New Work City » General

How is NWC important to you?

tony — Fri, 02 Apr 2010 14:48:55 +0000

Member	Responses	RSVPed	Date Answered
Sarah Cooley	How is NWC important to you? “It’s a community of smart, amazing people, that I enjoy being a part of!”	Yes	Apr 1, 2010 2:51 PM
Michael Stearne	How is NWC important to you? “Extremely”	Yes	Apr 1, 2010 2:48 PM
Rob Kelley	How is NWC important to you? “New Work City is a unique, welcoming place for tech workers in New York City. ”	Yes	Mar 31, 2010 6:48 PM
Sara	How is NWC important to you? “:) Is this for inspiration? New Work City has brought more joy to my life than I can say. ”	Yes	Mar 31, 2010 5:11 PM
John Thomas	How is NWC important to you? “It is very close to my heart. It gives me a chance to work with very cool and exciting people.”	Yes	Mar 31, 2010 4:11 PM
Hayden Perkin	How is NWC important to you? “Because it provides an refreshing alternative to the blandness of the mainstream of corporate workplaces.”	Yes	Mar 30, 2010 5:01 PM
Jesse Middleton	How is NWC important to you? “It excites me beyond belief to see what you’ve built here in NYC. It’s quite amazing!”	Yes	Mar 29, 2010 1:40 PM
Orian Marx	How is NWC important to you? “NWC is important to me because it is one of NYC’s true breeding grounds for entrepreneurship.”	Yes	Mar 29, 2010 1:14 PM
Edward Hall	How is NWC important to you? “I’m new But it gives me hope!”	No	Mar 29, 2010 1:10 PM
Kaarli Tasso	How is NWC important to you? “It is important both as a space and a community of people. Eager to help it make the next leap.”	Yes	Mar 29, 2010 12:17 PM
Kara	How is NWC important to you? “Even though I’m not a regular attendee, I think the space is very important to building a strong tech/indy/entrepreneur community in NYC. ”	Yes	Mar 29, 2010 11:03 AM
Jade Dressler	How is NWC important to you? “V I S I O N I still plan to be a part of this space someday.”	Yes	Mar 29, 2010 11:01 AM
myles fennon	How is NWC important to you? “From a business standpoint – it’s a place for me to help developing companies take the next step, from working in a quality nurturing enviornment, to stepping out on their own to find space that fits their needs. ”	Yes	Mar 29, 2010 10:36 AM
Dana Spiegel	How is NWC important to you? “As a place where entrepreneurs can grow and socialize”	Yes	Mar 29, 2010 10:32 AM

IMPORTANT: New Work City Town Hall, April 1st. No Foolin’.

tony — Mon, 29 Mar 2010 14:21:36 +0000

Two years ago, I drew up a home page for a new project, and called it New Work City. The new name and new effort signified a concerted and determined effort to build a dedicated coworking space in Manhattan.

The response was overwhelming, and two years later that project has flourished into an thriving community of incredible people from all walks of life. We found a space to call home, and used that as our headquarters for coworking, parties, discussions, workshops, fund raisers, launch events, BarCamp planning committess and more Meetup groups than we can count.

Hundreds of people from all around the world have landed at NWC to work and collaborate. Thousands have participated in our events and benefited from what our community has produced as a whole.

We are now at a crossroads. NWC is packed almost daily and has sorely outgrown our current space, and the community has swelled to the point that we are ready to do far more together than we can possibly do in our current iteration. It’s also become clear that our days in our current space are numbered; consequently it’s becoming increasingly important that we secure a new home sooner rather than later.

Join us Thursday, April 1 at 7pm to discuss where we go from here, both literally and figuratively.

RSVP & Details on Meetup –>

New Work City exists and thrives because you want it to, and where we go will be wholly shaped by where you want it to go, just as it has always been.

There are so many great things for us to do together. Let’s get to it!

Best,
Mayor Tony

“Go Epic, or Go Home.”

New Work City’s First Anniversary and Member Launch Party

tony — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 19:12:02 +0000

My my, what a year it’s been! Join us Friday, October 23^rd to celebrate NWC’s first year of coworking and to explore what’s in store for the future.

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

RSVP on Facebook

See you there!

Cheers,
Mayor Tony

New Art for NWC, Compliments of ArtLoop!

tony — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 15:53:59 +0000

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)

Join us for the New Work City New Member Lunch

ana — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 20:42:28 +0000

Hey New Work City members! While our mayor Tony Bacigalupo was gone on Whuffaoke, his cross country karaoke quest, our membership nearly doubled. This is fantastic news, but now there are more NWCers than we can keep track of. We want to help new members get introduced and settled in, so we’re holding our first New Member Lunch, inspired by those held by our friends at IndyHall. It’ll be a chance for us all to meet each other face to face, share who we are and what we do, and help all our new people feel welcome.

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!

Announcing CoStructure

tony — Mon, 31 Aug 2009 13:51:08 +0000

Reposted from the CoStructure blog.

Independents have it made, right? Being in charge of one’s own schedule is both a blessing and a curse– while one is no longer compelled to go to an office when the boss says so, one is also left with the responsibility to self-impose proper balance. Without an external force being applied to help structure one’s life, the balance is hard to achieve and harder to maintain.

CoStructure is an effort to achieve that balance by working towards it together. Learn more about the original idea on this wiki page: http://nwc.wikidot.com/costructure

Below are the first posts from our first set of participants: myself, Mark Burstiner, Greg Palmer, and Whitney Hess. Each has their own unique personal and professional background, but each shares a common need to improve the structure of their lives.

Check out our first posts, which we all wrote after our first meeting last week:
“Co-organizing CoStructure” by Mark Burstiner
“I Wish I Knew How to Quit You” by Whitney Hess
“Accountability Game” by Tony Bacigalupo
“Keeping CoStructure Challenging” by Greg Palmer

This is very much an experiment, one which doesn’t yet have all the ingredients and certainly isn’t fully baked. But as we explore how to help one another stay sane and get our stuff done, we thought we’d share and have you along for the ride so you can help us figure things out as we go.

How do you achieve better structure in your life?

Bloomberg’s Announcement on MediaNYC 2020 and its significance

tony — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 00:15:47 +0000

Originally posted on CenterNetworks here.

Today, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg outlined the city’s plans to boost the media industry in NYC in a variety of ways as part of MediaNYC 2020, which was originally announced in February.

Most notable and relevant to us, of course, is the effort to build a “Hive” space for independent media makers and other independent workers. The overlap with our ongoing efforts with New Work City and the Runway Project is obvious, so seeing the city make an increasing effort in this area is exciting for us. This, in combination with the city’s announced efforts earlier this year at fostering entrepreneurial growth, is beginning to add up to a real, noticeable effort on the part of the Mayor’s Office, the EDC, and others to foster healthy entrepreneurial growth in the city.

Creating an entrepreneur-friendly ecosystem

Effective spaces do two things: they help new businesses get connected and grow, and they provide a fertile ground for new partnerships to be discovered an evolve. We’ve already seen that progress in our community, where members have formed partnerships to start new initiatives such as LaidOffCamp and Zeitheist, among others. Freelancers, too, have found work in meeting and working alongside their colleagues, and through referrals that we pass along.

Our members also started and run the Runway Project, a community-driven education effort aimed toward people starting new businesses in the wake of the recession, and have helped dozens of newly independent New Yorkers get connected, educated, and on their feet in short order. All of this has sprung out of an environment designed to facilitate this sort of healthy activity.

Creating Sustainable Entrepreneurial Growth

The main challenge to establishing city-sponsored workspaces has been the fact that they have been historically temporary– reliant on below-market leases during bad markets which, when the markets rebound and prices go up, end up folding without external support.

At New Work City, we’ve been making lots of progress toward sustainability on our own. Our aim is to strike the balance between keeping membership rates low enough so as to be accessible to early-stage businesses and independent workers, while still maintaining enough cash flow to run a profitable business that gets everything at fair market rate.

For the new efforts the city is making in establishing spaces, my hope is that any new spaces that are established are done so in a way that creates long-term, sustainable economic growth. That means not relying on subsidy but on a sound business model that will survive tidal changes in economics and politics.

With the city increasing its emphasis on new and small businesses, I look forward to helping the city find ways to create this healthy growth in a city that is very much ready to take its place as a friendly place to be an entrepreneur.

Rackspace partners with New Work City for free hosting, file storge, email & more!

tony — Sat, 23 May 2009 00:16:06 +0000

While at SXSW this year, I was lucky enough to meet Gerald Zhou from Rackspace, who was at Austin’s Conjunctured coworking space.

For Conjunctured, and now for us, Rackspace will be offering members of New Work City FREE services, detailed below:

Mosso (website hosting via Cloud Sites) - http://mosso.com
* Unlimited sites, databases and email
* Automatic scalability without input
* .NET and/or LAMP

Jungle Disk (online storage and backup on Rackspace Cloud Files) - http://jungledisk.com
* Online network drive to share documents with fellow coworkers
* Backup client to backup crucial files on your computer
* Webaccess to files
* Fully encrypted data
* Conjuctured will cover your storage costs, unless they are ridic

Mailtrust - http://mailtrust.com
* POP and IMAP business class e-mail
* All with BlackBerry and iPhone support.

All these services are free for New Work City members. I know free is a strong word, so, to be clear their are limits (bandwidth, storage space), but they are very, very high. Just send me an email if you would like to get hooked up. Rackspace isn’t asking for anything in return, but you would totally rock if/when you take advantage of these services that you let them know you appreciate them helping us out.

Rackspace is all about feedback, all about listening to their customers, and all about improving their services based on what they hear. So, I think the best way we can help them out is to give honest feedback. You could do this by Tweeting it out, emailing feedback, thanking them at coworking@rackspace.com, or perhaps writing a blog post with your thoughts.

If you’re interested in getting other Rackspace products or want more info on these services, you can always email our special peeps at coworking@rackspace.com. They would love that.

We’ll talk about this and other benefits we’re working on adding to membership during our Thursday 6pm Town Hall– right now, most of you aren’t formally members, so we’re working on finding good ways to formalize your membership here so you can take advantage of these sorts of things.

More to come!

NWC Town Hall: Thursday – 5/28 – 6:00pm

tony — Sat, 23 May 2009 00:15:07 +0000

So, we’ve been open for just over six months now. That means, despite opening in the midst of a massive economic collapse, we haven’t gone broke!

That’s awesome, and the fact that we got open and stayed open is huge. But we’ve got so much more to do. There’s still a lot of room for improvement, and a lot of great new things to explore (and maybe one or two things to announce!)

And we need your help.

Let’s meet at New Work City on Thursday, May 28th at 6:00pm. We’ll buy the beer and the pizza!

Please reply below if you want to join!

Changelog: Added FreshDirect Drinks & Snacks!

tony — Thu, 07 May 2009 17:56:21 +0000

VitaminWater, Chips, and more to come, with a suggested donation.