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Created by Missrogue on Jul 9, 2009
Last updated: 10/13/10 at 09:39 PM
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For 3 weeks now, I’ve had a standing date with Tony Bacigalupo, one of my dearest friends and the co-founder of New Work City, which I happily consider to be Indy Hall’s “sister space” in Manhattan. Once a week, we call into a conference line for a 30 minute chat where we talk about anything we want…but mostly stuff related to coworking.
We record the call, and then publish it at TheCoworkers.com as well as to iTunes.
Technically it’s not a “show”, as we’ve decided on no guests and no post-production, but instead a window into a weekly dialogue that we agreed we should have been having in the first place. We talk about observations, ideas, and experiences of the week. And if all goes well, we will find some topics that we disagree on and get to debate.
Tony is one of my friends with whom I always have great conversations with. Sometimes they’re inspiring. Sometimes they’re refreshing. Often times they are lots of fun. No matter what, time spent together is time well spent. In the wake of his re-opening of New Work City, and my re-launching of ChoiceShirts.com, we decided that setting aside some time every week to talk…and then sharing the contents of those discussions, would be fun and valuable.
We also wanted to use it as an opportunity to talk about some of the meatier — and maybe even more risque — topics related to coworking that the mainstream media and most blogs simply aren’t talking about.
Whether you’re a coworking space owner, a coworker, or even someone working 9-5 and hoping for a better workday tomorrow, I think you’ll find things of interest for you. No topic is off limits, and we’re 100% candid and honest. Remember, this is a phone call, NOT a show.
So if you’re interested in what it’s like to sit down with the founders of a couple of coworking spaces and eavesdrop on their conversation, I hope you give The Coworkers a listen.
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Dangerouslyawesome/~3/zwgaIds1Fkc/
There’s a lot of reasons not to give up a slice of your passion or business to somebody else, but Tony hits a home run as to the real reason why in his reflection “Alone at NWC“.
I wonder what it would be like to start a coworking space without having to do any of the grunt work. If you had the money right away to hire people to do all of the little things, I wonder whether you’d ever be able to fully appreciate the intricacies of every detail that make a place like this so special?
Replace “coworking space” with “business”, and the message becomes universal.
The whole thing is worth a read. I highly recommend it.
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Dangerouslyawesome/~3/-05DQNJ7LEo/
If a “career” is the sum of the activities which make up a person’s work history and future, mine is unorthodox, to say the least.
My first career choice (age 7) was to be a paleontologist. Then I saw Jurassic Park and realized how dangerous it could be. Scratch that.
My second career choice (age 11) was to be a professional magician. Then I saw David Copperfield (a bar mitzvah present) and realized how creepy he was. Scratch that.
Computers
By the time I was 15 I had figured out how to take apart a computer and broken the family PC enough times that my dad made me responsible for getting it working again. I walked into a local neighborhood computer shop (remember those?) to buy a new motherboard. The shop owner asked me, the 15 year old me, “so what are you going to do with a motherboard?”. I told him exactly what I was going to do with a motherboard and he offered me a job after school to learn how to build computers. The owner and the lead repair tech taught me hardware and software diagnostics. I worked my way through high school and even some time in summers after college at the computer shop. I solidified my passion for technology. My boss asked me “so when are you going to learn to write code?”. I told him I wasn’t interested in being a code monkey, diagnostics were what thrilled me.
College
So I went to Drexel for a business degree. I thought, “I’ll learn to run a business, start an IT diagnostics firm, and make a mint”. I had a great time at Drexel, much to the chagrin of my grades and subsequently my scholarships. It’s ok, though, because I wasn’t excited by what I was learning. But I stuck it out for the co-op program that Drexel is known for. I’d get an awesome job, learn what I wanted on the job, and then graduate to start my company.
My first co-op working with technology in a corporate business setting was working for a bank. And firmly decided that I did NOT want to start an IT consulting firm, because I’ve never been so bored in my life.
HTML
For my 2nd co-op, I had a friend who had been working at a local interactive agency. His job sounded fun. DVD rental library, razor scooters, fun client brands I’d actually heard of. But he was a coder. And I’d told my boss back at the computer shop that I didn’t want to be a coder.
But I thought, “what the hell”. It was a 6 months, no strings attached attempt at a career that I had no experience in, and only assumed that I wouldn’t enjoy.
I actually told them that when I went for my interview.
Now, here’s a fun anecdote: I was interviewing for a position as a front end developer. The practical test I had to take involved basic HTML skills, like taking a sliced up image and putting it back together with a table. After all, it was 2004 and CSS based layouts were just barely beginning to be adopted. I still tested in Netscape, and IE 5.2 for Mac.
But at the time, I didn’t really know any HTML. So I snuck a preview copy of the exam and did my best to memorize the answers.
I knew I could learn quickly anyway, and the answers would always be at my fingertips on HTMLdog.
So I passed the exam (technically cheated), and was offered and accepted my 2nd Drexel co-op as a web developer.
I fell in love with web development. My manager was awesome. My mentor was incredible. My coworkers were rad as hell, and our CEO was a quiet visionary. I absolutely loved this job, and I loved this industry. I made incredible friends whom I still am in touch with today, though many I wish I saw more often. I was introduced to names like Zeldman and Meyer and PPK. People who continue to walk in my pantheon today. And even some who I’ve come to consider friends.
This job changed my life. I didn’t want to be a coder, I wanted to be a developer. I wanted to creatively express technology. I loved having tools to artistically create, where I didn’t need to be a designer. I could make beautiful things that real people actually use and saw.
Dropout
When my 6 months was up, I went to my department manager and told him I didn’t want to go back to school, I love my job too much. I was learning more on the job, and having more fun, and making money. Why would I give that up?
He made me promise that I’d go back to school, since he was a dropout himself who was JUST finishing his degree in his early 30s. I obliged, and he let me stay past my co-op.
As this company swelled, and went through some severe growing pains in terms of culture and leadership, I found myself without a job (Not for lack of trying on my manager’s part. They did everything they could to save me a seat at the table). Luckily, there was another group of people that I’d worked with who had also left, but to start their own company. So I rang them, let them know I was on the market, and they offered me work on the spot.
I started taking some night classes to follow through on my promise to my former boss, but was quickly frustrated. I’d grown accustomed to work that actually had value, and classwork wasn’t doing that for me. I’d grown accustomed to working well in teams, and my classmates were not good at that at all. And I’d learned about some of the most progressive technology, which is not even CLOSE to what Drexel was teaching.
I gave up on the degree and it’s value. Drexel had given me what I wanted: an opportunity to try something that I wouldn’t have otherwise. If it weren’t for that 6 months, no strings attached gig, I wouldn’t have fallen in love with the internet. I wouldn’t know HTML.
Freelance
I filled that time I had been in class after work with some freelance. I was a pretty solid front end dev, and had a good enough network of people who’d spun out from that original company that I had plenty of work to supplement my income, keep me busy, and push me to learn more. On top of learning how to be a better coder, I learned project management skills, sales skills, and the business skills that I’d hoped to learn at Drexel but didn’t.
As I tasted more, I wanted more. I went to my boss and told him I wanted more opportunity to lead.
He agreed to it. Then he strung me along for nearly 6 months, through one of the most interesting (and also most infuriating) projects I’ve ever built. And my frustration with not having an opportunity to lead grew into resentment.
I left that company, and not on admirable terms. I’m sorry for that.
I did, however, take to freelance. I’d built up a strong enough network and a couple of key contacts that had more than enough work to pay my rent and put food on my table.
And as I worked on more projects, I had more opportunities to bring projects to the table as the lead. I had acquired the client, I led the project scope, vision, etc. I sucked at it at first, but I got better quickly, largely because I was learning from the other people who I collaborated with (many of whom I met back at that first interactive job).
Coworking & Chaos
I was also learning about coworking, and saw that as an extension of the way I was already working. It also seemed like a part of the solution for some of the things that I felt were missing in Philadelphia.
I learned about it from a duo who were unorthodox themselves, individually and together. They did more than just teach me about coworking, though, they taught me about a whole other ecosystem of frameworks and events for “getting things done”. Through them, I learned what it meant to “embrace the chaos” as a leadership model.
Indy Hall
I started sharing the idea of coworking with places that I saw people having interesting conversations, but realized how the 80/20 rule really worked: 80% of the people talked, 20% did anything. Luckily, that 20% yielded some of my closest friends and colleagues today. With the partnership and guidance of Geoff DiMasi, I led Indy Hall into fruition, from a nascent community of a handful of nerds to one of the most incredible, diverse, and powerful groups I’ve ever been a part of.
The things I’ve learned about leadership from Geoff are too numerous to list here. But know he’s had an immense impact on my worldview and leadership style, and I’m thankful. Indy Hall has been a vehicle for many things, not the least of which was that learning and personal growth.
At Indy Hall I found myself surrounded by even more leaders. Real leaders. People who had vision, and didn’t just tell you how things would go, but they actually architected the world and experiences around them. We continued to teach each other through our experiences, successes and failures.
Parties
I’ve always loved throwing parties. The same activity that probably did the most damage to my grades and scholarship provided the most powerful mechanism for changing the world around me. I’ve thrown more parties than I can count in my professional career, and in all of them, have made connections that I firmly believe have strengthened my place in Philadelphia, in my career, and in life. Learning to lead social interactions, which ultimately is raw relationship building, is one of my hugest assets.
Also, I have a neighborhood bar that’s cooler than yours. I gua-ran-tee it.
Business
Indy Hall has been a labor of love. I’ve poured countless hours into it, consciously and not. It’s not a venture I created to make millions from, though that’s not to say I still can’t. But the value it’s provided me has been immense. I’ve learned about running a business. I’ve learned how other people run their businesses. I’ve learned the ups and downs of widespread attention. I’ve hired and I’ve fired.
But while I wasn’t growing Indy Hall for the sake of growing a business, my palate had been whet for the taste of building businesses and the mechanisms that run them. People were interested in “my way” of doing things, and I began finding myself doing less web development and more business consulting.
Consulting
At the end of 2008, I came up with the idea for Unstick.me as a way to hone those business consulting skills, but work with people I really thought I could help. So starting small made sense. I also ran a weekly video stream for a while where a group of people helped each other. It was like going to group therapy for business.
Unstick.me never made me a ton of money either, but it did become a placeholder for opportunities to come and a great way to weed out people who wanted free advice. I’ve heard anecdotal stories about some of those “Unstick.me Live” sessions helping people make decisions that they are very glad they made. Even if one of those stories is true, it was worth it.
“Entrepreneur”
I’ve fallen out of love with the word “entrepreneur”. It is crusted with hype, and tends to be a self-assigned descriptor more than anything else. I’ve sometimes been pinned with this label, by virtue of the fact that I’ve largely paved my own way for the last few years (and started a business or two). But I don’t think of myself as an entrepreneur, or any of the things that supposedly come along with it.
There are qualities of “entrepreneurship” that are undeniably valuable as part of an ecosystem, and importent to overall progress as a society. But I’m more interested in those individual qualities than some arbitrary mashup that’s been given a label.
I’d rather think of myself as someone who works hard at what they think is right, than someone who won’t be proven wrong.
I’d rather think of myself as someone who pays attention to the world around them, rather than constantly sniffing for opportunity.
I’d rather think of myself as someone who want’s to make a difference, rather than someone who wants to make something different.
I’d rather think of myself as a cautious optimist than a forced realist.
I’d rather build businesses that create value than reward ideas with no intrinsic value whatsoever.
“Entrepreneurship”, as far as I’m concerned, is a merit badge in the boy scouts.
So I press on.
Back to the FutureAgency
As the summer of 2009 came to a close, I was wrapping up some web development projects and feeling the need to start in on something fresh and new. I went to dinner with my friend and and mentioned I was looking for my “Next Big Thing™”. She is the VP of Social Media something or other at a well known advertising agency in Philadelphia. I’d always admired their creative work, and knew that she loved working there. She suggested that I talk to their co-founder and CCO. I explained that I wasn’t looking for a J-O-B. She urged me to meet with him anyway.
We talked about a number of things, but one of the important recurring themes that came up was their desire to re-invent their interactive team and practice so that it wasn’t dependent on a single leader…but rather a team of leaders, well integrated into the rest of their creative process. And so, among other things, I joined with the opportunity to craft just that.
I spent a year (exactly) with that agency, and with the support of their leadership team built their interactive group into one of the strongest and most dynamic teams they’d ever had. We didn’t get to accomplish 100% of the goals I set out to do, but we made what I believe is incredible progress, and I’m confident that the team is capable of taking them through the next year and beyond.
Everybody Wears T-Shirts
In the middle of that year with the agency, another opportunity arose. For almost as long as Indy Hall had been open, I’d had a consulting gig with a local, medium sized, family owned, t-shirt company for a couple of years on it’s B2C business, in a variety of different capacities (literally, from writing code to inventing marketing ideas to digging into business process to providing corporate therapy to the CEO). I learned how a business that depends on physical inventory works (and how much it can suck), but also how a business with global reach and a passionate focus on great customer service can really run.
Earlier this year, I sat down with the CEO and Chairman of that company (a father and son duo who I’d grown to love like family). I suggested that my work with them was starting to become challenging, because we consistently ran into problems that the company simply didn’t have access to the technology ready to support our ideas, regardless of if the ideas were good or bad. I suggested that the company lacked a CTO, or a Director of Technology. My recommendation to hire someone in-house who could “own” the knowledge of their systems and find the best ways to use the technology they did have to make some forward progress on our ideas, and I’d continue to consult to make sure that the technology continued to support the business in ways that I’d spent all of that time helping them dig into. I was 100% not expecting their response.
Hired
Rather than hire a CTO for me to work with, they hired me.
And for the last 6 months, I’ve been their Director of Technology (or whatever my title is).
I’m not quite sure if I knew what it meant to be a CTO (or any C-level employee), even though I did write the job description that they were so firmly convinced described me. I knew what the role should be capable of. And sure, I had ideas of how I would do it, but it wasn’t until I was in the thick of it that I understood what it meant to be a Director.
It’s not about the title. Or the salary. Or the benefits. Or the potential power trip. Or the company jet (psych).
It’s about being a directing. Guiding. Finding and defining a vision, gathering buy in, and then orchestrating the pieces together. A bunch of instruments playing aren’t a symphony, they require a conductor to keep them all in pace and aware of each other. And so does a director.
Director
“Director” is often synonymous with “final say”, and I think that my experiences in learned leadership and the mentors I’ve had kept me from making it about that. My say wasn’t nearly as important as whatever vision we’d all bought in on. If someone else’s idea supported it better than mine, we went with theirs.
I said “no” a lot in the last 6 months, too, but not because I didn’t want to do things. Because they weren’t aligned with the vision we’d all bought into.
And so, after guiding a team of 12+ through one of the largest (if not THE largest) technology initiative I’ve ever experienced (let alone led), I’m confident that I’m onto something with my preferred techniques for directing a project, for guiding a team, and for communicating the rhythms of business.
Directors primarily work with people, but the number one tool in their arsenal (apart of great communication skills) is the ability to pick a direction.
Direction. You can only go one of them at a time, but you don’t have to go the same one forever.
Try to pick a good one.
This post is dedicated to the countless people whose journeys I’ve woven mine with over my last 27 years on this planet. Thank you for having an impact on me, even if I haven’t been able to figure out what it was yet.
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Dangerouslyawesome/~3/2vYvFFchU60/
Do yourself a favor and watch these two videos ASAP:
Steven Johnson explains, quite succinctly and with historic reference, a lot of the theses we’ve built Indy Hall upon over the last 3+ years and generally why environments like coworking spaces and coworking communities are such powerful engines for true innovation.
The ADD version:
It’s not about any one individual “idea” or moment, or even incentivizing collaboration, but instead about creating opportunities for smaller, half-baked ideas to bump into each other and serendipitously realize that they are each others’ missing pieces.
So STOP trying to make innovation happen, and let it happen.
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Dangerouslyawesome/~3/PbmEWJzjLnY/
This is not fatblogging, I swear.
The last 3 years have been good to me in a lot of ways, but I have’t been good at taking care of myself. Among my 2010 promises that I made (not so much a resolution, but really a promise) was to take some time to refocus on me.
So far, 2010 has been the year that I wanted it to be. Indy Hall has continued to grow, but also mature. As such, I’ve been able to focus on some other ventures that are fulfilling in many new ways. I’m focused on products again, building both technologies and businesses. I’ve focused on teaching. I’ve focused on writing.
I’ve focused on my mental health. Learned what I cared about. Who I cared about.
I’ve taken time for myself.
I’m relatively healthy considering my aversion towards doctors. I only really get sick once, maybe twice a year.
But my body health – my physical fitness – has deteriorated. Recently, I dared to step onto a scale, to find that I weighed nearly 20 lbs more than the last time I was unhappy with my weight. So with 5 months left in 2010, I’ve committed to getting back under 200 lbs.
Last Monday was the “Geek Fitness” edition of Refresh Philly. I hadn’t been to a Refresh in some time, and this seemed like a topic I should pay some attention to.
I left Refresh with some new perspective on how – and why – I could make this happen. Here’s what I’m up to one week later:
Lose It or Lose It
I don’t think I’ve ever shouted from the hilltops how awesome Randy Schmidt is, which is a damn shame. I’ve actually known Randy since college, though we didn’t really get to know each other until the early Indy Hall days. Apart from being one of Indy Hall’s longest standing members (Randy’s participation and support dates back to the “Cream Cheese Sessions” of 2007), but he’s also one of my favorite success stories of complete career reorientation within the Indy Hall community.
But that story’s for another day.
Randy’s a problem solver. Lose It or Lose It was his solution to his own problem – his inability to stay motivated through losing weight. He found a pretty fascinating combination of reminders and the association of money to goals that’s not purely incentive based. Quickly, here’s how it works.
You choose a 10 week plan – 1, 2, or 3 lbs per week
You pony up an uncomfortable amount of your own money
Lose It or Lose It combines accountability friends, daily SMS or email reminders to you and your accountability friends), and weekly required weigh-ins to keep you on track
Each week you’re required to weigh in on the same day. Each time you miss your weigh in for any reason, you lose 10% of the money you put up at the beginning. If you weigh in but miss your weight goal, you lose 5%. If you weigh in successfully, you lose nothing!
At the end of 10 weeks, any money not lost in the weekly weigh-ins is returned, in full, including the paypal transaction fees.
There’s some neat things working here:
A set schedule with an attainable goal
When I business coach, one of the most common lessons I teach is to set realistic goals. There’s more value in setting goals that you can achieve than just achieving them, there’s also the emotional momentum of successfully achieving a goal. LIOLI gives you a reasonable schedule with a fixed end point, along with a realistic goal – just a couple of pounds per week – to set help you up for successive wins and keep you motivated.
Accountability
Randy’s Refresh presentation was actually more about how LIOLI takes on the human accountability factor that normally undermines diet partners. Unlike the person you’ve asked to keep you on track, the website is relentless and uncaring. Mostly because it, itself, isn’t trying to lose weight. But rather than remove the human element COMPLETELY, it stacks the automated (but friendly and often funny) reminders up against those human accountability friends as well…in fact it urges them to keep you on track. That’s right, your friend gets reminders to remind you to keep working at your goal.
Meta.
Money
I waited a long time to sign up for LIOLI because I had basically convinced myself that I’m not motivated by money. Then, after hearing Randy talk about it, I realized that LIOLI doesn’t motivate you with money, it helps you use your own money as a bargaining chip. That is, when you’re bargaining with yourself.
The trick to LIOLI is to put up an uncomfortable amount of money. Not an amount of money that risks you losing your home, or putting your life at risk. But an amount that you’d certainly prefer not to part with. And what you really need to consider is that the total amount isn’t the important part – but instead, the 5-10% amounts you risk to lose each week.
Basically, each week becomes it’s own mini-game. The amount at risk each week needs to be enough to force you to think, “is this decision, which is likely to hurt my chances of weighing in at my goal, worth $x?”
So I put up $1000 to lose 2lbs per week, or 20 lbs. That made each week worth $100, and each time I slipped on my weigh in target, I had $50 at stake. That’s enough to make me think “that burger’s not worth $50″. Or “I don’t need to spend $50 to have another beer”. Or “I could skip my run/ride, but that could cost me $50″.
I’m lucky to be at a point in my life and career where $50 isn’t going to break me, but its still enough money to make me associate my decisions with a value. If the outcome of decision doesn’t match the value, it’s an easy decision to make.
I’m not winning $1000 at the end of my 10 weeks. I’m using money as a bargaining tool with myself to help me make better decisions. It was my money to begin with, after all.
So, does it work?
Well, over 1000 lbs have been lost by LIOLI users. Almost 70 of those lbs were Randy’s. And by years end, I’m hoping that at least 40 more will be mine. I’m already ahead of schedule, but they say the first few weeks are the easiest.
Eating Better
I’m stating the obvious, but it’s not really something I’ve ever made a conscious effort to do. Luckily, it is an easy change, because based on the fact that I eat out almost every meal, all I needed to do was remove a few things completely from my eating options and add a few new ones.
I’m using an iPhone app called Lose It to enter my exercise and estimate my calorie intake. Not knowing how poorly I ate before makes measuring the differential tough, but simply paying attention to what I’m eating is already making a huge difference. If something I’m thinking about eating is worse for me than I realized, I go into the self-negotiating mode for LIOLI. That’s not to say I can’t eat anything I want, but I know what the outcome could be based on my decision.
A trip to the farmers market on Sunday to pick up some fruit for snacks, and another trip to Whole Foods for some easy-prep meals that aren’t full of crap means I can still eat well without sacrificing too much convenience, simply by knowing that my options are better than the ones I was giving myself before.
Much like LIOLI’s weekly required checkpoints, using Lose It on my iPhone is helping me learn my eating patterns so I can make smarter decisions about what and where I eat.
Exercise
Honestly, I’ve never been one to exercise. It’s never appealed to me. Getting sweaty, grunting, being in pain? Lame. I’m also not motivated by team sports, so I’ve never been much of an athlete. So something had to change.
Knowing full well that diet changes alone weren’t going to lose me 2 lbs a week, I picked a few variations to compile an exercise routine that I could manage to keep up with.
C25k
I was honestly motivated by the Refresh talks about running, so much that I convinced myself that I could do it too! Unfortunately I was quickly reminded how hard it is on my flat feet, and that it probably wasn’t the most sustainable way for me to maintain a daily workout schedule. That said, I found the Couch to 5k program approachable, and something I’m still going to try to work through.
I’m not really interested in actually running the 5k, but I like the program from the perspective that it assumes that I’ve never run before, and starts there. The first weeks runs are actually over 50% walking. But I’m still out for 30+ minutes, sweating, and “feeling the burn”. The part that sucks is later in the day when my ankles are wobbly and sore. If I can’t recover by the next time I’m planning on running, I’ve undermined my whole plan.
There’s a sweet C25k iPhone app, though, that gives you audio cues when to switch your running and walking, and it even lets you play iTunes or Pandora in the background. If you ARE a runner and want to train up to a 5k (or a 10k), there’s an app for that (10k version).
15 miles to 30 Rock
Since running isn’t a daily option (and I decided to start this whole routine in August of one of the hottest summers in Philadelphia’s recorded history), I’ve decided that going to the gym and using some cardio equipment is completely acceptable.
Treadmills give me the same problems as running outside, except it’s boring. So I took a spin on one of the stationary bikes. A few things I really like about the bike:
I’m not on my feet. My arches thank me.
Milage motivation – being able to ride 15 miles in the same amount of time I can barely run 2 miles is just more motivating to me.
I don’t feel the need to stop. Unlike running, where I need to stop because my ankles hurt, I can power through a consistent 40 minute ride even up the virtual “hills” the training program provides.
I can watch 30 Rock
That last one’s a little weird, but I was reading about workout routines and saw someone who stopped letting themselves watch certain shows except for when they were working out. Earlier this summer I decided to catch up on 30 Rock, which I’d never seen but heard was really funny. Season 1 had me hooked.
Before I could buy Season 2, Hulu sent me an invite for Hulu Plus. This gave me full access to their catalogue (which happens to include all seasons of 30 rock), but it also lets me watch them on my iPhone/iPad.
So I promised myself that I’d get through 30 rock, 2 episodes at a time, but ONLY while I’m on an exercise bike.
Those 40 minutes whiz by. It’s like taking a 10-15 mile bike ride with Tina Fey and Alec Baldwin every morning. It’s awesome.
And when I’m done with 30 Rock, I can pick another series I’ve been meaning to catch up on…I can even up the ante to 30 minute shows, and documentaries. Who said exercise equipment had to be boring!!
P.S. The music they play at my Gym is so bad. SO bad.
Daily Mile
A social network for working out. Not only did it seem counter-intuitive (social networks are places to sink time sitting on your duff, not being active), but it sounded awful. I imagined a virtual locker room full of athletes, slapping each others’ asses and shouting lame motivational chants at each other.
But Daily Mile turned out to be something else altogether. In fact, its kinda like having workout buddies without having to smell them. You can pick up tips (and even exercise routes) from other people that live near you. The amazing part to me was how many people I knew who were already on it. People I knew from Indy Hall, or just the general geek scene in Philly. I was welcomed warmly as I began to log my workout progress. In just a week, seeing miles rack up from runs and rides is pretty cool. I’ve embedded a Daily Mile widget in my blog sidebar too, more for tracking those miles than anything else.
Other relative stats, like “donuts burned” and “times around the world” are pretty exciting…while the numbers are low now they are the ones I’m kinda excited to see climb.
I won’t be consistently blogging about my progress, though I will be keeping all of my records public on Lose It or Lose It and Daily Mile, etc.
Thanks to all of my friends, especially Roz Duffy and Randy Schmidt, for the encouragement, support, and inspiration to cap off my year of refocusing on me in a really important and positive way.
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Dangerouslyawesome/~3/VMLZtRWszjU/
Last week, Cadu de Castro Alves of Bees Office in Rio de Janeiro (!!!) noticed that it was nearly the 5 year anniversary of when Brad Neuberg announced coworking at The Spiral Muse in San Francisco.
My how we’ve grown since then. Thanks go out to Brad for not only trying something, but then sharing. He took his idea and what he’d learned, and shared it. And so it began.
Other than some Tweeting, I unfortunately didn’t get to do much to celebrate this year, but plan to change that in years to come. That doesn’t mean I didn’t take some time to reflect on what it meant for Brad to recognize and propose a simple solution to a problem that many of us have experienced first hand:
Traditionally, society forces us to choose between working at home for ourselves or working at an office for a company. If we work at a traditional 9 to 5 company job, we get community and structure, but lose freedom and the ability to control our own lives. If we work for ourselves at home, we gain independence but suffer loneliness and bad habits from not being surrounded by a work community.
From Brad’s first writings about coworking, it was clear what this was about:
choice.
Most recently, Coworking Seattle (one of the first, if not the first, regional organization of coworking efforts) wrote a definition that is among the best I’ve seen for coworking:
Coworking is about making the personal choice to work along side other people instead of in isolation.
Look familiar?
It’s on days like this, through ideas like this, that I’m reminded how lucky we are to have people paving the way for us who wish to recognize that we DO have the ability to choose, from where we work to who we work with, and we’re total dummies if we’re not taking advantage of those abilities.
I’ve spent more time involved in coworking than I did in college, and I’m 100% confident that my life has improved more from being involved in this network, this community of people, than anything else I’ve experienced in my 27 years.
I’m thankful for those who I call mentors, colleagues, and friends through this process: Brad Neuberg, Chris Messina, Tara Hunt, Geoff DiMasi, Tony Bacigalupo, Matthew Wettergreen, Jacob Sayles and Susan Evans. This short list is barely representative of the number of people I’ve learned from, though.
Every day, in some ways more enjoyable than others, I learn something on the coworking google group. When I joined, that group was less than 100 people. Today that group is subscribed to by over 2700 people from around the globe.
And the members of Indy Hall, who saw their own story and vision in mine, and decided to join us on this crazy ride. From one crazy voice to over 100, the stories told by Indy Hall members about this time in our lives are stories to be cherished, as I’m confident we’re doing something unique, remarkable, special, and amazing.
And like Brad, we’ll continue to share. Our successes, our failures, our ideas, our opinions, and our insights.
On this August 9th, and every August 9th from here on out, I look forward to reflecting and remembering the history of where one of the most important groups of people in my life came from.
Thanks Brad. Thanks Everyone.
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Dangerouslyawesome/~3/y9etZOkoiwU/
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Dangerouslyawesome/~3/ipoHpNPJl80/
The power of coworking is not in the facilities, because those elements are commodities and have forever decreasing value. Scaling facility up is relatively easy…you can just throw more money at it. And despite how you might feel about funding your efforts, money is and will always be the easy part.
Culture, on the other hand – which is the glue of what holds a strong coworking community together – is difficult. Especially through fast growth, which is often desired to help achieve an end like scaling the space and the facility.
Culture is composed of norms, which can be established by anyone within that culture. They can be dictated – which tends to be the way offices are run. In coworking, something different can happen.
One of the things that fascinates me about coworking spaces is that we have the ability to provide a workspace, a context that most people are relatively familiar with, and actually REMOVE the rules for how it is “supposed” to work.
Ask yourself, “What happens in an office where nobody tells the workers how to act? How to interact? What to do? Where to go? Who to talk to?”.
There’s some chaos, but chaos is good.
I learned to Embrace the Chaos from early coworking founders like Chris Messina and Tara Hunt. Our human tendencies are to control chaos, and put things in order. By avoiding that, and allowing order to emerge a bit more organically, new behavioral patterns emerge. These patterns, in the context of coworking, are the things that our members love and subsequently, the things that the press likes to write about: collaboration & work exchange. Increased charity and giving. Better support for local industries. Happier people. Increased business foundation. Camaraderie and friendship. We’re building blank canvases for work patterns to emerge from, and I think that the work patterns that exist when nobody told them to are the most interesting and the most sustainable to practice.
Those elements don’t truly emerge until someone gets out of their way and simply lets them. Telling people to collaborate is a lousy way to have it happen, because it’s always dependent on you telling them. Creating opportunities for people to discover collaboration on their own terms creates a rolling effect that’s difficult if not impossible to stop once it starts.
I like to look at coworking and ask:
Are you contributing to the development of an ecosystem – one dependent on the health of its host – or a community – a self sustaining organism that while it may have a figurehead, could live on in other capacities without you?
All of that said…the question at hand is: what are the challenges to growing/scaling, and how do you overcome them?
The interesting thing is that these same elements that provide a very strong cultural base for a coworking community can also pose challenges as you grow. But the results of overcoming those challenges are richer than if the barriers weren’t there to overcome in the first place.
Consider this essay by Michale Lopp (of Rands in Repose). In it, he talks about a pickup hockey game played by Netscape employees every weekend for 14 years. A game with only 3 simple rules. Unwritten rules, but understood rules.
Rather than referee every game and start by reminding everyone of the rules, they just played. If someone new joined the game, and disobeyed one of the rules, it was up to one of the other players to let them know the rules, and then they could play on.
That is, until, a larger group with its own critical mass came in all at once. In one game, more arguments and fights, occurred than ever had in the history of the game.
Its not because that group was unnecessarily feisty, but because it’s much harder to grow a group that’s built on cultural norms – like the rules of the pickup game or the interactions of a coworking space – when lots of new people show up at once.
So what do we have at our disposal within our various coworking communities?
First, we have our membership. Existing membership is the foundation of your culture, not you. If they want something to change, its best to embrace the chaos and let it change, for the better. Making sure that existing members are having opportunities to build strong relationships is key, because they’ll be there to defend the cultural norms important to them.
On the Coworking Google Group, some people have made recent mention of “Town Hall” meetings and members lunches. These are excellent for building relationships because they allow coworkers to interact with each other with the context of membership but without the context of work. That means they are not worried about interrupting or otherwise inconveniencing each other.
Every time Indy Hall has deviated from a focus on helping create these contexts, and at the same time experienced a growth spurt in membership, we have had issues. Some can be small, like a noticeable increase in people who come in, put on their headphones, work all day without talking to anyone, and then going home. Others can be large, like the introduction of a disruptive member. Truly toxic things, like poorly ending collaborations and even theft, are more likely to occur when people aren’t on the same page with what to expect from one another.
If you don’t know what “normal” looks like in a given culture, how are you supposed to know if something is wrong?
When the community grows quickly but nobody is there to introduce the newbs to the cultural norms, the “hum” of a coworking space – the thing that gets most people excited but they can’t quite put their finger on – tends to decrease in volume. I’ve seen it repeatedly times, and not just at Indy Hall. I’ve seen it happen on the coworking e-mail list as it has grown from less than 100 people to over 2500.
Consider your coworking efforts like mini-societies, and consider the challenges of scaling ANY society when looking for solutions.
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Dangerouslyawesome/~3/05OLBZymurM/
In the last 4 years, I’ve come up with some pretty wacky ideas for how to get IndyHall into the brains of more people and, more importantly, the coworking concept into the mindshare of the ever-changing workforce.
I’ve noticed a relatively typical trend in that the kind folks who operate places where coworking takes place seem to struggle with how to market it and build a sustainable operation to support it.
I’ve been guilty of parroting the “build the community first” as the solution to nearly every problem that brand new coworking spaces encounter. It’s not a silver bullet, and it’s not meant to be. What it does is put the person who’s in the leadership role in the right state of mind – that of a leader and not just a proprietor - of the community space they’re about to attempt to operate. Being in that state of mind puts you in the most advantageous place to solve the typical, un-special problems that you’re bound to come across. That makes solving the weird, hard problems your focus. And if you give it enough time, they will show up.
But that’s not the point of this post. Lets say you’re doing a great job of developing the community before you’ve even got a space, and now you want to start converting those people to paying members so you can support a home for them to work in.
Freemium doesn’t work with coworking.
Free trials are an epidemic with new coworking entities.
It seems to make some sense. Coworking is a new concept, so charging a new member-potential to try something new raises the barrier far too high for them to walk in the door at all.
Except now you’ve created a new problem for yourself. That member-potential has significantly diminished value associated with what you just provided them. How are you supposed to charge them for the same thing the next time they come in?
In most cases, free coworking is being offered by prepubescent coworking spaces. Those coworking spaces lack the critical mass of smart, interesting, creative people that represent the primary attraction for most of the members they don’t have yet. Once you have that, it’s easier to diminish the value a little bit because you’re starting from a much higher offering of value.
But if your goal is to get people in the door that will stick around and help you sustain the business that will operate their clubhouse, you’ve gotta charge from day 1.
Case Study – The Free Trial of Doom
I got a panicked email from a coworking space owner who I’ve corresponded with a fair amount in the past, and I have full confidence is in this for all of the right reasons. The space was only a few months old, but she felt her runway shortening and was concerned about their member acquisition rates. 8 members had joined in 3 months (which, by the way, isn’t that awful when opening a space with 0 members). She was doing all of the things I typically prescribe: get out there and meet your potentials. Find ways to support them. Get them involved. Here was an excerpt from the email:
Many come and try out the space (we offer a one week free trial) but they dont come back, sometimes even after the first day. They all say they love it, the vibe is great, etc., but wtf. For the life of me, I don’t get it. We follow up, send emails, and even anonymous surveys to figure out what we are doing wrong, and people usually respond with either “it’s too far” or, “I absolutely love your space, and will sign up soon.” Soon. Soon doesn’t come soon enough. Rent in our area is high, and even though we got an AWESOME deal on our rent, we aren’t anywhere near break even.
How many times I’ve heard this isn’t a number I care to count, and it breaks my heart.
We offer a one week free trial. Kiss of death.
My response included the following:
A one week free trial is WAY too much. In fact, I don’t believe in free trials at all. You’re devaluing your Workspace before people even walk in the door by making it free. Don’t be afraid to exchange money for goods and services. It’s the only hard rule of business You’re using free space as a “bell and/or whistle” to get people in the door, but it gives them zero reason to stick around. If you can’t get them hooked in an hour, you’re not going to get them hooked in a week.
She took my response to heart and immediately made some changes. Among them was dropping the free week trial.
A few weeks later, I got a follow up:
…over the past week and a half, we’ve gotten 13 new members!!!! I guess I may have spoke to soon… not to mention that a one day trial as opposed to one week has made a HUGE difference! People come in, love it, and sign up!
In 10 days she had more than doubled (nearly tripled) membership growth that had previously taken almost 10x that long to achieve.
These specific results are admittedly anecdotal, and your milage may vary, but this isn’t the first time I’ve seen this sort of course correction.
I also included:
There’s nothing [inherently] sticky about that onboard process that you described. Show up … for free, and then a wishy-washy “I’ll sign up when its right for me”.
Not only does charging from day one give us the ability to maintain value from the moment the member-potential walks in the door, but it provides us with an extremely effective conversion point. It works like this.
Your first day is $25. But if you decide to sign up that day, we’ll happily apply that $25 towards whatever level of membership you’re interested in!
Which works nicely when our basic membership is $25, the same price as our drop in day. So you essentially get 2 days for the price of one just for signing up, and then your 2nd day lets you explore Indy Hall as a member, rather than a drop-in.
Also, because we have the aforementioned critical mass of smart, interesting, creative people, the rate that drop-ins sign up for ANY level is extremely high. We convert our paying drop-ins at a rate of 2:1. That is, for every TWO people who drop in, ONE of them typically joins at some level of membership. At our spring 2010 drop-in rates, that’s a relatively consistent 10 new members a month, and the numbers only climb as our presence grows in our region.
Other things to consider
Not charging for drop-ins (who contribute relatively less) for the access to space that you charge to members (who contribute relatively more) is disrespectful to the people who pay their hard earned money and contribute
What kind of people continually use something that provides value and are OKAY with not paying for it? Now compare that with people who happily pay for the things that make their lives better. Who would you rather spend your time doing business next to?
So free is bad?
Absolutely not. But it’s unwise in an early stage business to give ANYTHING away that you wouldn’t otherwise charge for. Instead, give away things that cost you nothing!
Run free events and make them awesome and open to anyone. Work with local businesses as sponsors. Find a local bar or restaurant and make them your watering hole. They’ll appreciate you consistently bringing them customers, and you’ll love having a place you can walk into and have a good chance of bumping into someone you know.
Partner with other local organizations and cross promote ideas, events, and opportunities when your core values align. Don’t be a logo slut: make sure partnerships are mutually beneficial, and you’re giving with purpose.
Share knowledge. Collective knowledge is at the core of coworking and a great way to get people in the mindset of sharing is to lead by example. What have you learned that you can give away and will be interesting and of value to your member-potentials. Who else has interesting valuable things to share, and what formats can you help provide for sharing that?
Start or support a local Jelly! Many have said that Jelly is a gateway drug to coworking, but I’ve discouraged coworking spaces from hosting Jelly in their spaces for all of the reasons I’ve outlined in this piece. Instead, participate in a local Jelly as members of your coworking space and go with the intent to meet people, not with the intent to recruit. Help a Jelly get started, but I wouldn’t run your own. Heck, even send the people who don’t want to pay for your membership to a Jelly as a free coworking alternative. Let them get hooked on a free version of coworking…there’s a great chance they may end up back on your doorstep wanting “Jelly Everyday” and decide to try out that membership after all.
P.S. Hey Alex, what about offering TOTALLY free coworking all day, every day?
That’s another post, another day.
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Dangerouslyawesome/~3/5CPJl5auIAg/
One of the guys I work with, Jon, just bought his dad an iPad. His dad isn’t tech savvy, to the point that he didn’t use his home computer much any more, so when he asked for an iPad his son was perplexed but excited.
Jon shared an email with me that his dad sent him after spending about 20 minutes with the iPad. I was amazed at some of the comments enough that I had to jot them down, and some of the ideas and questions they raised.
Dadquote #1: I assume APPS, means applications. Never seen it explained anywhere.
The concept of “Apps” seems very easily adopted. I wonder why that is?
Dadquote #2: Did not see where you get into the web
The mail app is called “Mail”. The Photo app is called “Photos”. The Calendar app is called “Calendar”. Etc.
In comparison, “Safari” is only relatively obvious to a Mac user as a web browser, or “The Internet” as my mom calls it. Why wouldn’t Apple call their internet app “Internet”?
Dadquote #3: as not sure how to shut it off…just turn it off with the same button at the top that I used to turn it on…wasn’t sure if there was a certain procedure to get out of things so I don’t lock things up.
Ah, the mark of a PC user. “I have to turn this thing off a certain way or else it breaks” is something that I don’t miss from my days of building and repairing PCs. I thought it was particularly interesting that he actually intuited the correct answer, and then based on past experiences, thought to himself, “no, there must be a harder procedure I have to go through to do it right”.
Dadquote #4: Once I have it in front of me other things may come to me.
He’s already committed to exploring the product more, one of the greatest achievements that I think any product designer can aspire to. The difference between that and the alternative approach to new technology – being afraid or intimidated, or worse, frustrated – is remarkable.
If the thing you’re making is ever meant to be used by anybody but you, there are some great lessons in these dadquotes that I’d encourage you to consider.
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Dangerouslyawesome/~3/lbYbdLcX9nk/
Working with the team at Red Tettemer has been about seeing the “little things”.
Today I decided to add one of my own little things by replacing the typical Lorum Ipsum that we splatter across our web pages before we get content for them with something a little more…infectious. I mean entertaining. I mean fun.
Since we use Textmate whenever we’re not elbows deep in Flex Builder, it seemed like a quick and obvious place to start, creating a Textmate Bundle that adds the Tab Trigger for the word “ipsum”.
Simply download and install this bundle, which I’ve decided to name BetterIpsum, and try it for yourself. Never more be plagued by barely pronounceable latin garble, and instad, get a tune in your head that you won’t be able to get out.
I’m thinking about creating a TextExpander version of this to make it less IDE dependent, but only if people are having as much fun with this plugin as we are at Red. And if there’s a way to do this for Photoshop (macros, I suppose?), I know our designers would love it as well.
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Dangerouslyawesome/~3/aO9JrLyJEJc/
Over the weekend, and late into Sunday night, I was scrambling to get some software put together to host ~50 people over the next 12 weeks. More on why I was scrambling another time.
Today, I want to take you on a trip. Hold on.
Rewind.
Late last year, Amy Hoy and I decided that it was long time that we sit down and actually do something together. Despite having been friends for a number of years, having supported and unstuck each other numerous times, and even working in close proximity, we hadn’t really worked together.
Amy had a landslide 2009. Setting the personal goal to “quit consulting” and live on revenue from products and services, and she nearly made it. No small feat, but she also decided to share her story on a 3 hour conference call back in December.
The feedback after her conference call from the participants was “we want more” on how to hustle our way to independence. Quite a call to action.
While visiting Amy and Thomas over new years, we postulated how we might finally work together, taking the call of “we want more” and blending it with my year of Unstick.me sessions, and came up with a course.
Rewind.
I’m a college dropout. I don’t hide this fact, I’m not proud nor ashamed. It was a decision, and I stand by the fact that I made the right one. College wasn’t the right fit for me, mostly because I had different aspirations. I didn’t want a job, I wanted to work. I didn’t believe in the business theories that were being taught. I couldn’t stand 10+ year old technology courses. I couldn’t handle apathetic professors (and misdirected students). I couldn’t operate in the bureaucracy. I didn’t understand theory without application and context. I valued fun over anything else.
Drexel University just wasn’t the place for me at the time.
That said, I’ve always had a special place in my heart for education. Mostly, alternatives.
See, I love to learn. And I’m lucky as a duck that I’ve got a bunch of crazy-smart friends, mentors, and peers to learn from.
Fast forward.
I’ve long believed that there’s a better way to educate than piling ideas on a person, than filling a person with facts. One of my best friends in the world and one of the smartest dudes I know, Matthew, is an actual professor at Rice University. At SXSW, he expressed concern that the world was quickly filling with people who knew ABOUT a lot of things, but didn’t know a lot of things. Information vs. Knowledge. The Wikipedia generation, if you will.
I have to agree with the sentiment.
A generation of people who are full of good ideas, but lack the skill to synthesize, to make the rubber meet the road.
That skill is teachable, though.
Creating these people is the job of education, formal or otherwise.
Rewind.
So in Vienna, Amy and I talked about what specific powers of synthesis we might be able to help people with. We’d both launched a number of products, services, efforts, etc over the years prior, and found ourselves often mentoring first time “shippers” on getting from an idea to an actual viable product worth their time creating. And the “Zero to Launch” course was born.
Covering the walls of their home office in Vienna, Amy and I storyboarded out a number of our experiences, and the lessons we’d learned. We crafted the story arc, the consistencies across experiences, that helped us succeed. We refreshed our notes on what had inspired us. On how and what we’d learned.
And we put together the a 12 week course to help others do the same.
The Pragmatic & Profitable Approach to Ideas (like therapy for your dreams)
Dig Deep: Doing the Research (get real, learn what ideas to steal)
Your Idea’s Darwin Test (will it get kicked off the island, aka go broke?)
Define Your Shippability (how to determine your minimum viable product)
Create your Roadmap (without one, how could you drive forward?)
Look for Shortcuts (they always pay off)
Carve out Your Audience (do it now!)
The Price is Wrong (and how to make it right)
Maintaining Momentum (with a “day job”; without strangling yourself)
Talking about Yourself (you gotta do it)
Keep Your Cool (again with the no strangling)
Your First Launch (how to run it, & the aftermath)
Fast forward.
This week, we kicked off that course with just over 50 students from around the world. We’re conducting the course 100% virtually, with a composite of weekly lessons, workbooks, reviews, conference calls, and forum discussions. Already, its clear that we have an incredible 12 weeks ahead of us, and I’m beyond excited to be involved in education again.
The Future
It would be arrogant of me to think that what we’re doing is the future of higher education. But I think what we’re doing is a part of it, not replacing it.
Thinking back to University of the Arts’ President Sean Buffington’s Ignite Presentation about making (art)work that matters and “what does it mean to educate an artist”. Sean theorizes that there’s a need for education to update itself to for the medium it is attempting to teach. Most importantly, Sean suggests that you can equip students with the ability to learn for themselves.
That’s the entire approach to helping the students taking Amy and my Year of Hustle: Zero to Launch course: guiding our class towards the rubber meeting the road, with the outcome being not another information-saturated member of society, but instead, a knowledgeable and empowered contributor to society, and hopefully, a life of success.
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Dangerouslyawesome/~3/sFCEIbfg8lk/
Hat tip http://altreport.hipsterrunoff.com/2010/03/some-sxsw-venue-creates-a-snarky-sign-2-repel-bloggers.html via @natasha
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Dangerouslyawesome/~3/_Sc1ztLxO38/
For the last few months, I’ve been quietly been working on a new project. Actually, I’ve been working on the contents of the project for over 3 years now, but recently, I’ve been plugging it into a new framework.
Back in the fall, I was approached by David Hauser from Grasshopper with interest in helping him set up a new coworking space in Boston. David’s whole “empowering entrepreneurs to change the world” value statement for Grasshopper is clear alignment with coworking, far beyond the business proposition. Furthermore, on a very personal note, he might be the only person I’ve met in business who harps on core values as an operating model more than me.
I dig that.
David and I quickly made it past the superficial conversations about coworking spaces and got to talking about community, people, empowerment, higher purpose, and the big questions like “why” we do things the way we do them at IndyHall. David’s eyes went wide and I watched him “get it”. He said, “more people need to hear this, why haven’t you written it down?”
Fact is, I have written it down. Most of it, in fact. The problem was that it was all over the place. Blog posts on this site as well as IndyHall.org. Literally hundreds of posts to the Coworking Google Group. But no cohesive story arc unless you got me in a room and put a beer in my hand.
So we decided that it was valuable enough for David to get behind the project, not just for himself, but with the goal to create something that would help many others kick ass. The end result of the project be something with larger value.
And so, I began writing The Coworking Book.
Now before I go on to post the excerpt, I’m sure you’re asking,
“But what about everybody else that’s written about their experiences? Who the hell are you, one guy, to tell this story by yourself?”
If you’re not asking that question, you should be, because I asked myself the question long and hard before deciding how this project would take form.
Instead of thinking I could take on that task, I instead set out to write the framework. That’s it. I’m building a framework that we can hang ideas from, and to guide people in to coworking from whatever vantage point they are coming from.
I’m writing what I hope is a cohesive story arc that makes the content interesting, valuable, and somewhat linear. And I’m telling it from a single lens: my own.
That’s version 0.1. The alpha. My version. That’s what I’m releasing this week at SXSWi. I’m going to be taking time out of my schedule while in Austin to put the finishing touches on the work I’ve done so far, and to follow my own advice - just effing ship.
Beyond alpha
My plans for next steps are to begin something that begins to look like the communal composition of some of the oldest texts in history. I’ve decided that within the margins of each paragraph of each chapter of version 0.1, I’m inviting people to tell their stories.
Through their own lense.
There are going to be holes that need filling in. I need you to patch them. There are going to be disagreements on points of execution. We need to discuss them.
But in the framework I’ve constructed, there are always decision-guiding tools to make resolving disagreements simpler and to remove ego, including mine, from the end product.
All of the discussion that goes on in the margins will then be folded in to the primary text with some guidance and support of others. What others? My hope is that some people step up from the margins and want to become co-curators.
Addendum: For the coders in the room, think of the main text as the trunk, the commentary as patch submissions/pull requests, and the curators as “core team”. And lets not forget the ever growing user base that ultimately will want to use this tool because it helps them kick ass.
The tool we’ll be using to collaborate is actually built on top of Wordpress, it’s called Digress.it. It’s a plugin + a theme, and while it’s not perfect, it’s pretty badass. This sort of interface was largely inspired by the DjangoBook, the official book for the Django Project, a framework for the programming language Python. What’s important to me is that people can comment with accountability and attribution on every post AND every paragraph individually, and this tool gives exactly that.
On Curation
Dave Troy has been talking about a “curatorial economy” on his blog, and its an idea that I like. Curatorial is not inherently exclusionary. It does, however, push for people to step up to plate and act. The ones who are considered are the ones who act. It’s not the same as a “do-ocracy”, where those who do get to make the decisions. This is about guiding but not imposing.
Curation is about making a choice, but with shared and articulated vision.
And that is my hope for the final product of The Coworking Book. That through a number of iterations, and communal curation, the work product that emerges is a clear, high value, extremely accessible utility for people interested in the past, present, and future of work.
Lots of commas in that last sentence. Sorry about that.
About the content
This part is important: forever, each version of the text, and the related comments and discussions in the margin, will remain online for free. Searchable. With 100% attribution.
At some point, we’ll need to “release”. Versions will each have a roadmap, with a set of goals that it needs to accomplish. When we achieve those goals, the book will be released.
When we reach a 1.0 version, we’ll only have a snapshot. It won’t be the bible, because it will continue to evolve. But we’ll have a snapshot, something that’s missing from the history books for our movement and our community.
The important part is this: we don’t stop at version 1.0. We don’t ever stop. We keep telling this story, and evolving the text. The growth and change in the sphere of coworking has changed immensely in only 3 years, and the change is accelerating. Lets snapshot things now so we can continue to measure that growth moving forward.
And without further adieu, I present you with an excerpt from the chapter “Finding your Coworkers”.
FIGHT CLUB
If you’ve seen the movie “Fight Club”, the main character who’s known as “Jack” is a hypochondriac who attends self help groups to feel better about himself. Demented and selfish intentions aside, something interesting happens to Jack: he meets Marla Singer, another self-help group junkie. In order to not appear awkward in front of their group members, they decide to split up the nights.
There’s a good chance you’re going to find a similar situation along your journey of community exploration. Except this time, this works to your advantage instead of being a detractor like in Jack and Marla’s relationship.
When you start recognizing people at multiple events, or on multiple lists…you’ve found another connector.
Connectors are the most important people in any community building effort because they are catalysts for speeding up your process. If a person is already dedicated enough to be participating in multiple events and groups, it’s not a reach to think they might want to team up with you to more efficiently map the topography of events and activities going on. They might even be able to help find more connectors.
These connectors tend to also make great leaders, and are critical to the mobilization efforts you’ll be embarking on very soon.
Over time, you will find yourself building a map of the existing communities and the active pieces of your region. Coworking can augment many of them, and they can all provide channels for potential members for your space.
More mature communities may already have these maps established, but that doesn’t mean you can’t go through this process on your own. You may uncover something that hasn’t received as much exposure as it deserves and it will go on to be one of your greatest assets once you open a space.
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Dangerouslyawesome/~3/CQpS_tVkacM/
Hijacked shamelessly from The Middle Finger Project here in Philadelphia, here are Ashley Ambrige’s guidelines for living life instead of just living a life. It goes without saying that I believe in and adhere to all of these, with or without Ashley’s say-so.
True living is more than just keeping your heart beating and a roof over your head. Don’t fool yourself into thinking that is “just how life goes.” There’s way more possibilities, and, yes, IT IS WORTH GOING AFTER. Be daring.
Stop blowing yourself off; we get so upset when others blow off our ideas and desires, but we have no problem doing it to ourselves. Take your ideas, feelings, wants, wishes, yearns & urges seriously–those are your only true guide. Other people have no idea what’s best for you, so stop seeking their validation. Do what you need to do for you. Be confident.
Stop doing everything by the book. It’s time to start drafting your own revised edition. Rules don’t always exist in the name of the greatest good; more often than not, they exist because someone wants to establish or maintain power. And that’s just not a good enough reason. Be inquisitive.
Life is a series of choices. You choose every single direction that your life takes. Use it to your advantage. Be deliberate.
There will be people out there who won’t support what you’re doing. Who cares. Trust yourself more, trust others less. That includes significant others. Be brave.
Figure out what you value, and make the necessary changes to align your life with those values. If you value time more than money, stop working 60 hour work weeks. The only way you’ll get more time, is by doing less. It’s simple math. Be introspective.
Speaking of money, IT ISN’T AS IMPORTANT AS WE’RE TAUGHT TO THINK IT IS. Money comes, and money goes, and it provides little value itself until you actually exchange it for something that is valuable to you. So, ask yourself that question. What do you value? That’s where the majority of the money you spend should be going. Be prudent.
Having good intentions doesn’t yield results. Get off your ass and make it happen. Be zealous.
Life isn’t meant to be taken so seriously. In the scheme of things, if you’re going to be late to work, it doesn’t really matter. If you don’t get an A, it doesn’t really matter. If you’re proven wrong about something, it doesn’t really matter. If your house isn’t as nice as your best friend’s, it doesn’t really matter. Relax, and enjoy the ride. Think big picture, not details. Will this matter in 100 years? Be panoramic.
The world is not judging you as much as you think they are. Most people are too wrapped up in themselves to even notice what you’re doing. Drop the pride and have a little fun. Be lighthearted.
Perhaps one of the greatest goals we can seek for ourselves is exhilaration. Are you exhilarated by your life? Be stimulated.
When making decisions, always ask what’s more important. Thinking about canceling on an invitation to a friend’s baby shower or birthday party because you have too much work to do? Get your head out of your ass. Your friend is more important; work can always be done later. Nothing is that urgent. Relationships, however, are your foundation and you’d be lost without other human connections, so value them. And show it. Be thoughtful.
You don’t just need to love yourself; you need to respect yourself. You’ll garner that respect by accomplishing things you’ve set out to do. Be relentless.
Being content with your life and being proud to call it yours are two different things. Strive for the latter. Be courageous.
Last but not least, wine should be drank with meals. Preferably Argentinian Malbec. It’s freaking delicious. Be delighted.
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Dangerouslyawesome/~3/k2VDTp773Jk/
This isn’t a new trick, but since it didn’t occur to me until just now I figured there’s a chance I’m not alone.
You know how much of a pain it is to add all of your Facebook friends to an event or page invite? Facebook seems to have done this on purpose, but nonetheless, all of my friends invite me to random stuff. Really, really random stuff.
Well, it was finally my turn to push all 969 of my facebook friends, regardless of their location, to the page for GigabitPhilly and suggest their fandom. Should be easy, shouldn’t it?
Well, if you drag this link => Annoy All Facebook Friends
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Dangerouslyawesome/~3/8t3yhx8PauM/
Some really good thoughts on Social Capital(ism) and related investment by Roger Ehrenberg came from a panel in NYC sponsored by Philly’s Goodcompany Ventures. Goodcompany CEO Garret Melby, who I enjoyed meeting after my presentation about organic team building at Entrepreneurs Unplugged back in December and spoke at Ignite earlier this week, also commented.
The full post is worth reading, but two quotes stood out to me:
…It’s an issue of how you define capital and return.
My hypothesis is that we need a whole new regime for quantifying the value of businesses that have goals other than strictly financial profit. We need hard numbers – real metrics – to demonstrate the value of initiatives that create value for society beyond the payment of staff and the generation of profits for shareholders.
But the “R” [in ROI] – the return – isn’t simply financial profit: it’s economic utility, real benefits being enjoyed by society.
This leads me to something else that I always find hard to articulate: the ROI of IndyHall, or even coworking in general.
We’ve been running IndyHall for nearly 3 years as a business for a reason, and a profitable one at that. But the metrics for ROI aren’t salient, since most of the investment has been in human, knowledge, and time capital, and the return doesn’t show up on our balance sheet. As such, Geoff and I don’t take a draw, at least not in terms of cash…because that’s not what’s we’ve invested. If there was a balance sheet for the social capital we’ve invested and seen in return, though, and we had metrics for it, we’d be able to far better express and share what we’ve accomplished.
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Dangerouslyawesome/~3/eatf-y3iArk/
A couple of weeks back, one of my clients sent me to the Engage Expo and Toy Conference in NYC to study some aspects of the online virtual world industry. I admittedly knew very little, both about the technology and the industry, but I was excited about attending a conference where it’s not the same people I always see talking about the same things they always talk about to the same people who are always listening.
Among the things that really interested me was how the toy industry runs on a very interesting set of pattern metrics called “play patterns”. In short, there are massive amounts of research put into slicing and dicing demographics into popular patterns for engagement: what kinds of things do people (not just kids) like to do, what things have them come back often (addicting) or play for long periods of time (immersive). Knowing this information and who you’re targeting helps de-risk toy design. I saw some really interesting correlations to this and marketing, but that’s for another time.
One particular panel stuck out in my notes, where moderator Nicole Lazzaro showed slides and some related theses that there were 4 keys to “fun”.
From these patterns, the elements that jumped out to me as the most concise were:
Hard Fun – Reward lies in challenge and mastery
Easy Fun – Reward lies in expressions of creativity and discovery
People Fun – Reward lies in social, peer to peer interactions
Serious Fun – Reward lies in creating value
Nicole theorizes, and goes on to explain and illustrate, how balancing these keys increases the likelihood that games are popular, fun, and ultimately create experiences worth sharing. As I’ve pointed out before, experiences worth sharing are most crucial component for effective word of mouth marketing.
Motivators
The first thing that stuck out to me was that these four keys are all rewards, and all rewards based on intrinsic motivators. For those who saw my recent Ignite Philly presentation, I brought up the notion that intrinsic motivators are extraordinary, and often overlooked in business and management.
Related, it reminded me a lot of Dan Pink’s thesis from Drive, and his TED talk, of the operators of the “new workforce”, are based in the intrinsic motivation associated with autonomy, mastery, and purpose. Seeing as how I spend far more time looking at the trends of business than of play, I realized…for me (and many others), work is a type of play.
From Nicole’s Four Keys of FUN, I’m proposing the Four Keys to Business.
1) Hard Business
There’s intrinsic reward about overcoming business challenges. This is often a ‘make or break’ attribute of entrepreneurs, business leadership, and good management.
In a recent article in Inc, Omniture founder Josh James talks about highs and lows of building the company and ultimately selling it to Adobe for a buttload of money. One of my favorite quotes from Josh:
There were times when I lay down on the floor at night, close to crying, and said, “I’m done. I can’t make payroll.” Then my wife would come over and kick me and say, “Get up and figure it out.”
One time, I got a customer to prepay us. Another time, I came into the office and said, “Oh, by the way, we’re changing payroll dates.” That bought me 10 days.
That’s hard business. That’s the reward in hard business: overcoming challenges and finding solutions.
2) Easy Business
Some people would argue that there’s no such thing as easy business. Ignoring things like “savvy” and “knack”, but still considering things like “luck”, you find yourself thinking: “How do some people make this look so easy?”. The part that they make look easy is usually an ourward expression of creativity and exploration in our business. Why is this considered “easy”? Because if you’re willing to open your mind up, the sky is the limit. True creativity and exploration means you can sidestep the constraints of reality, even if it is only temporary. Sometimes, though you realize that the constraints you thought were constraints were more in your head than anywhere else.
Easy business is letting your mind wander, but always coming back to reality with whatever you’ve found along the way.
3) People Business
Not everyone is a people person, like Tom. But business success is all about people because, lets face it, businesses are made up of people.
As rewarding as social interaction is in gaming, it is among the most universally gratifying aspects of business. Think about why coworking is a most popular trend; despite what the press wants you to think, it’s not about cheap desks. It’s about the social experience in the workplace. Coworking provides a vehicle for People Business, the social aspects to business, without giving up independence.
I think that more people are interested in People Business than any other kind of business. The evidence for this is in the vast swaths of business networking events. For some, networking is a vehicle for business and for others, business is a vehicle for networking. One isn’t necessarily right, but the more I experience, the more I know I’ve found more effective. Being a good business person has helped me build an extraordinary network, one that I’m not sure I could have built simply by going from networking event to networking event.
4) Serious Business
Often the most discussed attribute of business is still only one part of the four keys, but it needs to be there, and that is creation of value. Since ultimately the purpose of a business is to generate revenue, the most direct path to revenue is the creation of value.
The importance of serious business, creating value, is not just to generate revenue but to find sustainability. If you’re continually creating value, you will always have the resources and the opportunities to fuel the other key aspects of business and achieve them successfully.
The real key is balance
The takeaway here is not to change your focus on business, but instead diversify and balance them. I like metaphors and similes, as many people know, so think about the keys I’ve described as literal keys, allowing you to open new doors. If you’ve only been unlocking one door, opening it, and walking through, you’re not experiencing the success in business you could be if you tried each of the different doors.
Which door will you unlock first?
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Dangerouslyawesome/~3/4vT0dBzPeKc/
Lifted with attribution to Hugh MacLeod. These are his ideas, not mine. I just happend to dig on most of them.
Everything takes three times longer than it should. Especially the money part.
The best way to get approval is not to need it.
People want what they can’t have. In fact, that’s pretty much all they do want.
Once you become an entrepreneur, you find the company of non-entrepreneurs a lot harder to be around. You’ve seen things they haven’t; the wavelengths alter, it’s that simple.
In a world of over-supply and commodification, you are no longer paid to supply. You’re being paid to deliver something else. What that is exactly, is not always obvious.
Word of mouth is the best advertising medium of all. The best word of mouth comes from disrupting markets.
People buy your product because it helps fill in the narrative gaps in their lives.
You can either be cheapest or the best. I know which one I prefer.
Some people think that once they secure venture funding, their problems will be over. Wrong. That’s when your problems REALLY begin.
It’s better to be underfunded than overfunded.
If an average guy in a bar can understand what you do for a living, chances are you’re halfway to becoming a commodity.
It’s easier to turn an ally into a customer than vice versa.
If you’re happy in your career before the age of thirty, you’re probably doing something wrong. Heck, if you’re happy in your career before the age of seventy, you’re probably doing something wrong.
Smart, young, artistic people are always asking me which is a better career path, “Creativity” or “Money”. I always answer that it doesn’t matter. What matters is “Effective” and/or “Ineffective”.
Write the following on a piece of paper, have it framed, and stick it on your office wall: “Have you hugged your customer today?”
People will always, always be in the market for a story that resonates with them. Your product will either have this quality or it won’t. If your product fails this test, quit your job and go find something else. Just making the product incrementally cheaper or better won’t help you.
Products are idea amplifiers. The molecules and/or bytes are secondary.
People remember the quality long after they’ve forgotten the price. Unless you try to rip them off.
Markets serve entrepreneurs better if the latter can keep the former undersupplied. Oversupply is the kiss of death.
I personally know a former CEO who, once he attained control of the company, ran an EXTREMELY profitable business into the ground in less than two years. From a market cap of $100 million to ZERO, just like that. Why? Short answer: He loved being “The” CEO, but he didn’t much care for being “a” CEO.
In terms of becoming an entrepreneur, probably the most useful thing I learned in the last twenty years was how to enjoy my own company for long stretches of time.
One successful entrepreneur I know well has a wonderful quality, namely that he never, ever compares himself to other people. He just does his own thing, which actually serves him rather well. Just because his competitor has bought himself a bigger motor boat, doesn’t mean he feels the need have a bigger motor boat. This quality helps him to build his business the way he sees fit, not the way the motor boat people see fit.
Running a startup is full of extreme ups and downs. Which is why so many successful and happy entrepreneurs I know lead such normal, stable, unglamorous, “boring”, family-centered lives. Somehow they need the latter in order to balance out the former. Extra-curricular drama looks great in the tabloids, but that’s all it’s ultimately good for.
MBAs are conditioned to use their brains in much the same way as sex workers are conditioned to use their genitals. Nice work if you can get it.
Bill Gates may have a million times more money than me, but he isn’t going to live a million times longer than me, watch a million times more sunsets than me, make love to a million times more women than me, drink a million times more fine wines than me, listen to a million times more Beethoven String Quartets than me, nor sire a million times more children than me. Human beings don’t scale.
F. Scott Fitzgerald once wrote, “There are no second acts in American lives.” F. Scott was a drunkard and a fool.
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Dangerouslyawesome/~3/bd7NtiMEG48/
I’m a heavy Gmail user, with 6 (soon to be 7) separate Gmail and Google Apps accounts. On my Macbook, I actually IMAP in to all of the business accounts using Mail.app for one reason: cross-account search. For my personal account, though, I’m extremely reliant on Gmail’s web interface. I’ve used Mailplane in the past, and really loved it…with the exception of the inability to do cross-domain search. I use that daily.
On the mobile, there’s no option for cross-account searching. Mobile Mail.app gives me some native functionality and speed, but without cross-account searching, I’d much prefer to use Gmail’s mobile web app. HTML5 support in recent releases has made it faster, easier to use, and hands down one of the best mobile apps on the internet. I used Mobile Mail to connect to my Gmail accounts over IMAP because having multiple bookmarks was clunky no matter how I configured it, but I was always looking for something better.
In all cases I use IMAP because it keeps accounts in sync; changes made on the computer, the web, and the iPhone are all synchronized via IMAP.
I never used Push for my email because, well, I get a lot of it. I rely on Push for contact and calendar updates, but for email…if I haven’t checked my mail in 10 minutes, I can be sure that there’s something new in there.
Worse are unread counts. I’m compulsive about unread accounts. Mail, RSS feeds, Campfire, whatever it is…I hate having things unread. It’s a bad behavior, because I treat unread counts like to-dos, and in all of the scenarios where unread counts keep me on my toes, they are essentially to-do lists that OTHER people can put things on to. I’m already busy, I don’t need someone else to put more things on my to-do list.
The biggest loss in using Mobile Mail.app is tags, something that I do use pretty extensively. I’ve learned to get around it in Mail.app, which has better drag and drop support for moving things into folders that represent tags over IMAP. Mobile Mail.app was just clunky, and I resolved to not do that interaction on the go unless I had to.
I know I’m not describing everyone, but I am describing a lot of people. And as more corporations move their mail infrastructures away from Exchange and into Hosted Google Apps accounts, the group with this set of needs grows more and more.
A few weeks back, Dave Martorana (of MultiFirefox, Multiplex, and Two Guys on Beer fame) slung me a prototype of an app he’d been working on at IndyHall. It was called “MultiG”, and was basically an app that did fast account switching between Gmail and Google Apps Gmail accounts. It was rudimentary, but instantly useful for me. He quickly added an “unread” count to the accounts dashboard, but then did something I had never seen in an email client. He added a secondary badge that showed how many messages were actually new. I mean, how many of your unread messages weren’t there the last time you looked.
Think about that for a second. The anxiety of unread counts has finally found its Prozac. All I care about is how many messages are new! In casual conversation, I dubbed this feature “TrueNew”, something that I hope other developers build into their app notifications.
At this point, I was hooked. But Dave wasn’t done.
He’d also whipped up integration with the iPhone’s native address book. I haven’t gone through the process of moving my address book into Google, and again, I have multiple accounts so where would I sync my address book to? Not all of them.
Dave added a button to the chrome of the Gmail browser window in his app that let me pull up my iPhone address book and insert email addresses right into the “To:” field. Sneakily, if I turned on CC or BCC, the exact same feature gave me the choice of which field to put the address in to. Simple, sleek, lovely.
Since emails tend to include attachments and links, Dave also put in a handler that made sure that they opened without leaving the app, much like our favorite iPhone Twitter client, Tweetie.
This feature set changed the way I interacted with mail on my iPhone. It made my life better. It made one of the most painful parts of my day, dealing with email, less painful.
We realized that “MultiG” was a lousy name, and Johnny Bilotta (the other Guy on Beer) proposed “Mailroom”.
Sold.
He whipped up a sexy icon, and we were off to the races.
Dave got the app in the hands of a few other testers, worked out some kinks, processed some feedback, and with the hand of myself and co-conspirator Amy Hoy pushing him to “ship as early as possible”, got it into the App Store.
Initial feedback was mixed. People who were like me in terms of email use loved it. People who had different email workflows weren’t as convinced, and many people saw it simply as a “wrapper for Gmail”.
Technically they were right, but they were missing the progressive enhancements because they didn’t augment their workflow. The app wasn’t for everybody, and we knew that. We’d still struck a chord with a good number of our initial users, and got some great feature requests.
2 weeks later, Dave pushed out a significant release to Mailroom. We’d prioritized feedback against our desired feature set, and introduced some new ideas of our own. At the root of the new release was a settings screen.
Badge Icons were a huge part of our 1.0 release feedback. We’d been hesitant to include them by default because, without Push (which I’ll get to in a minute), the counts were largely inaccurate most of the time.
Since we wanted to encourage people to start using TrueNew, we made that the default badge icon if enabled, but gave the user the ability to turn on unread counts instead.
Another major improvement was both workflow and performance related. If you only had one account and used Mailroom, launching the app to the dashboard was wasteful. If you left Mailroom on a given account screen to go to another app, launching put you back at the dashboard again, which was undesirable. We gave users the opportunity to remember the last account used, meaning that as soon as they launched the app they were where they left off last. This immediately made my email experience more efficient.
And as a bonus, Dave gave the user the option to lock screen orientation. Not something I was particularly needy for, but a nice touch nonetheless.
And then there’s that last setting. Cache management. What’s that, you ask?
Well that brings us to the biggest quiet improvement to Mailroom 1.1. The app is now taking advantage of Gmail’s HTML5 offline storage. What does this mean?
It means that every time you visit an account, the entire interface is cached locally and a HTML5 database is created/updated with the email on your screen. Kill your connection (because ATT sucks, because you’re on an airplane, or because you’re in a meeting) and Mailroom is still useful. In fact, you can not only read messages, but you can reply to messages and even COMPOSE NEW MESSAGES without a data connection. As soon as you reconnect, your cached messages are sent while retrieving new mail.
He even made the multi-account dashboard smart, only allowing you to enter accounts that had offline caches from a previous visit.
Yesterday, all of these 1.1 features hit the iPhone App store, and already a large percentage of our users have upgraded. One of them left us a review in the app store that commended us not only on the app and how great its icon is, but on Dave’s responsiveness to feature requests. Big win for us, that’s exactly what we wanted.
We’ve already talked about feature roadmap for 1.2 and 1.3 releases, and it’s very much in the works. The plan is to continue with iterative releases, process feedback, and continue to grow the user base all at once.
Two “issues” continue to arise: the lack of Push badge updates, and the $2.99 price point of the app.
First, push isn’t as “simple” as some of our reviewers seem to think it is. Among the scaling concerns we have about people who move a lot of email. I ran some averages and my smallest inbox gets well over 24,000 emails a year. Those numbers aren’t staggering, but across the customer base we’re targeting, that becomes a LOT of notifications to deliver.
The real technical challenge is more complicated though. In order to accurately update badge icons over push, we’d need to store email addresses and passwords on a server somewhere, and that’s a HUGE security risk that we can’t figure out how to justify. I know I wouldn’t want that info out there, and I have to imagine that our users wouldn’t like it either.
So until we come up with a more elegant way to support push, Dave has built in an app-specific URL handler. Calling mailroom://username@domain.com from another iPhone app or even from a mobile web page launches Mailroom, and even jumps straight to the account if there’s one in mailroom that matches the email address in the URL. We’re hoping that other push services like Boxcar and Prowl can build in support for our app. We know it’s not the best solution, but given the infrastructure for Push provided by Apple, we’re pretty limited in what we can do. We don’t want to deliver a half-assed experience, so until we figure this out, Mailroom will not support push. If anyone has suggestions for how to overcome this hurdle, our ears are WIDE open, so please, sound off in the comments or via email.
And about that price point. Some customers seem to think that $2.99 is too much for an app that’s “just a webkit wrapper”. I won’t do more than touch on the fact that it’s not just a webkit wrapper for the right users and workflows since I’ve already explained here. But why $2.99? First, we’re targeting business users and we know it. They’re more comfortable spending more money on apps because in most cases, businesses equate cost with quality. But more importantly than that is the fact that this is, in most cases, a high-touch app.
99 cents for an app that you’re most likely going to touch at LEAST once an hour, if not several more times in a given day, feels undervalued. Like Tweetie, which I launch several times a day, I feel like I get an immense value for the $2.99 I spent on it.
Fact is, our first release might not have been worth $2.99 for everyone and you could say they got pegged with an “early adopter” tax. But since we’re not charging for the updates, and plan to roll them out often, we don’t think its really a tax at all. It just means that you will continually get more value from the app you already paid for.
We’re confident that future releases in our roadmap will continue to win people over the price point and even the “it’s just a webkit wrapper” theme. Mostly because, we’re listening. We hear what people like, don’t like, and how they are using the app. The more people feed back, the more they help to shape the future of Mailroom.
If you haven’t already, please consider heading to the App store and picking up a copy of Mailroom for your iPhone or iPod Touch. We’d love your feedback, and absolutely appreciate you supporting independent software development. You can also follow us on Twitter for app updates, or send us ideas and feedback there as well.
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Dangerouslyawesome/~3/wlJophr1cyM/
Did you spend your time writing about things worth doing, or doing things worth writing about?
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Dangerouslyawesome/~3/I_d-9wIKmyE/
I was just tipped off to Cobot (thanks to Allen at Centernetworks). In the last 2 years, I’ve evaluated a LOT of options for improving the management of IndyHall. None of them have fit the bill.
All of the issues stemmed back to the same thing that is wrong with most coworking spaces:
the focus of the software is on the desks instead of the people.
Cobot has found a way to strike the balance between functionality that helps a coworking space run (like analytics and billing support), but also paid careful attention to the needs of the people in the space, helping them get signed up, oriented, and solve their own problems so we don’t have to do it for them. They even have a support ticket system for our members when something goes wrong. Even the pricing model is based on the members instead of the desks.
This is smart. Very smart.
Being people oriented is what’s gotten IndyHall as far as it has, and seeing software that supports that is extremely exciting for me.
Even more exciting, is software that is designed to help people get into the mindset of being people-oriented…if they aren’t already. I think that software that helps train people into good habits instead of reinforcing bad ones is great software.
Feature-wise, it’s not quite there for what we need, but I’m going to be paying very close attention to this venture because it’s got the right direction. Our feature needs are what they are, and while I hope they can support them, I’m much more interested in how they continue in the direction they are going where everything else I’ve evaluated in the last 2 years has totally missed the mark.
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Dangerouslyawesome/~3/Snl6SbbZYrQ/
“It’s not hard to make decisions when you know what your values are.” – Roy Disney
Hat tip to Theresa Stigale, one of the partners that owns the building that IndyHall resides in.
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Dangerouslyawesome/~3/Vw18A63QL5k/
Gatekeepers are the leading cause of confusion, dissent, and ultimately their own demise.
Don’t be a gatekeeper.
Instead, find every way possible to help people say “yes” and allow them to execute.
The outcome is world changing.
Permission is a highly underutilized leadership skill. Let’s see if we can’t change that.
Mission #1: Try saying “yes” to something trivial that you would normally say no to, and watch what happens.
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Dangerouslyawesome/~3/62qc3wgV5zM/
Less than one week ago, an unlikely e-mail found it’s way into my inbox. Actually, it found it’s way into 2300+ inboxes connected to the Coworking Google Group, which arguably the most active singular location to find out about coworking, share ideas about coworking, and meet people interested in coworking.
Gerrit Visser, and his partner Bernie DeKoven, had owned coworking.com for over a decade. On it, they shared articles and ideas about collaborative work and play. They periodically interacted with members of the coworking community, including some interviews with Brad Neuberg who kicked off the movement we know coworking as today.
An Opportunity
Gerrit and Bernie had been approached by two commercial entities interested in coworking.com, and decided between them that the community that had gotten behind the term “coworking” should have a shot at buying the domain first, if they were going to sell at all.
A few hours after their post the Google group with the offer, there hadn’t been any public activity so I decided to take some action and e-mail Gerrit for details.
Once I had the sale price and a target to hit, I realized that there wasn’t only no way for me to buy this domain on my own without seriously stressing my bank account, but it would have been the wrong thing to do. Indy Hall benefits from a strong sense of belonging and ownership even from people who do not technically own IndyHall. It’s peoples’ contributions to the making of Indy Hall in every step of our history that binds them to us, and to each other.
Photo by @missrogue
People support what they help create
I e-mailed a list of trusted advisors, peers, and a couple of coworking’s “patron saints” to first see if I was off my rocker, but also to propose a model for raising the funds. That model established a clear cut financial goal, defined methods of contribution, and outlined some simple rewards.
Three basic tiers of contribution, and actionable goals.
Before I could even get the model out of the hands of this short list, almost half of the target had been reached. The concept had been de-risked.
The floodgates open
At 12:26 pm EST on Monday February 15th (my dad’s birthday), I posted a proposition to the google group based on the one that had happened in the smaller dialogue. 5 hours later, I had to put a hold on contributions because we’d actually OVERSHOT our target by a few thousand dollars. Money poured in from around the world.
Quickly, discussion on the Google group changed from excitement to excitement…with a bit of anxiety.
Woah. That went fast. Too fast?
In the hurry, I’d created a sponsorship model that was exclusionary, unless we were to raise funds without any limits. If we went that route, we’d need someone to be responsible for that extra money, and what its spent on. Talk of business entities resulted, co-ops, LLCs, and the like. The pendulum swung between highly inclusionary and highly exclusionary.
Nearly 100 emails were slung over the next 2 days, debating a number of ideas and issues. Among them, three primary ideas/questions began to crystalize.
How to pay for/who owns the domain, long term
What kind of entity could exist
The definition of coworking
The idea of a coworking “entity” or “organization” seems like the right medicine, but I remained unconvinced that we weren’t curing a symptom instead of a disease.
Back to core values
We’ve approached the “what is coworking” conversation before, and at this scale, it’s EXTREMELY difficult to pin down an answer of what is and what isn’t. Instead, we have core values established by Citizen Space in 2006 and adopted and iterated by many other spaces and communities. Those core values are clear and understood, and most importantly, something we can expect people to respect.
I might argue that defining coworking doesn’t help anyone long term, because if the definition isn’t allowed to change, we’re stomping out the fire we intentionally created. That’d be counter to the movement. That’d be counter to the purpose. That’d be outright stupid.
But without arguing the “what” and the “who”, we can come back to the domain coworking.com, and what it represents.
Power of Words
The beautiful thing about the internet is it’s made up of words. Domain names are technically pointers to ideas, and instead of having to remember IP addresses, DNS has allowed us to connect words with ideas.
Coworking.com connected the word “coworking” with the ideas…and the ideals…of the community, without introducing commercial and organizational overhead.
Meanwhile, the discussion (and periodic disagreement) on the Google group continued in a healthy, smart, and fun manner. It was helping people bond, and figure each other out. The armchair psychologist and sociologist in me was grinning as I watched the whole thing unfold. The word coworking truly bring people together in fantastic ways at every turn. How could someone not get excited about this?
Launch
While the community continued to converse, sharing ideas, and inching towards something truly emergent, I continued working with Bernie and Gerrit on the domain transaction. It’s worth noting that THEY were every ounce of awesome to do a deal with. Their commitment to the idea of coworking was genuine, and their continued excitement about the domain being put to this use was clear in every e-mail. Almost 80 messages between the three of us over the course of a couple of days, keeping each other updated at every turn. Not the most efficient deal by any means, but they were responsive, fun, and most importantly: I think they handled things very fairly.
Today, I worked with their technical guy Jasper to transfer the domain and complete the transactions. While waiting for DNS to resolve, I drafted the home page that I described in the initial proposition to the group. I built a single page that introduced the coworking core values, and linked to the leading community properties: the google group where this entire legacy will live forever, the wiki which is full of an extensive knowledge base (despite being incredibly disorganized), and the blog (which could stand some refreshing of its own).
I launched that website at 7pm, February 18th, with the text:
Did you know that there is a global community of people dedicated to the values of Collaboration, Openness,Community, Accessibility, and Sustainability in their workplaces?
It’s called Coworking. And people seem to think it’s swell.
Again, connecting the word to the values. The most important thing we can do right now as the movement grows and more people discover the word and the actions associated with it.
Now what?
Now that the site has been relauched, we can return to the questions raised by the admittedly half-baked funding model. I’ve returned the puck into the court of the community, suggesting we focus on brainstorming a way to redistribute the funding opportunity over a wider base, and creating a more sustainable and inclusive model. I have some ideas of my own, and some suggestions from others, but I don’t have an answer yet. My hope is that the ~20 initial funders are willing to re-draw lines so we can all move forward together gracefully. I’m not naive enough to think that money won’t complicate things. But I’m confident that we will find a lightweight and sustainable model to move forward, providing as many people in the community the benefits of the domain as possible.
My hope is that we can re-orient a bit, and as Chris Messina suggested in an offline e-mail, put the focus on the humans instead of the companies that make up this community. I think that will better represent the purpose of the website, and the voices behind it.
There are infinite possibilities with this domain, and that’s very exciting. We’re starting small, and even the small achievement is huge.
Furthermore, we’ve proven that this community can move mountains together. That may be the most exciting demonstration yet.
Thank you.
For this opportunity to lead, learn, inspire, be inspired, and make some history happen.
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Dangerouslyawesome/~3/tJ7U9y5b8RM/
This post is actually a slightly adjusted version of a comment to this thought-provoking commentary. I thought it was a compartmentalized thought enough that I wanted to post it here for my own record.
The prompt, from Ashley’s essay, is:
“We’re taught what to think, not how to think”.
Therein lies a problem. The education model being experienced today (K-12 & much of higher ed) has been built on top an old process designed to produce two things: workers, and more academics.
If we’re willing to put aside the “more academics” part and focus on the “workers” part of the product of education, we need to consider what’s changed. Through at least one lens, changes exist in workplace and the expectations it has.
Rather than go down the road of “I paid six figures for a college education and now I can’t get a job, EFF YOU America” that many young professionals are doing right now, there’s a huge, huge, HUGE missed opportunity to improve the educational system using mentorship, and refocusing on learning skills instead of just the learning of skills.
When the industries with the highest demand were focused primarily on manufacturing, someone who came out of school not only had basic skills, but had the proficiency to learn some more basic skills in order to accomplish a task. Manufacturing and the industrial workplace provided a very specific, guided ladder to continue learning skills, leading to promotions, opportunities, better pay, hours, so on and so forth.
Times be-a changing.
Now, with another industrial shift fully swinging away from manufacturing (sorry Detroit) and towards knowledge work, the ability to just learn new tasks isn’t enough.
You’re expected to synthesize new, unmarked tasks.
You’re expected to create, not just produce.
If you can’t create, you’re going to have to try a LOT harder to get a great job. And that thesis ignores the increased likelihood that you’ll work for yourself, start a company, be a great leader of your industry or workforce. Maybe more.
And speaking of great leadership, mentorship seems to have been lost almost everywhere with the exception of artisans, and craftsmen (craftspeople, for the gender sensitive). And even there, art schools are stacking students high with skills, and until the last minute, very little REAL WORLD practicum.
Take a look at this video from IgnitePhilly I, where University of the Arts’ President Sean Buffington eloquently explains how as a university administrator he KNOWS that things are fucked up, and even how, but doesn’t know to go about making steps in any new direction.
From IgnitePhilly2 (4 months later), Chris Lehmann of the Science Leadership Acadamy talks about how schools need to stop being run like businesses, find new metrics for success, and a general lack of responsibility and accountability in the system despite the quality of the educators. Science Leadership Acadamy is an empowerment-based educational system, experimentally created in partnership with The Franklin Institute. One of my favorite points he makes is: you can’t learn when you feel the subject is more important than you are.
“What happens when school is real life, and not just preparation for real life”.
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Dangerouslyawesome/~3/rsM0ArQwnGk/
I’m always “preaching” about finding and having higher purpose in everything you do, especially work. It’s something I learned back in 2006 from Chris Messina and Tara Hunt when they started Citizen Agency…it was a core tenant of what they helped their clients do.
One of my side ventures is as the business manager for Two Guys on Beer. Johnny, Dave, Joe, and I have been producing this show together for almost 2 years now…Joe and I officially on the team for a bit over a year now. We’ve had some really incredible successes under our belt, not the least of which is a syndication on Philly.com’s beer page, participating in Philly Beer Week last year that resulted in interviews with beer legends Sam Calagione and Jim Koch, BeerCamp – a homebrewers summit attended by 200+ homebrew fans, fantastic relationships with a number of breweries & restaurants, and of course over 130 episodes in the bag.
The team works hard for a project that we’ve been slowly…slowly….turning into what we believe can be a profitable venture. We joke that we’re at the point where people send us beer, and that’s awesome…but the real goal is to make money drinking beer. The truth is, we have a higher purpose based on 4 core values that we think will help us make that a reality:
Advocate Beer
Grow the Craft Beer Community
Make Knowledge Available
Build Beer Relationships
Even with these core values, things get tough…especially with a project that is a passion project for the whole team right now. It’s hard to remember, sometimes, “why are we doing this again!?!”.
Then, you get e-mails like this:
TGOB:
You guys are AWESOME! I love experimenting with different beers, but I can’t find good beer while the US Army has me stationed here in Korea. I download your podcasts onto my Zune and watch them as I drink some malty Philipino beers (the only thing decent you can find here), and your show makes me feel like I’m home. Keep the shows coming; you keep me from feeling homesick. You guys rock.
2LT Vandergraff
6-52 AMD, 35th ADA BDE, South Korea
Wow. That’s the kind of thing that really puts things into perspective, and how important having core values can be.
Without our core values, the product that Two Guys on Beer produces wouldn’t be what it is today, and the team probably wouldn’t keep pouring our time and hearts into the show. But most importantly, 2Lt Todd Vandergraff wouldn’t be able to enjoy beer as a way to stay connected to home.
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Dangerouslyawesome/~3/qswg3ioklcQ/
Co-author of The Cluetrain Doc Searls writes on the Project VRM blog:
You are not a human being on the Web. In fact, as Paul Trevithick put it (at one of our first VRM meetings at the Berkman Center), the Web has no concept of a human being. It is fundamentally an arrangement of files and connections between those files. Hyperlinks on the Web may subvert huaraches, especially when they are authored by human beings (such as here, in a blog, which is a human expression); but the Web itself is oblivious to that. We still lack the means, on top of the Web (and the Net) to form and maintain relationships that are anything more than a very crude, partial and highly distorted imitation of those we have out in the real, human, social world.
Put another way, social contracts in cyberspace have a long way to go before they catch up with those in real-world social space. In fact, they may be two hundred and fifty years behind. “Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains”, Rousseau wrote (in The Social Contract, Or Principles of Political Right(Du contrat social ou Principes du droit politique), in 1762. The Age of Enlightenment followed, during which we began to work out a variety of social contracts involving governance, commerce, education and religion. I submit that we have hardly begun to do the same on the Net or the Web.
“Markets are conversations,” the famous first thesis of The Cluetrain Manifesto(and later a chapter of the book by the same title) was meant to help model the social contract in cyberspace after the ones we have in meat/meet space. This has happened only in those places where the interactions are most human. It has barely happened where the interactions are most corporate.
More on “Where Markets are Not Conversations“.
Don’t get me wrong, I firmly believe that the web allows us to maintain much larger bases of looser connections and there’s immense value in that. But companies placing dollars (instead of heartbeats) into social campaigns online to accomplish ANYTHING (marketing, support, recruitment, or otherwise) are missing the entire “social contract” needed to balance the operation in a sustainable manner.
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Dangerouslyawesome/~3/vhDG5YzGI-E/
I was interviewed for a book about passion based businesses back in early 2008, and it’s finally hitting bookshelves next month. I’ll share a link once I’ve got one.
In the chapter about risk, I’m quoted saying:
“It’s all embodied in this concept of embracing chaos. Everyday something crazy is going to happen. There’s nothing I can do about it. How can I capture that energy and spin it some place positive? It’s one day at a time. What’s next? Tomorrow is next. That’s as far as I know.”
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Dangerouslyawesome/~3/uxDqG6PJEWY/
Coworking is growing, and there’s no question about that. New spaces are opening to the tune of a few a week, and press coverage is anything but limited.
We’ve hit “trend” status, it seems, and a number of publications are taking notice.
Trends don’t just include positive growth, though, they include negative growth as well. While spaces are opening up and the coworking google group is humming with activity, I’m concerned about a number of spaces that are struggling to find break-even between their membership and their expenses.
Moreover, nobody is talking about the big R word that is normally saved for corporate human resource departments.
Retention.
Coworking spaces are jumping through all kinds of hoops to get people in the door. But are those people staying? Are they contributing? Are they collaborating as is suggested by most coworking literature?
What things are people staying for? Why are they leaving?
I’m currently working with our intern Parker on sifting through our 2009 numbers to produce some concrete numbers and data related to our retention rate. I’ve gone on record to say it’s been good, but have never been able to say how good.
My goal is to find concrete numbers relating our growth and our retention directly, and to interview people who’ve left or lowered their membership level to find out why. I hope that we can produce numbers for 2008 and the 2nd half of 2007 (while we were open), but our recordkeeping methods might make that difficult.
We need data.
This post is an open call for participation from other coworking spaces to do the same. In order to participate in my research, I’d like the following:
A month-to-month assessment of membership counts, and what level of membership they pay for (full time, flex, etc).
A month-to-month assessment of member exits, and any insight into what those exits were related to.
A month-to-moth net gain of membership.
A count of drop-ins that returned, and how often they’ve returned.
To speed things up, I’ve created a very basic one-year worksheet to get you started. You can download it as an .xls here.
The number of spaces that have been open for over 12 months is small, so I’m hard pressed to limit these responses to spaces that have made it beyond their first year. Instead, I’d like to suggest that you have at least six months of active membership under your belt in order to submit your statistics. The more data you have, the better, but I won’t turn anything down.
You can send your space’s stats using this handy dandy form.
Then what?
I’ll be publishing all of the results, along with our own results, openly and licensed under creative commons for mashing up, sharing, and inclusion in other coworking materials.
Thanks for your help and participation.
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Dangerouslyawesome/~3/qNVpzhhsBSc/
Wish I were with you but I couldn’t stay
Every direction leads me away
Pray for tomorrow but for today
And all I want is to be home
Stand in the mirror you look the same
Just looking for shelter from the cold and the pain
Some want to cover, safe from the rain
And all I want is to be home
Echoes and silence, patience and grace,
All of these moments I’ll never replace
No fear of my heart, no absence of faith
And all I want is to be home
All I want is to be home
People I’ve loved, I have no regrets
Some I remember some I forget
Some of them living some of them dead
And all I want is to be home
Home, Foo Fighters
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Dangerouslyawesome/~3/9eYaEDT0UxU/
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