage all of our recent press to convince the remaining majority of the global workers to leave their full time jobs for positions as independent contractors and freelancers. With everyone working as independents, every desk of every coworking and Regus facility will be utilized 100%, maximizing all of our missions for optimum freelancer opportunities.
We look forward to the future growth of the movement with the support of this new partner. Congratulations Coworking, you’ve finally come into your own!
Happy April Fools to our new visitors, thanks for playing along!!
Rather than write all of this down, I decided to talk for 9 minutes. If you’re willing to stick with me, I wholeheartedly appreciate it. Enjoy.
LINKS
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!
Things have been quiet on the blog because I spent the week in Las Vegas at BlogWorldExpo talking about community building using new media/social media tools. More on that experience in the next week, at least what I’m allowed to talk about :-).
In the mean time…we’ve had some totally awesome press while I was away!
First, I did a quick interview for KYW Newsradio last week with John Ostapkovich. The a couple of spots ran on Tuesday the 6th, and John sent me MP3s to share for those that missed:
Unfortunately, Odeo is sucking it up, so I’m going to link directly to locally hosted MP3s.
Enjoy my bandwidth.
Interview 1
Interview 2
Also, Philebrity’s Brian James Kirk hung out here a few weeks back (as did Joey Sweeney himself) and wrote about us in Philebrity’s usual cheeky and borderline offensive tone (who doesn’t love gossip/media bloggers, really?). Realistically, though, if you take Brian’s piece with the appropriate grain of salt, it’s well written and definitely fun to read.Finally, at the complete opposite end of the spectrum of audience, Innovation Philadelphia interviewed Bart and I while I was out of town to include a profile on our project in their monthly newsletter. I think they did a good job of taking the material from the interview, plus more general background from our about page, and sent out a really nice piece. Well done, and thanks to IP!
Tags: BlogWorldExpo, KYW, John Ostapkovich, Philebrity, Innovation Philadelphia, Joey Sweeney, Brian James Kirk,
Tara Hunt has kicked off a project she’s calling “Spread the Love”. I’ve been following it closely and thinking about how its core values can be better applied to the things I’m involved with, and wanted to put some of those thoughts down here.
There’s been some discussion recently about the recent press that IndyHall has received. Of course, we’re proud of our office and talk to anyone about what we’re doing here, and what’s going on in the world of coworking outside of IndyHall. Unfortunately, some misplaced journalistic intention has stirred up some bad juju…so I wanted to clear the air.
Whenever I speak to someone about Independents Hall, I try my hardest to make it clear that we didn’t originate this concept, and that this kind of thing CAN and IS going on all over the world. In some settings, I tell the more personal story of how we got the crew together, what motions we went through, and how we arrived at sharing an office. I think that story is extremely important to show that from nothing, something can form, and that community is the most effective (and fun!) way I’ve found to do it.
The downside with telling that story is that it makes it difficult for the writer to choose focus. Are they here to interview about Independents Hall (or whatever space they are interviewing) and how it came to be, or are they here to interview about the coworking concept from the level where they can see EVERYTHING that is going on around the world. Honestly, I think the interview is easier to write and thats why they choose that one. I can count, on one hand, the number of articles that have been written that focus on the coworking movement rather than any specific space (or spaces). That leaves it up to the interviewer to put some focus back on the community that supported them, and maybe I haven’t done as good of a job as I could have.
This morning we had a piece published on one of my FAVORITE blogs, Freelance Switch. There is a lot of traffic coming to the site this morning from that article, and I wanted to post a few points of clarification, some additional links, as well as provide some resources that I’ve been providing to people who’ve emailed me personally to ask more:
- I never made it to San Francisco…the “interview” was 100% remote. I imagine my jealousy of the west coast would have multiplied had I actually made it over there to hang out with the crew that I had become so close with (via the web), and I may have not ever come back :-).
Some of them have recently made the voyage cross-country to visit me so I intend to return the favor very soon to see what west-coast coworking feels like. The biggest thing that I drew from their experiences that they published were the core values of community, collaboration, openness, and sustainability. Without them, it was tough to consider ourselves a *true* coworking space. - Coworking is a starfish organization and we’re just one leg of that starfish. Independents Hall is not a franchise. Neither is coworking. It’s a community driven sharing of experiences and knowledge that allows the movement to grow leaps and bounds beyond what it could if it had hard-defined leadership and rules. Instead, we rely on the core values listed above to establish an organizational ring around the global entities that make up the coworking movement. If you want to cowork in your area, check the wiki, find out who else is posting on the google group, or go to the local cafe and see who’s working. “Roll your own” if you can’t find someone else doing it. Which brings me to….
- The Cream Cheese Sessions were inspired by Jelly in NYC. Amit Gupta and I have been discussing ways to impart the value of Jelly/Cream Cheese/whatever you want to call your semi-ad-hoc-work-together-session on others. These events are one of the best ways to get your local coworking in my opinion. They’re low cost (if not free), easy to organize, and a lot of fun. Amit has started a “Jelly Organizers” group where we hope to help start the discussion about how to get your own local event off the ground. We’d like to, in time, field more specific questions in the form of a podcast…but that’s down the road.
- The P’unk Ave crew who hosts and runs Junto helped forged the path in a huge way. Since the first day that Alex Gilbert mentioned the idea, it was clear how important this could be. Watching the event grow, flourish and mature from “4 people in the middle of a snowstorm” to dozens of people who come out monthly to embrace a topic and share their ideas has been inspiring, and I’m proud to have been a part of it. Geoff, Rick, and Alex G. provide and lead this event that uses a historical venue (I don’t mean their shop, though it is beautiful, but the format of Junto) to promote the true purpose of what we as a community wanted to accomplish. Without Junto, there likely wouldn’t BE an Independents Hall. We think (and hope) Ben Franklin would be proud.
I’m feeling guilty about some of the “me me me” type of stuff that’s been published…and I can’t put all of the blame on the writers. It’s admittedly hard to tell a story from a neutral standpoint, especially a story I’m so passionate about, and I definitely could be doing a better job of leading journalists in the right direction. The promotion of the space that we’ve opened here has been wonderful and of course we appreciate every place that has written about us or included a link to our website. But there are more people, the people I’ve listed above and many more, who deserve attention too.
I just want it to be crystal clear that we wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for more people than I can count, or can list, or probably even know of. I don’t want anyone to think that I’ve been opportunistic, because I really am passionate about both this local community that drives IndyHall as well as supporting the coworking spaces that are opening up all over the world. Remember, we’re just one small leg of the starfish.
I’ve spoken to Geoff about this matter and moving forward, we’re going to request that reporters interview a larger census of the community whenever they write about us. We think this is a fair opportunity to “spread the love”. If you have other ideas on ways to better future interviews and remove opportunity for a skewed story, please, let us know in the comments.
A reporter and photographer spent several hours at IndyHall this past Wednesday and the product of their work hit newsstands this morning…we’ve got a bunch of printed copies of the biz section of Sunday’s Philadelphia Inquirer but if you’re not near a copy (or your newsstand doesnt carry it) you can read it here! If you do grab a copy, we’re on the front AND back page of the business section.
Photo of the front page via Mika Kania
