In less than a week, it will be the two year anniversary of the first time I blogged about coworking. (note that in that post, I hyphenated co-working. ha!). That’s right. Two years.

I’ve been talking about coworking in Philadelphia for longer than Snakes on a Plane has been out.

I talked about coworking in Philadelphia before Steve Irwin passed away.

I was still in school when I started down the path of founding IndyHall.

Longer than Viddler has been publicly available.

A year and a half’s worth of Juntos.

Two SXSW‘s, both times changing my perspective on an industry and opportunity.

Longer than most of you have been twitterholics.

Longer than John Gruber has been avoiding me.

The last 24 months feel like a blink of an eye.

I’ve been talking about this coworking thing for a long time, but I’ve been immersed in it the whole time, not just talking about it. Action has been everything. My inability to sit still has been my greatest asset.

Thank you to everyone who’s inspired and encouraged me. This past year has been truly astonishing, and I’m so proud and thankful to be surrounded by so many brilliant, motivated, hard working, and life-loving individuals.

It wasn’t easy.

In retrospect, it seems easy, but it wasn’t easy. I gave up a lot. I’ve turned almost every aspect of my life upside down. Each step of the way, no matter how difficult, came easier and easier because of a combination of fantastic mentors, and trusting myself.

Where will I be in another 2 years? Where will IndyHall be in another 2 years? So long as I keep following my heart and my intution, I’m confident that wherever it is, I will be happy.

Reed’s message is touching and accurate: donating blood is such a simple act that can make such a huge difference. I know, lots of people don’t do well with needles or are afraid of blood. But think about it this way: what’s the last thing you risked something of yourself for someone else?

As an entrepreneur, I discover daily the ways which not only I, but other people assess risks. Most of the time, the risks people are taking are self-serving. Regardless of the outcome (positive or negative), they are the only person that benefits. I read about and see people make really terrible risk assessments all the time. Donating blood, however, has a KNOWN positive benefit with practically no risk at all.

I can’t think of a better place to dominate your fears while being surrounded by people who support their peers and their risks every day: IndyHall.

We’re having a blood drive here next Saturday, March 29th, from 9am-3pm. We’re only at about half of the donors we need so PLEASE consider committing to a spot and donating.

You need to reserve a spot, and since this is nearly an entire month in advance, setting aside a time should not be difficult. The Red Cross makes it easy (yay! webapps!) to register and select a slot ahead of time online. You can visit our donor registration page to find out more.

One of our friends who’s afraid of needles and knows her risk of passing out has stepped up to bat to be an excellent example for those of you still on the fence: Ruth Kalinka not only jumped up and registered, but she’s also coordinating an ice-cream after-party at the Franklin Fountain afterwards to reward everyone for their bravery. THAT’S awesome. Thank you Ruth!

A big thank you to Reed Gustow for not only helping coordinate this drive, but for helping recruit people as well. I really, really appreciate it.

When:
Saturday March 29, 2008
9am-3pm
Where: IndyHall
How: register here.

[tags]indyhall, indpendents hall, red cross, blood donation, reed gustow, ruth kalinka[/tags]

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[/tags]

For those of us who work on the ‘front end development’ side of things, there’s a careful balance we hang in regarding new browser releases. The short version is that as new browsers approach their release candidate status, we need to be checking and double checking our work in them to make sure that their change logs don’t break our work.

At the same time, there’s a known issue with the fact that, more often than not, running the latest beta or release candidate alongside with the production version (and, if you’re a really good developer, one previous version back from the most current production release to take care of things). Internet Explorer is notorious for this and I recall the headaches I went through beta testing it. I essentially resolved to (and continue to resolve to) use multiple virtual machines, one for each version of IE.

Well if you’re on a Mac and into testing Firefox 3 Beta without wiping your profile for Firefox 2.x, check out Dave Martorana‘s MultiFirefox.

He’s created a little launcher app that, when copied to your Apps folder along with the accompanied Firefox3.app file (appropriately renamed so it wont overwrite the stable version), will let you create and/or select an additional profile, as well as the version of Firefox that you wish to use. It’s clean, it’s simple, and it works.

You can download the dmg (2.0(003) updated 12/22/08) (again, this is mac only), or the zip of the source (2.0 updated 4/22/08) if you want to dig around the guts or, ahem, port to windows? It’s written in Python, because that’s what Dave’s a rockstar in. It’s been rewritten in Cocoa Native, because THATS what kind of rockstar Dave is. That’s not all, though, actually…aside from being an active contributing member of the IndyHall community, Dave also wrote some bitchin’ javascript a couple of weeks ago that got me out of a bind. We’re still testing that but plan to release it as a jquery plugin. Dude knows his stuff and takes a challenge on head first.

Updated DMG and source, v2.0(003) (4/18/08)

4/18/08 Changelog: Updated to include Firefox 3 Beta 5 Full rewrite to Cocoa native (severely reduced filesize) Auto-update for future versions Auto-detect of all versions of Firefox available Supposed support for OSX 10.4 (untested)

3/14/08 Changelog: Updated to Firefox 3 Beta 4

2/25/08 Changelog: Fixed minor profile bug Rework of Firefox launch code Added about screen Decreased filesize

DMG Download (17.98mb, includes FF3 Beta 5) Zip of source (661kb, does not include FF3, uncompiled launcher code only)

Dave maintains this project at his site, CodeContortionist

[tags]dave martorana, firefox, firefox 3, firefox 3 beta, indyhall, launcher, multi profile, multifirefox, python[/tags]

That said, my upside-down sleep cycles from the last several weeks of whirlwind have been making for some rather interesting dreams (no, not the naughty kind). I don’t usually remember them, but last night’s was vivid, odd, and stood out to me as trying to deliver a message to me.

I don’t remember ALL of the details, but the general sentiment was that I was back in my high school. Much like most of my high school experience, I was late and hadn’t done my homework. Where things got weird were, I found myself surrounded not by my high school teachers, but instead by various faces from today’s social media/new media/tech/geek scene that I’ve become so fond of. Instead of my stat teacher, I saw Allen Stern from centernetworks.com. Instead of the Bodeys (a mr. and mrs. pair of english teachers, for those of you who didn’t go to high school with me), Mr. Messina and Ms. Hunt. Hall monitor David Blumenstein had a watchful eye on me as I ran to my locker when I was late for class. Junto-master and IndyHall co-founder Geoff DiMasi was there as the social studies teacher. I’m sure there were more injections from my current reality to my actual past that I don’t remember as vividly, but you get the picture by now.

I’m not usually one for analyzing dreams, but I thought it was interesting that at the turn of the year, the turn of a year where I have so much more that I want to do and so much more that I want to grow, I have a dream like this one. I’m going to think of it as a cue that I need to remember to never stop learning, or think I have to stop learning. I’m going to think of it as a cue that the people around me are the best teachers there are, and part of the reason I look up to them so much is that I hope to be as good of a teacher as them.

2008 is, for me, a year of growth. That was my response on New Years Eve to a tweet that Chris sent out with a “themeword” meme. 07 was a year of experimentation and leaps of faith. I had just quit my job, started attending conferences, building my clientbase, adopting all kinds of new best practice techniques that made me more efficient. Nevermind the leap of faith that IndyHall would not only be successful, but becomes so integral into a community here in Philadelphia.

1 year later, it’s time to take all of the good habits and lessons that I acquired along the path of experimenting in the last 12 months and put them to use in a growth phase. Putting together a more formal team of talent is at the top of my list of “to-dos”, and we’ve already started formulating how that will work. Splitting my time between being the talent, and evangelizing best practices to new ears is also a priority. It’s about personal growth, its about industry growth (our industry, effectively our home), its about knowledge growth.

Instead of just attending conferences, I’m hoping to speak more. Instead of just building web sites, I hope to build web apps. Instead of just inspiring and managing myself, I hope to have a team to manage and keep inspired. I have some personal goals for IndyHall, but I’m going to save them for myself for now because I’m more interested in seeing how the community that we have here continues to hit a stride and take advantage of the resources we’ve created. That giving up of some control, for me, is part of my personal growth as well. I’m learning to practice what I preach!

I’m really excited about this year. Really, really excited.

[tags]2008, dreams, growth, outlook[/tags]