New Work City set out to make life easier for people who can work anywhere. Along the way, we learned that what we were building wasn’t simply a respite from working from homes and cafes. What we’re dealing with, it turns out, is something much larger.

Over the last year and a half, we’ve acted as a home away from home for countless people from around the city and visitors from around the world. We hosted events, harbored the planning committees of several BarCamps and other volunteer initiatives, and have witnessed some brilliant people coming together to build great things.

Space

Having a central gathering place has been a big part of this. Our current space has served our needs for the last 18 months, but lately we’ve been feeling the growing pains. It’s clear now that what we’re doing is bigger than what fits in the space we have, and the impact we can have on our community can be that much larger in a better place.

As it happens, a series of highly unlikely coincidences (and poor planning on our part) have put us in a strange situation and given us a powerful impetus to begin implementing this future: We are going to have to leave our current space at 200 Varick Street by May 1st.

Yes, May 1st. That’s really soon. Crazy, right?

Luckily, we have been preparing for our move for some time now. We won’t, however, be ready to launch a new home in time for May 1st. That leaves us with an interim period during which we will have a unique opportunity to explore the many things our city has to offer.

Road Show

From May 1st until the opening of our new space, we will be hitting the road– opening up our community to visit and work in a variety of spots around the city, and discovering some of the great people, places, startups, and other organizations with whom we coexist.

It will resemble, in many ways, this past fall’s Breakout Festival. It will be geared toward servicing the needs of our community and connecting with related organizations.

We’ll be documenting and sharing everything along the way, and all the things we learn and discover while on this journey will help us better understand the role our new home will play in this ecosystem.

And it will be totally community-powered. If you want to host a gathering, do it!

We’re going to use a wiki to coordinate things for now. (Cue the shudder from wiki haters like me!) It’s mostly just a placeholder at the moment, but it’s here: http://bit.ly/a5tquS

We’re also looking for one spot to call our temporary HQ during this transition period. If you’ve got a nice spot and room for 12-25 of us, give me a call!

How are we going to get away with all of this? Because we’re inherently mobile, and most of us can work just about anywhere. More importantly, though, New Work City is a community first and a business second, and now we are going to have a chance to prove it. We existed without a central space before, and we’ll do it again.

NWC’s members made it clear at last week’s Town Hall that they believe in what NWC represents and stand ready to work to shepherd in its new future.

New Home

Along the way, we’ll be looking at new spaces and exploring relationships with people who can help us get our new home up and running. Just like we did before, I’ll be documenting things along the way. Photos, videos, floor plans, and more will start flowing in as we ascertain our candidates and work on striking a deal.

The first space was launched with the goal of proving that people needed a coworking space in Manhattan, and that it was possible to successfully run such a space. Now, it’s clear that New Work City represents something bigger. While our first space was inherently temporary and primarily focused on giving people a place to work and host small events, our next space should be designed to be more than just a workspace.

The goal with this new effort is to build a self-sustaining local community center– one which can act as a hub of activity for anyone with an independent disposition and a beacon for those who seek a chance to build great things alongside the city’s best and brightest.

Join Us

There’s going to be a LOT to do. For now, I mostly wanted to share with you where we’re at right now, and what our early plans are. As things progress, I’ll be calling upon everyone to step up.

For now, join our Meetup group if you haven’t already– we’ll be using that as the staging area for our future activities as things move forward.

New Work City would never have existed in the first place without the passion and participation of people who, together, constitute the community that New Work City represents. It continues to exist and thrive because we, as a group, share a common set of values and needs, and because we believe that we are better off together than alone.

This is an exciting time for us, and a tremendous opportunity to make a real impact on our city.

Hang onto your hats, folks! This is going to be one hell of a ride.

Cheers,
Mayor Tony

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.”

When it comes to the shortage of women being represented in technology, entrepreneurship, conferences, and coworking spaces, one thing there is no shortage of is examples:

At NWC, we’ve got a decent representation of female membership, but it’s honestly not nearly what we’d consider balanced.

So what can we do about it? Well, part of why NWC is here is to make it easier for people to lead independent lives and find what they need to find. So, for our potential female coworkers out there, I figured it wouldn’t hurt to make it even easier, and lower the barriers even more.

I want to offer up a day at NWC where women are encouraged to come cowork, free of charge, and the boys are only welcome if they bring a lady coworker with them.

Now, this would mean that regular paying members might not be able to use NWC on a day when they otherwise would have. This is something of an issue.

I believe, however, that it’s in everyone’s interests that we develop a more well-rounded community that encourages more female entrepreneurship and participation in the community. Also, since we also all have pretty flexible schedules, I figure with sufficient advance notice people can plan around a day when NWC will be unavailable.

So screw it… let’s do this.

Two weeks from now is Friday, March 5th. So says the Mayor, on March 5th, NWC is open and free to female coworkers and male coworkers bringing a female coworker with them. If you’re a guy and can’t find a lady friend who needs to get her cowork on, we’ll have a limited number of spots you can reserve ahead of time.

Update: Let’s call the date for this event TBD and give ourselves some time to figure out how to do this right. Check this wiki page for a current draft of the structure: http://nwc.wikidot.com/lowering-barriers-for-aspiring-female-independents

We’ll pause at lunch time (12:30) to have a discussion about what people are doing (and what more people could be doing) to lower barriers to aspiring female geeks, entrepreneurs, and coworkers everywhere.

I’m going to discuss this with more members to make sure this works OK enough for everyone, and then post up an RSVP next week.

Update 1:
Somebody very politely pointed out that “Ladies Day” is probably not the best name for this. I wholeheartedly agree. What should we call this thing?

Update 2:
Part of the challenge here is making it easier for more women to participate, while not singling out or segregating women from men. So the event should include a healthy balance of boys and girls.

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

or

RSVP on Facebook

See you there!

Cheers,
Mayor Tony

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!

Reposted from the CoStructure blog.