At NWC, we’ve got a decent representation of female membership, but it’s honestly not nearly what we’d consider balanced.

So what can we do about it? Well, part of why NWC is here is to make it easier for people to lead independent lives and find what they need to find. So, for our potential female coworkers out there, I figured it wouldn’t hurt to make it even easier, and lower the barriers even more.

I want to offer up a day at NWC where women are encouraged to come cowork, free of charge, and the boys are only welcome if they bring a lady coworker with them.

Now, this would mean that regular paying members might not be able to use NWC on a day when they otherwise would have. This is something of an issue.

I believe, however, that it’s in everyone’s interests that we develop a more well-rounded community that encourages more female entrepreneurship and participation in the community. Also, since we also all have pretty flexible schedules, I figure with sufficient advance notice people can plan around a day when NWC will be unavailable.

So screw it… let’s do this.

Two weeks from now is Friday, March 5th. So says the Mayor, on March 5th, NWC is open and free to female coworkers and male coworkers bringing a female coworker with them. If you’re a guy and can’t find a lady friend who needs to get her cowork on, we’ll have a limited number of spots you can reserve ahead of time.

Update: Let’s call the date for this event TBD and give ourselves some time to figure out how to do this right. Check this wiki page for a current draft of the structure: http://nwc.wikidot.com/lowering-barriers-for-aspiring-female-independents

We’ll pause at lunch time (12:30) to have a discussion about what people are doing (and what more people could be doing) to lower barriers to aspiring female geeks, entrepreneurs, and coworkers everywhere.

I’m going to discuss this with more members to make sure this works OK enough for everyone, and then post up an RSVP next week.

Update 1:
Somebody very politely pointed out that “Ladies Day” is probably not the best name for this. I wholeheartedly agree. What should we call this thing?

Update 2:
Part of the challenge here is making it easier for more women to participate, while not singling out or segregating women from men. So the event should include a healthy balance of boys and girls.

One year of coworking and more

It’s been a busy 12 months, both inside and outside of NWC:

We’ve made a lot of good friends. To the tune of  77 members throughout the year, 43 active members as of today, and dozens of visitors passing through from all corners of the world.

We helped make a lot of good things happen. On top of the great projects and products NWC members have developed over the course of the last year, some of which are highlighted below, we’ve also been home to the planning of BarCampNYC4, LaidOffCampNY, FashionCamp, OneWebDay, CultivateNY, the Breakout Festival, BigAppsDevCamp, Swagapalooza, and more. Our latest experiment is in CoStructure, where we work together to bring more sanity to our overworked lives.

We hosted a lot of good events. 22, to be exact, in our main Coworking NYC Meetup Group, which has blossomed to over 550 members. On top of that, we kicked off the Runway Project and helped hundreds of newfound independents get started on working for themselves over the course of 13 volunteer-led brainstorming and educational events. We’ve also been home to several other Meetups, including the Open Government Meetup, the Math Club Meetup, the Social Causes/Social Media Meetup, Groovy Grails Meetup and more. We also organized two fantastic TEDxNWC events, where some of NYC’s greatest minds got together to discuss creating a better future.

We had a lot of good times. Between Coworking After Hours, TechDrinks, some impromptu bouts of Beatles Rock Band, lunch outings and more, we’ve all had plenty of good times in between getting things done.

That’s a whole lot of good.

As we go, New Work City is going to continue to grow and evolve. As the past year’s activities have made clear, NWC is far more than just a place to work– it’s a growing, thriving community of incredible people, and we as a collective group are going to work together to find new ways to help each other.

Member Launch Party

NWC’s members have been hard at work, and on 10/23 we’ll showcase their awesome stuff:

Perpetually
Darrell Silver presents TechCrunch50 finalist Perpetually.com, which lets you archive sites and go back in time to see how they’ve evolved over time. It’s like the Wayback Machine on steroids on a healthy diet and exercise!

Bundl.it
If you’ve ever wanted to send a batch of links in Twitter or elsewhere, but found that sending all those links was too onerous, you can use Sara Chipps’ Bundl.it to create a really simple package of links, and get a short URL to direct people to a simple and elegant list of those links.

The Circuit
Mark Burstiner, the NYC tech scene’s de facto event video streamer, steps in front of the camera for a show about the awesomest things happening on the web.

RedRover
Kevin Prentiss’s RedRover helps new college students connect to each other through shared interests—sort of like what those cheesy ice breakers were supposed to do, but this actually works, is online, and is not cheesy.

OpenHallway
Gib Reimschussel offers a service that allows you to conduct usability tests virtually online– and lets you record videos of the users’ reactions and experiences. A simple, affordable option for companies that need to conduct lightweight usability testing.

KeenKong
Frederic Guarino will share with us a new service that lets you manage your Twitter conversations easily and on a large scale, as well as see in-depth statistics about the activity of people talking to and about you.

Maybe A Secret New Announcement From Tony
Which is a secret, but everyone who attends will be able to participate!

Event Details

Location:
New Work City
200 Varick St, Room 507B
New York, NY 10014 (map)

Subway:
1 to Houston St.
ACE BDFV to W. 4th St.

Schedule:
This is a rough outline of the evening’s activities and is subject to change. Needless to say, make sure you actually get there by 9.
08:00pm – Event start, Beatles Rock Band
09:00pm – Drinks, snacks, & social
10:00pm – Talks from Tony and members
10:30pm – More socializing
Late night – Musical entertainment

Does this sound as fun to you as it does to me? I think it does! So get your RSVP on!

RSVP on Meetup

or

RSVP on Facebook

See you there!

Cheers,
Mayor Tony

This is a post from Colin McDonald, longtime coworker and supporter of NWC.

Hello, New Work City and friends! I’m the guy who left three art works behind after my visit to Coworking After Hours this week. If you haven’t already, I hope you’ll stop by to see them soon (not to mention tweeting about them, but I’ll get to that in a second)!

The art is visiting NWC as part of the first project from Artloop (@artloop), an organization I started to increase the support and visibility of art education. The project offers student art in a variety of forms (from tote bags to originals) to our backers on Kickstarter (full details here), and we’re also working to introduce this work to creative, dynamic local communities that might initiate a new “loop” of art enjoyment and engagement. I couldn’t think of a better fit for this than NWC!

Artloop’s student work comes from our partnerships with two NYC public school art programs (the three pieces at NWC are from the Institute for Collaborative Education in the East Village). Because art is often left unclaimed at schools and then lost or thrown away, students and teachers have been open to giving small amounts of art to Artloop as a way to build support and get their work out into the city.

I’m excited to show students the pictures of their art in such a cool space. I thought it might also be fun to show how their art has connected with NWCers, so I couldn’t resist setting up a Twitter experiment (naturally). If you’re at NWC, you’ll notice that each of the three works has a small placard that lists a Twitter hashtag (#nwcart1, #nwcart2, #nwcart3). I’d love to collect your thoughts about the art works as their NWC residencies progress, including your best title ideas — none of the works we’ve collected have titles, and they deserve them!

Feel free to check out the three pieces below and leave titles/thoughts in the comments too:

#nwcart1

#nwcart2

#nwcart3

Don’t hesitate to email colin-at-artloop-dot-net or tweet @artloop with any questions or feedback. And if you’d like to support this and future Artloop projects, all while getting some cool art in return, I hope you’ll consider backing our Kickstarter project.

Thanks again to Tony and everyone for making this happen. I can’t wait to read your titles and musings!

- Colin, Artloop (@colinmcd / colinmcd.com)

You don’t have to be a member to come, we’d love to get new and old together. And feel free to join us even if you’re not working from NWC that day.

We’ll be meeting on Friday Sept. 18th at 12:30pm at City Winery, where your lunch comes with a free glass of wine!

Come out, grab a bite, and say hey! We’ll each be paying for our own lunches, unless somebody wins the lotto between now and then

Let us know you’re coming by commenting below!