A Better Job Board
There’s a handful of great creative industry job boards that aren’t specific to Philadelphia, and the ones that are here tend to be relatively underused or mis-populated. At the same time, Indy Hall has been decidedly pinned as a “source for talent”, while we actively avoid putting ourselves in the middle of the recruiting pipeline and encourage those hiring to come participate in Indy Hall to find the talented folks themselves.
This isn’t scalable or maintainable, so I wanted to share our goals for “something better”.
The primary consideration in the solution we’d use and support is putting the people at the center, not the jobs. That’s core to our mission, and so it is important that it’s core to everything we do.
What that turns into is that the “job board” needs to work in a way where it facilitates job exchange, not just passive job listing and grabbing. It needs to become a place where people, ideally members instead of administrators of the board, play an active part in helping share job opportunities & talent availability.
Having run a coworking space for 3+ years and being a member of this community for many more, I’ve seen where jobs really come from: relationships. Indy Hall is fundamentally designed to allow for the creation of relationships – even lightweight casual ones – in the workplace. This is uniquely attractive to people because they don’t have to try to make friends WHILE working…instead you end up with a higher chance of working with friends (or at least helping your friends work). It’s an inverted workplace construct that truly increases the quality of life during any given project or term of employment, and therefore creates longer lasting and more valuable working engagements.
Those who’ve built or observed many new job boards notice a “chicken and egg” problem of charging for a job board that isn’t well populated. I actually think that is the much less interesting problem with almost ALL job boards, and how I’m motivated to help build a better one with lessons learned observing and participating in work exchange at Indy Hall.
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Don’t Try to Name Us
“Philly kicks ass. The creative class term, though, always comes off to me as a way for someone else to co-opt the work of the doers. Don’t try to name us.” – Geoff DiMasi
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Not Just Another
Self-Involved Tech Scene
Philadelphia’s tech community is special.
It’s hard to have this conversation without appearing to have an inferiority complex. It’s also a conversation that’s been had dozens of times, and dozens of different ways.
Ultimately, nobody comes out on top when cities start comparing themselves to each other.
Besides, it shouldn’t matter why one technology community is “better” than another. It’s not about resources, capital, talent, or government support. It’s not about the cost of living. It’s not about climate. It’s not about how good the food and drink is. It’s not about how good the music is.
And at the same time, it’s about ALL of those things together. Together, we call a set of societal attributes a “culture”.
And every city has a different culture, some more reminiscent of others.
There’s a relatively recent boom of cities that use their technology community as the center of their illustration of culture, and then they compare and contrast those attributes against other popular “tech cities”. But very few self-identify with existing elements of culture.
In Philadelphia, we’re growing what we’re growing organically. We grow what’s needed, not what others have prescribed.
Philly’s tech scene doesn’t care that it’s a tech scene. It cares about making a difference, not just for itself but for future generations.
Philly’s tech scene is full of people who either were artists, or should have been artists. Philly’s tech scene isn’t just tech, but also includes leaders from education, science, government, the arts, business, and more. Philly’s tech scene works towards bettering Philadelphia, not just Philadelphia tech.
And it’s not for charity. When Philadelphia as a whole wins, so do we.
The best thing about Philly’s “tech scene” is that it’s not about supporting tech. It’s about supporting a better version of a real life in Philadelphia.
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Vitamins vs. Prescriptions
Giving good advice is difficult.
Taking good advice is even more difficult.
Asking for advice the most difficult.
I’ve noticed that the exchange of advice typically comes in two forms: prescriptive and transformative.
Prescriptive advice is full of assumptions. A person prescribing advice is giving information that is usually a projection of their own experiences, ideas, ideals, desires, and agendas without taking the time to realize the “history of the patient”. While advice from their own experience tends to be the kind of experience that people are most confident giving, it’s missing an element of context for the recipient.
Phrases like “you should”, and “it’s important to” signal messages that are absolutes, and while they might be the right advice for some or maybe even many scenarios, the assumptions that come along with prescriptive advice are most likely to generate the need for ongoing advice, much like a dependency on a medication.
Transformative advice is like a vitamin. It’s full of nutrition. Instead of covering up your pain, it gives your brain the tools it needs to recover from the problem you’re experiencing on your own. Providing transformative advice gives the recipient an opportunity to really expose the issues they’re experiencing rather than simply pointing to the body part that hurts. It requires some diagnosis on the part of the advice giver. But rather than projecting personal experiences, ideas, ideals, desires, and agendas, the advice-giver provides context, and perspective.
Phrases like, “what if”, and “what do you think about” lead questions that can help bring the recipient to action, rather than define the action explicitly. This not only lets them factor in information that you as the advice giver might not be privy to, but takes them through the exercise of thinking about the problem for themselves instead of needing to come back and ask the same question a second time.
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Encouraging Collaboration in Coworking
This is a repost from the Coworking Google Group, because I thought it was useful enough to share here as well.
I like to look at collaboration on a coworking space from an ‘environmental’ perspective. Not like the earth’s environment, but what in terms of how you can influence behavior by changing the variables of the environment.
Think of it this way: it may be your goal to encourage collaboration, but ultimately, what you REALLY want is collaboration to be more likely to happen on its own. So it’s more of an indirect path to your goal. Here’s how we do it.
We’ve operated on the thesis that trust and relationships are the most important precursor to successfully working together, and as such, we’ve worked hard to make Indy Hall a “Community of Trust”, where events like the ones Thilo lists below serve a very specific purpose:
They get coworkers who otherwise might not be as likely to “bump” into each other casually to get to know each other outside of the working arrangement, but still in (or near) a working context.
By having work be the context, there’s a mutual understanding that the potential for working together (or otherwise collaborating, learning, etc) is baked into their interactions, so they don’t have to focus on pitching each other. Instead they focus on their personal relationship, what else they have in common, what shared connections they have, etc. Those bonds lead to trust, and trust as I’ve said is the precursor to collaboration.
If you take this environmental approach, I think you’ll find that it’s far more sustainable than shouting “COLLABORATE, YOU FOOLS!!!” at your coworkers, and the quality of life at your coworking space increases multi-fold.
With this in mind, you can take the most common events held at most successful coworking spaces, like meetups & usergroups, parties, group lunches, etc, and see how it encourages this kind of behavior, and you can also brainstorm what kinds of events make sense for you and your crew.
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