We’d just come out of BlogPhiladelphia, one of the first large scale events by and for the Philadelphia creative tech community. In a Junto held specifically to discuss the “What’s Next” question, some ideas crystallized that are still a huge part of the visions for Philadelphia today and in the future.

Long time Indy Hall member Dave Speers presented on behalf of his brainstorm group in an oration he should be proud of. He touched on 3 key components:

• Identity
• Communication
• Purpose

Identity

In the summer of 2007, our shared identity was broadly defined, but unity was found in a notion of “making a living doing what we love“.

Over the last 4 years, we’ve continued the path of mutual discovery of the people in our own backyards making a living doing what they love. We’ve folded this language into Indy Hall’s core mission, too, and it’s become an important part of who we are and how we operate.

Communication

Dave called Twitter, “Tweeter”, which had me giggling as I reviewed the footage, but his point was that persistant communication mechanisms were uniting us in unprecedented ways. While Twitter continues to be a large presence, there’s also increased visibility into the interactions of the industries being represented in Philadelphia, online and off. More importantly than loose connections are the strong relationships that can emerge from these communications. True communication – not just talking – opens the doors for emotional influence of the individuals in those industries in extraordinary ways.

Purpose

Purpose was still left open for discovery in that summer of 2007, but there was a clear hunger for momentum. If we’ve successfully achieved anything in the last 4 years, it’s a momentum that not only has citizens of Philadelphia excited, but has citizens of other cities inspired. That’s an accomplishment in itself.

I think it’s important for us to periodically look back to where we were in order to get a clearer picture of where we’re headed, and how. It’s remarkable to me how much of this language still persists our daily dialogues about Indy Hall, Philadelphia, and the evolution and growth of the creative technology community here.

Source: these ideas were summarized and paraphrased by me, but sourced from this video.

“We’d love to wait for you to come on board and help us, but fuck it, we’re gonna do it anyway.” – From Scene but not Nerd, January 2007.

The sentiment hasn’t changed for me, it won’t change anytime soon, and this past weekend’s events illustrate a very important part: the sentiment is shared by more than just this angsty technologist.

DIY, or “Do It Yourself” for the uninitiated, means more than just “bottom up” for this town.

It means that people have a true sense of ownership, and a true sense of pride, in what they make, and why shouldn’t the city that they live and work in be a part of their portfolio?

BeerCamp Philly was more than a party (and believe me, there ain’t no party like an IndyHall Party, cuz an IndyHall party don’t stop), but a framework for achieving many of the important aspects normally not achieved by DIY.

First, the notion of doing it yourself seems to imply two things:

• Do it BY yourself
• Do it FOR yourself

BeerCamp debunked that in a big way, and put a stake in the ground for an fast growing, almost entirely underground community of homebrewers.

Among the takeaways I heard as the night played out, two important ones were recurring, and I believe the most important.

• Many of our participating homebrewers don’t get to taste their beer with anyone outside of the group of friends with whom that they brew. That’s a lost opportunity for creating a feedback loop to learn from.
• Many of our homebrewers don’t get to taste other homebrewer’s beer, and compare notes. Yet another lost opportunity to accelerate their learning process, and continue to experiment.

I should point out that it is my intuition that homebrewing is a social activity, and very few people do it 100% solo, but I’m not sure about that.

In one night, we connected 11 brewers to each other, and simultaneously introduced them to our sold-out attendance of well over 200 beer-lovers.

Brewers shared notes about process, junior brewers learning technique from a senior generation (and not surprisingly, some of those newer brewers had some things of their own to teach).

The act of “doing it yourself” for these brewers took something they did for craft, became a shared experience with a much larger audience, many of whom were new faces to our community.

In those series of moments, everything accelerated. Not just during the event itself, but with lasting effects that have yet to be seen unfold.

That’s the difference. Lasting effects because they have skin in the game from here on out.

During BarCamp Philly II, which was probably the dozenth’ or so “unconference” event I’ve attended in the last couple of years, something similar occured.

These people, and the dozens more that are out of frame and that came throughout the day, seized an opportunity to take 7 hour schedule and make it their own.

At 8am, there was no conference schedule. At 10am, 12 rooms had organized into over 50 sessions. The schedule board was full, and the organizers reacted by adding a 13th track, making room for up to 6 more presenters.

For all of the energy put into carefully crafting a conference schedule that’s ideal for an event’s agenda, I think this one came out pretty well.

Note the diversity, by the way. BarCamp Philly has begun to leave the realm of “geeks only” (only a couple of Twitter/social media sessions, and a healthy smattering of tech-oriented sessions), and is now also strongly trending into business, communication, education, law, art, music, and culture.

Back to Doing It Yourself.

For many attendees (I’d estimate well over half based on a show of hands at the beginning of the day), BarCamp Philly II was not only their first BarCamp, but their first exposure to the broader community of people moving and shaking in Philadelphia. At every event since the 2007 BlogPhiladelphia I co-organized with Annie Heckenberger, I’ve heard the same phrase over and over:

“I had no idea so much was happening in my own back yard”

And that’s just it. There is already so much going on in our own back yard.

Much of it, without the traditional focus on “What resources don’t we have and how do we get them?”, and with more of a focus on, “What can we accomplish with what we’ve already got?”.

Also, while it’s a little bit hard to be sure from session titles alone, I think you can deduce (and others can confirm) that BarCamp Philly was much less instructive, and far more interactive and conversational.

It wasn’t just about getting people to share ideas (which is fine, but not intrinsically productive), but about finding ways to help ideas connect.

That’s the difference between being told it’s a good idea to share your ideas, or having ideas shared with you, and having some skin in the game yourself.

Receiving pre-synthesized information leaves out all of the opportunity for self-discovery, idea branching and merging, and ultimately, innovative thinking becomes unidirectional.

Presenter->Audience.

Kung Fu Master->Grasshopper.

Yoda->Luke.

Mentor->Mentee.

Those relationships are valuable and important, but it’s not the only way to do things.

We’re doing this a little bit differently, we’re doing it ourselves.

When the participants of BarCamp Philly come together to decide what’s important enough to talk about, and dialogue about it, serendipity accelerates in a big way.

And because they have skin in the game, the lasting effects are strong, and most exciting for me, yet to be seen.

So these events were a success, right?

Well, yes.

The organizers totally dominated in putting together an incredible event framework, and worked their asses off to make sure that participants of the events could be effective. Roz Duffy, JP Toto, and Kelani Edmondson are quickly becoming master event planners and organizers. Kara LaFleur joins them as an extraordinary volunteer who just gets things done, and even more, coordinates volunteer efforts in force, allowing big things to happen when all you’ve got is a bunch of willing hands.

That said, as I titled my unusually somber and introspective session with Geoff, “We’re not done yet”.

If my personal goal was to be able to travel the country sharing and learning along with other people working to improve their cities, I’d be happy saying I’ve achieved that goal.

If my personal goal was to generate press (for better or for worse) around our efforts, more than once gracing the front page of established print and digital publications around the world, I’d be happy saying I achieved that goal.

If my personal goal was to be surrounded by, and work with (but not for) some of the smartest, most driven, talented, and incredible people you can possibly imagine, I’d be happy saying I’d achieved that goal.

Luckily, those personal goals are all being achieved as the first chapter of a much longer story is being written. There are a lot of characters already (rivaling a Tolkein novel at this point), and the cast is only growing.

I’m not writing this book, we all are.

We haven’t even finished the first chapter, Philadelphia.

The fun is just getting started.

This past weekend we celebrated the one year anniversary of IndyHall’s grand opening. I’ve been making it a point to clearly define what we were celebrating, for a reason. At our party, I added some clarity to the point.

IndyHall existed before the office at 32 Strawberry St was opened, and I firmly believe that if the office were to close down tomorrow, IndyHall would continue to exist.

IndyHall is not (just) a coworking space. IndyHall is a coworking community that shares a vision of making Philadelphia a better place to do whatever it is that they love to do.

The space at 32 Strawberry Street is the most tangible facet of IndyHall, the easiest to identify with. That’s a good thing, for our own community here in Philadelphia as well as the global coworking community and, quite frankly, the entire world. It’s good that IndyHall has a clubhouse at 32 Strawberry (so good that it was worth throwing an epic party to celebrate).

It’s important to have these clubhouses. Without some tangible touchpoint, it’s difficult to share goals, share visions, and collaborate on executions.

I’ve talked a lot about coworking over the last 2 years. I think I’ve talked about coworking more than any other single thing in my entire life, really. Over this time, I’ve realized the most common questions we get, and some of them tend to overlap and create some interesting trends.

Usually, people don’t get it. It’s getting better over time, and mainstream press is helping. But on the whole, outside of the microcosm community that we live and work in, people don’t get it. They don’t understand the purpose, other than the “having a desk in a real office” part.

I used to get frustrated when the thing that got people to understand was when I said, “Well, our business model is renting desks. But that’s really just the way we cover our overhead.” The fact that the least important part of the company (in my mind) was the most obvious, bothered me. Leaving a conversation where someone understood IndyHall on that level meant that they simply didn’t understand IndyHall.

Geoff was quoted on PSFK over a year ago saying:

“It’s not about making money, It’s like when you were a kid, and you had a clubhouse… it’s a way to feel like part of a community.”

The people who truly understand IndyHall are the one’s who’ve come to hang out at the clubhouse. And by the clubhouse, I’m still not just referring to the building in which we rent desks, host workshops, and build some of the coolest software you’ve seen this year. I’m talking about a bigger clubhouse.

People who heard me talk about IndyHall a year ago probably heard this analogy from me:

Imagine a bunch of little soap bubbles. Each one is self contained, and adjacent to a number of other soap bubbles. If you were to pop each bubble, the contents would just spill out into the open with nowhere to go. What I want to do is blow one giant soap bubble over top of the little bubbles, reach in through the wall of the big bubble, and start popping the little bubbles in creative and interesting ways, getting their contents to mix and mingle under one common “structure”.

That’s what we’ve effectively done with IndyHall. There was an extremely vibrant community here in Philadelphia, but it went undiscovered due to its fragmented and disparate nature. Think back, Philadelphians, to BlogPhiladelphia. Annie Heckenberger and I put together an event (this was the most “Hurricane” I’ve ever seen Annie, by the way. I wonder when we’re going to get that back) that was a whole lot of fun. But beyond the fun, but the number one response I got after the event was:

“I had no idea what my neighbor/coworker/blah blah blah was up to. They write for this blog/have their own startup/want to take of the world, too!”

It’s absurd that we think we need to have a conference, a meetup, or a party to find out what our neighbors/friends/peers are up to. Totally and completely absurd.

We should be able to simply hang out and go about our every day lives and have a point of contact that has the same degree of effect as a conference/meetup/party, but all the time. Tara and Chris have called coworking “Barcamp Every Day”, and I think that is a more important effect of coworking than the “save money on gas and office space” angle.

Frankly, the “efficiency” angle is an easy sell, and a real boon for the movement and it’s growth. But it says nothing about the value add and the changes that I firmly believe are much deeper rooted in not where we work, but how we work. We’re riding the crest of these changes, but I really believe this is bigger than all of us realize yet. THAT’S why I was upset about FastCompany’s shitty coverage of coworking. They have a massive, and extremely impressionable audience, and were sending the less valuable message. But I digress.

So going back to my soap bubble analogy, IndyHall is so much more than the 32 Strawberry St clubhouse. We’ve got clubhouses all over the city. Bars, restaurants, parks, apartments, offices. We’ve crashed conferences in other cities, together. As new soap bubbles find themselves within the ever-improving community clubhouse framework, they have similar experiences.

Knowing you’ve got a clubhouse is important for setting goals and executing on them as a community.

Knowing you’ve got a clubhouse is important for moral support when things aren’t going quite like you planned.

Knowing you’ve got a clubhouse is important when you need that last little push to get your shit done.

Knowing you’ve got a clubhouse is important for putting things into perspective.

Knowing you’ve got a clubhouse is important when you need to just close your eyes and dream for a minute.

Where’s your clubhouse?

I consider myself lucky that I really, really enjoy the work that I do. Recently, my passion has been poured into the coworking project, Independents Hall, and being involved in various other community building events. It wasn’t until a couple of weeks ago that I had to force myself to return to reality and face the facts…in order to pay the bills, Alex Hillman is a developer.

Coming back from Orlando I faced a pile..one of the most daunting piles of work I’ve ever felt myself under (far worse than any string of exams I felt while still in school). To be fair, the pile was my own fault. I hadn’t done a very good job of ramping things down right before swinging into “IndyHall Mode”, where I spent most of August and September. But, I had committed to clients, who had paid for services, and I was definitely pushing the limits of the relationships I have with my clients.

On the record, THANK YOU, to all of the clients I have that were patient and proud of the stuff we did with IndyHall, and understanding while I got back in the saddle and found my way back into my development routine.

That said…2 weeks of hell, 18+ hour days, juggling stacked and overdue deadlines (again, all my own fault)..and there’s finally some light at the end of the tunnel. If I could bottle the refreshing feeling I had as I started crossing things off my to-do list, and sell it, I would. I’m pretty sure that the government would make it a controlled substance, it because the feeling was that good. Ahem. Anyway.

I realized something. These working conditions I put myself under were taking away from one important part of what I did. I develop, because I love to. I was developing these projects, because I HAD to, and the situation I got myself into was leading me towards a burnout. Understanding that my commitments and promises are what drive business and growth, and my loyal customers could have left weeks ago but instead stuck it out with me, helped. But emotionally…the realization that I wasn’t enjoying myself was a little damaging. I did not want to burn out this quickly at doing something that I enjoy so much.

Then, one week ago today, a screenshot came across my desk from one of the sharpest interface designers I know, Amy Hoy. At the top of that screenshot, I saw this:

My good friend Gary Vaynerchuk, recently soaring into the stratosphere with his 300+ episodes of a wine-tasting video podcast, was staring me in the face from the “laid back friday” couch and pointing at me as if to say, “yo man, this one’s for you”. Amy asked if I knew anyone who could build this out for a wordpress template for Gary’s new side project, and something in me said “you’ve got other stuff to do, but this one will be good for your soul”. So I agreed to spend last Saturday banging out this template.

I’m still not 100% sure what about this project set it apart, and realistically, it was only about 3 hours of work, but it was able to zero me out. I didn’t do it because I had to, I did it because I wanted to. Yesterday, I spent part of my afternoon with Gary and WLTV Producer Erik Kastner, at the Wine Library (holy crap, you have to go the place is nuts) talking about some of the things clunking around in my head. We’ll see what materializes from those conversations, I think it’s some good stuff.

I guess the whole reason I started this post was to stress the need to do things that you love. It’s energizing, and it’s healthy. I remember being in grade school and having assigned reading and pleasure reading. At the time, assigned reading may have been something from a composition book, or a textbook…but either way I read it because I had to. On the other side, I’d pick up something I wanted to read (at the time, I remember R.L. Stein “Goosebumps” series was a popular choice).

The act of reading was the same. Eyes scanning pages for letters forming words forming sentences, paragraphs, pages, and ultimately some story. But the book I picked, I had an emotional gratification from. I think this goes for the work I do, too. The act of building out this page for Gary was no different, but seeing Gary’s site live was a different reaction than I had to any of the other project’s I’ve wrapped in the last few weeks.

So where does this realization leave me? Well, I’m still processing that. I’ve got some exciting new things on the horizon, opportunities and events. I have a dream that is being realized day by day. I have some of the best friends in the world that I’m so happy are around for all of this, and many more friends that I’ve made because of the events of the last several months. I’m glad that I have them to turn to at this point in my life as I’m putting all of the pieces together and figuring out the next move. Big or little, something’s brewing.

The only thing that’s certain is that I’m going to love it.

update: seems gary and i were reading each others thoughts and he did his 120 second video today on a very similar topic, his “big picture patch“. A good reminder to put things into perspective, no matter your situation.

Bit of Trivia: Brian’s the guy responsible for connecting me to Annie for BlogPhiladelphia.

[tags]brian oberkirch, marketing, social, SXSW07i[/tags]