This afternoon I attended my first City Council hearing. Frankly, it was my first time inside City Hall. Today’s hearing was related to a topic that is known to be near and dear to my heart: the city support of the so-called “creative economy”.

I found out about this event, as most people did, last minute. And my desire to attend was minimal, chiefly because I have a strong distaste for the types of meetings that end up being mostly masturbatory: if I don’t leave a meeting with some sort of actionable item besides having another meeting, I’m usually pretty unhappy with the use of my time.

However, I was drawn to this event because a number of my peers, notably some that I have a pretty large amount of respect for, had been invited to present on panels to the hearing board. That group included Blake Jennelle, Philly Startup Leaders founder, and Matt Fisher, President of Night Kitchen Interactive and long time member of PANMA. I knew that these particular leaders shared my views of the local scene, shared opinions about the strengths and needs of our community, and were extremely capable of vocalizing these messages succinctly and effectively. If nothing else, I would have an educational experience in how a city council hearing is conducted, and support my friends. The only guaranteed loss was being indoors on such a beautiful spring afternoon.

As I was walking into City Hall, I decided that it would be interesting to live-twitter my experience. Not only for record keeping purposes…but sort of an experiment to share my at-the-moment opinions (as heat-of-the-moment as they were) with my followers.

So it began. I quickly learned that there was a video feed (which I’m working on finding an archive of), and others were watching from afar. And before I knew it…my twittering turned my timeline into a back channel for the Philadelphia City Council Public Hearing on the Creative Economy.

I’d be very surprised if this was actually the first time a government event had a backchannel…but what was interesting to me was that it ended up proving incredibly valuable. For a number of reasons.

First, as my original thought was, for record keeping. If you look over my tweets in chronological order, the hot-topics were tracked in twitter forever. Sweet.

Second, was me opening my brain. Not that I wouldn’t have done that anyway, but instead of passing notes or whispering in my neighbor’s ear, and being disruptive…I got to put my disruptive behavior to good use.

Third, and most interestingly, it engaged a number of people who could not be in the room do to prior commitments, or lack of notice. I’m lucky that I don’t have a boss I have to ask if I can take the afternoon off to go do something. Most people aren’t. Did all 1500+ people that follow me care about the contents of the hearing? Of course not. But a number of them certainly did. And some of them cared enough to chime in on the conversation. And thus, the backchannel was born.

Whats most interesting about the people who cared, is that not all of them were even in, or from, Philadelphia. One of the really important parts to remember about all of the creative economy and city branding initiatives that we’re involved in is that they are, at the very least, two-fold. There’s the need for better awareness inside our city limits, but just as valuable, are the external perceptions of our city, its economy, its workforce, and it’s general contributions to the rest of the world. So when people started listening, and better yet, chiming in from places like New York City, Kansas, Austin, and LA…the message was being spread MUCH further than the city council ever could have anticipated. And the best part about this message? It’s showing the rest of the world, not only that we’re doing something…but we’re looking to them to reciprocate in many of the potential relationships we’re creating.

Its worth noting that I only have a limited scope to this online backchannel…my own tweets and the tweets of the people I follow. If someone said something and I wasn’t following them, I missed it. If someone responded to one of the people I was following, I likely missed that as well. So the message may very well have gotten even further than I’m aware. And that’s freaking rad.

There are a lot more thoughts I have about the contents of the event. Some of it was intensely, intensely positive. Some of it was intensely, intensely frustrating. I’ll save those thoughts for another post as my mind starts weaving things together. Most notably, though was some really really glowing support for the things I care the most about: Indyhall, of course, but also P’unk Ave and their Junto, Geoff DiMasi in general, and iSepta (a new app thats sprung up out of some really awesome organic collaboration between some IndyHall members). IndyHall, P’unk Ave, Geoff, and I were mentioned by no less 3 separate panelists. If the city didn’t know about us yet…they sure do now.

In the mean time, today was the day I realized the value of live, citizen journalism.

Today was a pretty important day.

They say (good) things happen in 3s

A few months back I marked the 1 year anniversary of my independence. Along the way I’ve made contacts and friends across this wide and amazing industry, and even built a home for some of them to spend their time during the work week.

I’ve alluded to, in various places, a new project that I’ve been working on since not that long after that 1 year announcement. Not that it’s been much of a secret but as of today, there’s one more tangible piece to the puzzle in my hands, and those would be my new business cards for Round3Media that you see above.

Over the last year, the types of and scale of the projects I’ve gotten involved with has changed dramatically. Lucky for me, there’s always opportunity for growth when you’re willing to take some initiative and be challenged. Through the year, I’ve had the privileged of working with a number of extremely talented folks, and in an effort to scale things properly, we’ve formed Round 3.

The Name

We kicked around naming and branding for quite a while, and as I expected, the one we fell in love with was the one we least expected.

Ken, Bart, and myself (founding partners of Round3) have all started multiple companies. For all of us, Round3 is our 3rd company. There are 3 of us (supplemented by a well rounded talent pool). There are three phases (or rounds) to most web projects: discovery, design, and development. Round3Media just made sense.

There are some strangely exciting coincidences that have happened while we’re starting up surrounding “threes”, so we’re pretty sure that’s a sign we made the right decision.

The Team

Round 3 is comprised of myself on the technology front, Ken Rossi on the design front, and Bart Mroz on business and project management. Ken’s designs and clients combined with my code have comprised a large portion of my portfolio in the last year. Frankly, Ken was the designer who convinced me that I had what it took to go out on my own in the first place. Bart’s been a huge part of day to day operations of IndyHall and continues to run a successful freelance project management operation.

To supplement our “core” team, we’ve brought Johnny Bilotta and Jason Tremblay on as contract-to-hire associates. Johnny’s designs have appeared ALL over the place recently, from the initial creative for the IndyHall website and business cards, to a number of branding initiatives we’ve done together. Jason’s been active in IndyHall since early on as well, and has been behind the technology for a number of local projects including www.wcdish.com and some of the tech behind the West Chester Restaurant Festival. We’re excited to have these two incredibly talented individuals who are interested in joining our mission.

As far as structure of the team, it’s our goal to keep things as flat and low to the ground as possible. There are three “disciplines” we’re representing (design, development, and business/project management). Beyond that, project and company goals will be discovered together. For as long as we have the ability to keep communication open and not end up with a super-tiered ultra-mega-globo-corp type mentality that I’ll get into a bit later, this seems like a step towards an ideal working situation. Why? Well there’s some problems that need fixing.

The Mission

What’s the mission, exactly? The way we see it, there’s a huge gap between the independent contractor and the agency. And don’t get me wrong, they both have their place. What I’m interested in experimenting with is the space between them.

Working as an indie is great. You have freedom, you have flexibility and agility. You have independence. You can keep your overhead low, and deliver high quality products for a great value.

On the flip side, it’s difficult to be held accountable by larger clients for larger projects. Also, if there’s a need to collaborate, there tends to be some scrambling to get things together and unify the communication for the ad-hoc team. It’s doable, and it’s a very powerful thing (i’ve done it for a long time and we do it every day at indyhall). It just takes more time and energy than most are willing to put out.

Agencies have a high level of accountability and structure. To their credit, the additional organization necessary to pull off larger projects and accounts are absolutely necessary as a supplement to the talent they employ. Certain clients and project types simply cannot be handled by a solo talent.

On the flip side, that additional organization adds cost (both time and money, as projects become more expensive and take longer to execute as information moves through the ranks). This also means that there’s a rather large amount of “whisper down the alley” between a project coming in, and the person executing the tasks.

Finally, as an indie, you rely on collaboration. There’s very small group of superheros who are actually good at hybrid skillsets. You may KNOW HOW TO wireframe, design, build XHTML/CSS/Javascript, as well as back end data driven architecture, but the odds of you being REALLY, REALLY good at all of them are much lower than the chances that you’ve lied on your resume and listed every piece of software you’ve ever heard of as a “skill”. It’s OK. I’m not chastising you. I’m encouraging you to pick a skill to be a rockstar at, and find other complimentary rock stars to work with. If you put 3 rock stars together, you’ve got the makings of a band. That’s what I want to see on a project: less drum solo, more collaborative singing/songwriting/performance pieces. And a little cowbell never hurts.

So really, what’s the mission?

Its our hope that over the next several months, Round3Media will give us an opportunity that a number of other very talented groups have begun to explore. We’re going to dig deep and find out what can be done in the space between indie and agency. Rather than scramble at each project to figure out who’s working on what, and what pieces we need to pull together, we have some stable business process that over arches over our individual indie “practices”. Its a step towards unity, but not so far away from the individuality or freedom we crave.

To follow the band metaphor from above, think of Round3 as a jam session for talented ‘artists’. The session is always at the same place at the same time, but what happens at each jam session is totally unique and special. We’re going to create a construct for business to take place in, but the creative side of web production and marketing will all be more like a pick-up “jam session”.

At the core, for me, this is all about scaling indie methodology.

Process vs Results

When the NotAnMBA guys were in town a few weeks back, they were inspired by the culture at IndyHall and similarly, speaking with Tony from CoworkingNYC. They made a post about a common theme that came out of our conversations and that the majority of us put much higher value on results than process.

Rather than caring when you get to work, where you’re working from, or that you’re “following the rules”…we’re actually more interested in people who are willing to bend or break the mold, try new things, innovate, and get to the highest qualty end result by “any means necessary”.

That openness and freedom for the people that we’ll be working with as Round3 grows is key, I think. It’s the type of process that an indie works on, because they don’t have a boss to answer to. Instead of worrying about the process that I had in mind when I delegated a task, worry about the end product that I had in mind. How you get there, how you meet or exceed my expectations (as an employer or a client)? So long as communication stays open, I’m a happy camper.

So where do we go from here?

Up, is our best guess. We’ll continue to work at IndyHall as we have been, and honestly, not much is going to change. Individually, we’re bringing some really interesting client work to the table that we’d have turned to the talent that sits around us every day for collaboration.

There’s going to be some transitioning of our existing client bases as we try to bring as many of them on board as we can. We’ve all worked hard to build client relationships over the course of our careers, and nothing would make us happier than seeing them served by the results produced by Round3 talent.

For me, personally, I’m going on the road. The next few weeks are travel heavy, as I attend Future of Web Apps in Miami this upcoming weekend and SXSW Interactive 08 in Austin, Texas at which I’m presenting (more on that soon). All along the way, I’ll be showing off not just the cool stuff that I’m directly involved in (IndyHall, Round3, etc) but will be spreading Philly love in any way that I can. I’m so excited to get to show the world, even in these two venues alone, what the talent in Philadelphia is up to. If you see me at either of these events, ask me about what’s going on in Philly. I’ll give you an earful of excitement, for sure.

The IndyHall community is one of my proudest accomplishments of my entire life. Round3, though only at its inception, is yet another moment in time that I’m insanely proud to be a part of, and I’m so excited to see grow from the seeds we’re planting.

Tags: alex hillman, bart mroz, business process, creativitiy, indyhall, jason tremblay, johnny bilotta jr, ken rossi, round3media, scaling indies

Original Photo by Jill Greenseth

Today marks the 1 year anniversary of me having gone independent.

Wow.

A year. Really? I go back and forth between “that’s it” and “that long”? In some aspects, I feel like it was only a couple of months. In other aspects I look at all that I’ve managed to accomplish everything I’d set out to do, and much much more.

I partnered with some amazing talent, many of whose work has earned us opportunities to work together more than once. I worked with some amazing clients (many of whom are brands that I really, really love).

I’ve co-built a couple of funny little apps that got a fair amount of attention, which was never the plan…the plan was to have fun building them.

I co-founded our own little version of a much larger movement that, in it’s own right, has paved the way for more opportunities for myself and countless other people. That’s one of the most gratifying and exciting accomplishments of my life, and I’m SO happy and grateful to have been a part of it and have made all of the friendships and connections I have along the way.

One year in, I’ve learned a lot about making choices and how to learn from the choices that I, and others have made.

The Next Chapter

It’s only appropriate that my newest client not only has choice in their name, but is excited to learn what happens when you give a community some opportunity to make choices.

My newest venture is a new kind of building. This one is less about building a website site and a lot more more about building a community. Learning from the wonderful community building experience we’ve had here at IndyHall, I thought it’d be great to take the model to the road and allow others to benefit from it. This next foray into community building is with a company called Choice Shirts, just outside of Philadelphia in Pennsauken, NJ.

The new project is called The Choice100 and it’s first incarnation as a blog has launched last night. It’s simple and direct, but that’s by design. The whole goal of the project at this stage of the game is to facilitate asking a potential community of design talent what they think about the proposed community model, and feed back as to what would benefit them the most.

This project has me really excited for a number of reasons. One, it’s a really fun opportunity to have conversations with the folks who work in a field that I’m closely tied to (design, that is) but from a whole new angle for me; graphic design for apparel.

Even moreso is that a company with a fairly traditional (and well established) business model is just as amped as I am to listen to their customers (who, in this case, double as their product creators) and be so open about the process.

In the preliminary research on who to have in the loop for this, I got some really positive feedback from designers that have worked in other t-shirt “contest” and “designer community” scenarios. Of course, they’ve all had thoughts as to what was good and what was bad. What’s really great about ChoiceShirts and The Choice 100 is that the company has a history spotted with creative evolutions of existing and established business models, and that they are embracing a conversation within a community to help model the next steps for their company.

Sounds wonderfully Cluetrain to me. What happens when you stop selling and start conversing. ChoiceShirts is not only embracing that, but they’re excited to embrace that. That’s immensely energizing and inspiring for me.

We’re going to be starting from the ground up. This blog is out there to announce the existence of this new evolutionary process for ChoiceShirts, and gather the interested parties in a place where they can converse. Next steps will include some real-world brainstorming, which we’ll facilitate at IndyHall much like the first brainstorming session we held back in August.

Check out the site, leave some comments, and subscribe to the blog and twitter feeds if it sounds like something you’re interested in participating in. Remember, this project is about us hearing what you have to say!

I’ll be there, will you?

Badge prices go up $25 after today, so if you aren’t on the Panel Submission waiting list like me, you’d best get on that.

I’ve got some pretty rad plans, and even if only one of them manages to get executed, this year’s SXSWinteractive should NOT be missed.

Philly, represent!

Oh, and don’t forget my tips from last year on how I survived SXSWi07.

In my years on the internet, I’ve dealt with a number of mainstream ISPs…back in the dialup days, I settled on a local company who was good at supporting even things that they didn’t have to. I had a habit of janking up my local lan settings as a kid…their support staff was kind enough to walk a younger, savvy but inexperienced me through fixing whatever I had mucked up.

Since being responsible for my own utilities, I’ve dealt with almost every major telecom provider…Verizon and Comcast for internet, and I’ve had an account at almost every cell phone provider. Bottom line: the customer support at every single one of them absolutely positively sucks.

When we opened IndyHall a couple of weeks ago, I made a conscious decisions NOT to utilize Comcast or Verizon for our commercial internet install. My members’ usage was priority, and a quick, stable connection was a must…but I’ve been without service for unacceptable amounts of time in the past due to awful, awful customer support.

I started asking around, and a lot of people recommended SpeakEasy(referral code included). I called to get some clarification on their commercial line plans, and settled on the top speed commercial DSL: 6meg down, 768k up. For our office, this would be perfect, and I was told that should I need to grow into a T1 it wouldn’t require any downtime. The service rep helped me schedule our installation, and we were slated to have everything in fairly close (within about a week) of our first day in the office.

The two part installation was painless. On the first Monday in the office, someone came from the phone company to install a loop in the basement of the building. The tech showed up on time, had worked in the building before, and was very friendly and got right to work. A few days later, I called Speakeasy to confirm that his installation had been completed successfully, which I was told was correct. I also confirmed our final installation date, which at the time was for the following Tuesday.

At that point, I shot in the dark, asking the phone support “Is there any chance of moving up the final install date? It’d be really great to provide your service to our members sooner…”. Quickly, he came back, and moved up our installation to Friday instead of the following Tuesday, buying us 4 extra days of service! I was so pleased, I thanked him, and moved on.

The final installation was also great…the tech once again arrived right on time, and diligently worked through some really tough, old wiring in the building. He updated me regularly on the progress, and we tested the line together before he left.

1 week later, my phone rang, and it was Speakeasy. “Hi Alex, we’re just calling to see how your first week of service was?”.

Wow. Proactive customer support. That was new to me, in the realm of internet providers and telecom. I was honest with the guy and told him that while the speed was acceptable, it was a LITTLE slower than we had hoped, but that was mostly likely due to the old lines in our building. He agreed, and said that if we wanted that I could call back at any time and they would come back to test and, if necessary, replace the lines.

At this point I told him who we were, what we do, and how I value customer support so much. I explained to him that this was one of the most pleasant experiences I’d EVER had with customer support, let alone within the telecom industry, and that I really, really appreciated it.

So this post is an open THANK YOU to the folks at SpeakEasy for proving that customer support isn’t dead, and I highly suggest to anyone, based on my experiences, that you should consider using their services for your next business venture.

Tags: internet, commercial DSL, speakeasy, verizon, comcast, customer support

isn’t for the lack of interesting things going on. Quite the contrary, in fact. I have a MILLION things I want to write about. Among them:

• The opening of Independents Hall on 32 Strawberry Street
• The power of building the community before the product or service
• My own discoveries about balance and time management
• Neat new development projects
• A summary of what I’ve learned so far along the path of building IndyHall
• and much more…

In the mean time, to tide you over, you can read this piece in the Philadelphia Inquirer about IndyHall.

I’m about to walk away from my computer and all connectivity for 3 full days…the longest I’ve unplugged in as long as I can remember. Today is the 3 year anniversary for Ryan and myself. It’s been a crazy road, and she is amazingly supportive of everything that I do even though, at times, my time commitments to work related things make for bad juju. I love you very much sweetie, thank you for a great 3 years.

Oh, but before I sign off and leave the state for a long weekend, one other big announcement.

Geoff and I signed a lease on a space for Independents Hall last night. I’m going to drop off our first rent check and security deposit, getting the keys and then trying to forget that on Monday, the next chapter of Philadelphia’s coworking community begins.

Congratulations to everyone who helped us get here. Ecstatic doesn’t describe what we’re feeling.

Tags: vacation, Ryan, love, anniversary, independents hall, coworking, lease

Sorry this is a day later than I had planned. I’ve got 2 events on my calendar this week that happen to be at the same time. Which one do I go to? I’m not sure yet! MAYBE BOTH!!!

Social Media Club Wednesday August 1st @ 6-8pm

This month’s Social Media Club meetup will be at the upstairs bar of Triumph Brewing, at 2nd and Chestnut (and right around the corner from the new home of Independents Hall…more on that soon!). I’ve never been to one of these, but it seems to be a catchall for social, marketing, and media folks. If you’re interested in any of that, think about checking it out! Plus, Triumph is a sweet, sweet spot, it’s where Indy Hall had our BlogPhiladelphia party for those of you who remember that shindig.

Green Drinks Wednesday August 1st @ 6-8pm

Green Drinks invites anyone interested in or curious about green, ecological, environmental, organic, renewable, regenerative, or restorative issues for drinks and conversation with like-minded individuals in their community.

WHEN: first Wednesday of each month from 6-8pm-ish

WHERE: Standard Tap 2nd & Poplar Streets in Northern Liberties Philadelphia’s Center City www.standardtap.com for menu, specials, directions, etc. several local beers, including: Yards, Victory, Stoudt’s, Flying Fish, Sly Fox, Troegs, Appalachian, Weyerbacher, McKenzie Brewhouse and more… A NEW location! We moved recently to support several attendees’ green ideas + requests, trying to support local businesses and breweries, and staying convenient to public transportation, bicyclists, and carpoolers/drivers.

Not in Philadelphia? Check to see if there’s a GreenDrinks in your ‘hood.

As always, if I didn’t get your event leave me a note in the comments and I’ll add it!

Tags: green drinks, social media club, philadelphia

Roz made really great post on the urban family, and afterwards followed up with me offline about the format that etsy (an awesome crafty/boutique community) has run that really feels like a direction that IndyHall is headed.

Etsy has another “entity” called EtsyLabs, which allowed them to extend their successful community of people selling their things online into a resource to teach OTHER people how to experience that same success from doing something that they love.

Roz is spot on, part of the fuel for me wanting to start organizing Independents Hall was self-serving: I’d already built a successful business that was based around sharing of talents between friends and established talent partners. Since it worked so well for me, I not only needed a place to find more partners (thats the self-serving part), but also I wanted to show others the value of collaboration, and make it easier for them to be awesome at what they do.

Along the way, many of us have become friends, and encourage each other to succeed and be happy with what we do, even outside of the realm of “work”. The fact of the matter is, Independents Hall has allowed us to build the foundation of an “urban family” that’s much larger than just our circle of friends, acquaintances, and business partners. By taking an online community offline, and doing things face to face and not just for the purpose of business but for the purpose of improving the quality of our lives, we make huge strides to unify an otherwise segmented community that we live in.

Tags: urban family, community, philadelphia, Etsy, EtsyLabs

I made promise to some people that I’d start doing an event summary much like I did last week at the beginning of each week. This week I don’t have much new to add, but I’ll re-post in case you missed it from last week’s summary. Also, if you have an event (one time or recurring) be sure to drop a note in the comments so I can add it to my calendar and include it in these posts. But for this week of July 22nd, 2007:

Purple Cow Brainstorming Circle Tuesday July 24th @ 6-9pm

Monthly, the Purple Cows (that’s Seth Godin speak, for those who missed my previous post) have a brainstorming circle. This is kinda like a rapid-fire barcamp. The model goes like this:

You get 3 minutes to pitch an idea. Any idea. This isn’t just tech stuff, it can really be anything. At the end of 3 minutes you give 3 things you need to realize the idea, and 3 things you have to offer to it. Follow up with 3 minutes Q&A. So in ~7 minutes, you’re ready to move onto the next idea. Its fun, efficient, and a great way to inspire and be inspired.

The next one is at Joe’s Coffee Bar, - a socially-responsible business participating in the “Buy Local Philly” campaign. RSVP on the wiki.

Junto Thursday July 26th @ 6-10pm

Another monthly event held at P’unk Avenue. Born out of the pages of a history book, Benjamin Franklin created the Junto as an opportunity to bring everyone from the common man to the aristocrat together to share ideas, interests, and goals with the understanding that you can better yourself by bettering the community, and vice versa. Our Junto follows those goals, but updates it to current times and puts a focus on creativity in the community. Each month we have a different “keynote” topic or presentation, and from there it’s open forum for discussion and industry chat. Rumor has it that the Junto format wants to be a barcamp when he grows up. P’unk Ave chips in beers and tomato pie, feel free to bring other snacks or a favorite drink/mixers if you would like. We’re not quite a happy hour, but we’re not all business, either. You can sign up on the site to get notifications for this event.

This iteration of Junto will focus on a lot of Post-BlogPhiladelphia stuff, what we can do to carry the energy that started there, so if you have ideas or want to keep the ball rolling you’d best show up.

Cream Cheese Session Friday July 27th @ 9am-5pm

Every other Friday the members of Independents Hall come together for a coworking session. Since we don’t have our own space (yet), we move all over the city.
This next event will be held at National Mechanics, on 3rd just south of Market Street.

Tags: events, philadelphia, coworking