HELL. YES.

Let me make this very clear: New Work City is a platform for you. It is your space, your own little city. I am your Mayor, and I represent you.

If you want to do a UX lab, do it! 

If you want to get people together and do a SHDH-style hackathon, we really need one! Do it! Pick a date and email me.

If you want to do a workshop. A talk. If you want to just pick a time to watch TED talks on our sexy new projector… 

Pick a date.

Email me.

Make it happen.

NWC exists to make it easir for people to do all the great, creative, innovative stuff that people would otherwise have a hard time doing in NYC. The more cool stuff you want to do here in New Work City, the better.

My friend Charlie Oliver just hosted the inaugural NY Blog Academy Meetup yesterday, and a ton of people showed up. To the first event!

My friend Matt Coop is doing an Open Government Meetup on Monday 3/23.

When are you going to use NWC for something awesome?

Let’s kick some ass together.

It’s a recession, so let’s get a move on! There’s much economic growth to make!

New Work City and New York City are natural friends.

NWC has two central objectives: 1. To provide community workspace for location-independent workers, and 2. To facilitate entrepreneurial activity in NYC.

In NYC, commercial and residential developers are seeing occupancy drop as companies downsize or disappear altogether and as countless laid-off New Yorkers begin leaving town.

The city, however, sees opportunity in the midst of the crisis– the same opportunity that we see. Many of the people who’ve been laid off won’t be going back to the jobs they had before, and some won’t go back to jobs at all. For many, this is an opportunity to explore independent work– as a contractor, consultant, entrepreneur, or otherwise– and the more we can do to help these folks, the better for everyone.

That’s why Sanford and I helped form the brand-new Coalition of Space Providers, which joins together many of the existing work spaces in NYC. This coalition will work with the NYC Economic Development Corporation to provide discounted workspace for first-time entrepreneurs, as well as events and other benefits.

This also dovetails nicely with a separate effort that we’ve been working on at NWC, which we are soft-launching tonight: The Runway Project.

It looks like the recession is going to be producing a lot of new entrepreneurs and freelancers, and those folks are going to need help getting off the ground. The fine folks at New Work City are already teeming with knowledge and skills that they can share, and we want to do everything we can to connect these two groups together.

So the Runway Project, in its most basic form, will be a platform for people to offer their skills in the form of workshops and talks, and for “New Independents” to find thse events and learn more. 

We’ll also be focusing on offering more evening coworking sessions at a discounted rate, so people who are short on cash and long on time can join us and get their cowork on.

It’s never been easier to get started working independently, and to the many New Yorkers working on their next step, New Work City is here for you

Cheers,
Mayor Tony

Full text of the Mayor’s announcement

The great folks at NYC Wireless donated a router to us and helped get it configured and up and running. This is the same system that powers the free wifi in many of the major parks in NYC.

The router runs a special firmware which connects to a server running WifiDog, which is open source software that allows you to create a customized login system for people connecting to the internet through your router.

NYCW built a system on this that allows each space to have its own landing page, as well. You can see in the screenshot above (click for full version) that we’ve build out this area to include buy buttons, RSS feeds, and a calendar, all of which should be of use to members as they’re arriving and signing in.

In the future, this software may provide a means for an ad-hoc social network– letting people create profiles and find each other as they sign in to various spots in the city. 

We’re hoping that sometime this year we’ll be able to explore that more, but in the meantime, bravo to NYCWireless for their excellent setup!

As a part of the Visa  program, members of New Work City can now take their memberships to any one of 22 spaces in 10 states and six countries around the world and work free of charge.

Here’s the list of participating spaces:

Souk 			Portland	OR	USA

Office Nomads		Seattle		WA	USA

Whitespace		Seattle		WA	USA

Giraffe Labs		Seattle		WA	USA

Suite 133		Tacoma		WA	USA

StartPad		Tacoma		WA	USA

Citizen Space		San Francisco	CA	USA

Cubes & Crayons		Palo Alto	CA	USA

Blankspaces		Los Angeles	CA	USA

Uptime			Chico		CA	USA

Impromptu Studio	Des Moines	IA	USA

Office Space Coworking	Akron		OH	USA

Indy Hall		Philadelphia	PA	USA

The Office		Media		PA	USA

Group 88		Simsbury	CT	USA

Williamsburg Coworking	Brooklyn	NY	USA

Caroline Collective	Houston		TX	USA

Office One Bangkok	Bangkok			Thailand

Nomadz			The Hague		Netherlands

Coworking Milano	Milan			Italy

Station C		Montreal		Canada

AltSpace		Wellington		New Zealand

This is a huge step for coworking. We’re looking forward to having our coworking friends from other cities and countries drop in and share new perspectives with us.

For members who want to participate in the program, go to this page and find the relevant instructions for the space you’re interested in visting.

If you participate in the Visa program, either as one of our members or as a visitor from elsewhere, let us know so we can blog about it!

With a gift from Nichelle Stephens!

Christmastime is upon us at New Work City! Here are some happenings:

- Our Christmas tree was donated by our neighbors, who used the tree for a Wal-Mart commercial. If you see a commercial with two women playing Xbox instead of wrapping presents, that’s our tree!

- We’re already getting Christmas presents! Thanks Robert Sosinski for the much-needed coffeemaker and water filter, and thanks also to Nichelle for the wonderful cookie treats and beautiful glass cookie jar pictured here!

- We’ll be having a Christmas party as part of TechDrinks IX, tentatively scheduled for Monday, 12/22. Stay tuned here for more details.

- We have a Christmas list! Head here on Amazon to see what we want for Christmas! We’ve been really good this year, but we’ve only been around for 1 month of it

We do, of course, support all holidays here at NWC. Whitney has already promised a menorah for the space. Stay tuned for more holiday goodness!

Now that we have lockers in place, we can put books on them! To kick off, I’ve added some from my personal collection, with more to be added soon.

We’ll work out how people can loan out the books, but feel free to make use of them while you’re in the space. 

A little variety to start us off:

• Why Work Sucks and How to Fix It by Cali Ressler and Jody Thompson
• Four Hour Workweek (duh) by Tim Ferriss
• Down & Out in the Magic Kingdom by Cory Doctorow
• LLC & Corporation Startup Guide by Mark Warda
• Elements of Moral Philosophy by James Rachels
• Scientific Progress Goes Boink by Bill Watterson

Are you working on a side project during your off hours, or when the boss isn’t looking?

Or are you just the type of person who likes to hack for 15 hours straight?

Indulge in your workaholism at this free evening coworking jaunt. Bring a laptop and some work to do!

New Work City opens at 9am, so you can join us during the daytime for our standard drop-in rate ($25), or you can come at 5:00pm and work through the evening for free.

Our host, Whitney Hess, has informed us that this event can and will go rather late into the night!

RSVP here!

Thanks Whitney!

Sixteen people from various backgrounds and NYC organizations came together to meld minds and take the first big steps: determining preferred dates, venues, and sponsors, and determining who will talk to whom to follow up.

We also streamed it live on our UStream account, which we’ll try to use for more events in the future as well. I was happy to see that, after we ironed out some technical difficulties, the folks watching online were able to see and hear the meeting pretty clearly, and even contribute to the meeting.

It was an amazing meeting of some of NYC’s best minds, and one thing that struck me more than anything else was the sheer resiliency of both BarCamp and our community. Observing how the meeting transpired, I had no fear of BarCamp jumping the shark, and after four events with continuously growing success and interest that’s impressive.

Viva la BarCamp! Check out our notes from the meeting here.

Our next meeting is likely to be Monday, December 1st at 7pm at New Work City, if you’re interested in helping out, come join us!

We’re going to start doing regular meetings to recap what’s going on at New Work City– what we’re working on, what needs to be worked on, and ideas for the future.

There’s a lot to do, and we’re going to continue to need your help along the way. Right now, our highest priorities are as follows:

1. Get keys and swipecards for full-time members
Waiting to get through security is a pain, especially when stepping out for just a minute to get a cup of coffee or some lunch. We’re working on finishing the necessary paperwork so we can get keys and swipecards for our members. We’ll keep you posted on that!

2. Sound absorption in the conference room and phone booth
As anticipated, noise levels and building out quiet spots to be on the phone are definitely a priority. While the echo issues in the main space have mostly subsided, the conference room and phone booth still need work. We’ve got a couple of friends who have volunteered to donate or create some art for the space, on nice sound-absorbent materials. We’re also considering inviting an artist to show off their works in the space, or even doing a weekend art event. We’ll discuss in more detail at the next meeting.

3. More stuff! Lockers, bookshelf, microwave, coffeemaker, couch, projector recycle bins, switches, and more
We’ve got a lot of errands to run! We’ll be making continuous improvements to the space, and will be looking to you to help us check everything off our list. (PS- if you have or know someone who has a couch in fantastic condition that they’re looking to get rid of, let us know!)

We’re working on several of the above items already and will be keeping you up to date. We’ll also update the Stuff We Need list so you can help us out!

The next City Council meeting will be Wednesday, November 26th, from 5-6pm.

Yes, we know it’s the day before Thanksgiving. We totally don’t expect you to come, but we’ll plan on streaming and recording the discussion and posting it here.

Also, just to be clear– there isn’t actually any formal city council, just us members and mayors

Until then!

Mayor Tony

- Sebastian and Phillip from TripWolf.com, our first drop-ins out of the blue.

- I introduce Mike, who came in next, to them.

“We should talk,” he says. “What startup are you in?”
“Tripwolf”
“Oh, I know you guys! I read about you in TechCrunch!

- I try to ask the newest members for their suggestions for music for the space, and Sebastsian suggested Kruder & Dorfmeister (as what he describes as a “cultural export”). Great ambient music.

- Gathered around the LCD and watched Gary Vee prank call a beer merchandise businessowner to illustrate how to monetize a video blog on an artibrary subject.

- Whitney giving Gregory some free UI consulting on his site. “Prepopulate content… Flickr has a ‘recognized’ and ‘unrecognized’ home page…”

- Gregory considering doing a video to introduce his site.

Tony idea: Wouldn’t it be great if WTFisTwitter.com were a platform for people to post videos explaining anything? WTF is (startup name). I’d love to post a video describing Greg’s product too.

- Talking about people with booked schedules. Tony getting more and more interested in the idea of sponsoring people’s time.

- Mike brought us Financier cookies. If you haven’t had these, then you don’t know what you’re missing. They’re incredible gourmet pastry cookie things, and were a great cap off to yet another amazing day.

Today’s overall attendance: 9 people (3 FT, 2PT, 3 Drop-In, one Mayor)