Some months back, I was approached by my friend Dana Vachon about any interest in having a mural made for one of the large, stark white walls. Of course! We’d been looking for ways to get more color and interest into the space for some time, and a full paint job was just a bit more daunting than we were ready to take on in our free time/off-hours.
Dana is a graduating senior from the Fine Arts program at The College of New Jersey. One of her final-term classes was a mural class, and since her and her project partner had to make a piece anyway, it made sense for us to help cover their materials costs and in return, have a piece of art for our hall.
Dana and her classmate Jess McGovern asked for input on any themes. Honestly, I wasn’t comfortable providing too much of a lead, because a) I’m anything but an artist but, more importantly, the space we work in doesn’t just belong to me. I wanted something that could be meaningful for all of us, and embodied some important themes of our work.
After shooting down an Alex Hillman portrait in the style of Andy Warhol, we talked more about themes of coworking. I explained to Jess and Dana about The Starfish and the Spider, the notion of leaderless organizations, and how that tied into the coworking model as well as the coworking movement. At the same time, I felt that it was really important to keep things themed to Philly, the city we’re all so proud to represent and call our home.
What Dana and Jess came up with was much, much cooler than anything we could have asked them to do.
Following our lead with the “Philly” theme, as well as taking the Starfish’s “unstoppable power”, and depict what we all *ahem* hope is a reality in the new future: that our actions and goals take the city of Philadelphia by the tentacle and make a very REAL impact! (Of course our version of this reality, unlike the mural, does not involve ripping the roof off of Independence Hall and carrying it across Old City to the Ben Franklin Bridge).
Editor note: This thing is huge. its 5′ tall by 12′ long. We’ve yet to get a picture of it next to something to give it perspective. But seriously. Huge. Perspective? Check it out next to my 24″ iMac, on the left.
In case you’re curious, the buildings/structures from left to right include:
The Ben Franklin Bridge
The spire on top of Independence Hall
One Liberty Place
Independence Hall (minus the aforementioned spire)
Our beloved National Mechanics, the cause of and solution to, so many of our problems.
Dana and Jess have worked incredibly hard on this project, from the concept to the installation, and we can’t thank them enough. We’ve got a meaningful piece to adorn our walls that they should be proud of, because we certainly are!
On Friday, Peter Key of the Philadelphia Business Journal wrote a story about three of the creative grassroots organizations in Philadelphia that are working together to make a difference, and that included The Hacktory/Make Philadelphia, Philly Startup Leaders, and of course, us! You can read the full article displayed using Vuzit’s (one of our local technology friends) handy viewer.
And then, this morning, a great piece in the Daily Candy Philadelphia highlights our office and community as an alternative workspace for, you guessed it, indies and freelancers. Thanks Daily Candy!
New visitors, welcome, enjoy our site and feel free to contact us with any questions.
There is a lot of tech community growing in Philadelphia, and it’s awesome to see. But frankly, we all are a bit too serious at times. Educational events, planning and networking, oh-my! Sometimes it’s too much.
To keep us from going sane due to all this productivity, Geekadelphia, TheHacktory, and IndyHall (also known as G,H&I Party Planners) are teaming up to do a Battlestar Galactica party on May 10th, starting at 5PM.
At 5PM stop in for some LAN party action, and try out the Offical BSG game and the fan-made (and award winning) Beyoned The Red Line game. Both set in the BSG Universe. We might have a spare machine on hand, but please bring your own PC if you can! Meanwhile we’ll play episodes and hang out between rounds.
At 7:30PM we will stop the gaming for a while to watch the Best of BSG. We will pick the 3 best episodes on the spot to watch. If you haven’t been watching the show, this is your chance to see what everyone is raving about.
And while you are watching, you can chew on Cyclon raider cookies and Battlestar shaped cake. I kid you not!! Out food-scientists are hard at work planning every detail of this modern meal monstrosity. Of course the I’m sure the party will continue even after the ‘Best Of has been watched, and the ships have been consumed Glacticus style.
If you plan on snacking, we suggest you either bring some BSG themed food, or bring along $5 to chip in for pizza, drinks, and other snacks. If you want to game, please bring your own PC. If you want to help make this happen, please e-mail FarMcKon@gmail.com, with the subject BSG Party Planning. We’d love the help. Cyclon Raider cookies don’t bake themselves!
Please RSVP on the Facebook event or login to the Hacktory website to sign up for this event.
Posted by Alex Hillman on 04-16-2008 under Uncategorized
We still owe shirts to a bunch of members who renewed but we haven’t seen yet. I know, I’m a slacker. I’m back on it, we’ll be announcing their availability very very very soon. Promise!
In the mean time, for those of you who haven’t renewed or aren’t in the Philly area, we’ve very, very excited to announce the availability of t-shirts for anyone to purchase!
We make a couple of bucks on each of these shirts, and like every other line for income for IndyHall, that’s money that goes directly into creating more value for our members and the entire Philadelphia community that we touch.
If you order 3 or more shirts at a time (and not just IndyHall shirts…ANY shirts on choiceshirts.com), the shipping is waived.
Also, do us a favor when you get yours and put it up on flickr and tag it “indyhall” so it will show up in our photo stream up to, or email them to my first name [at] indyhall [dot] org.
I know I can’t wait to start seeing these shirts pop up in places I’ve never been. I’m sure we’ll run a “furthest distance from IndyHall” shirt contest at some point, so get ahead of the curve and grab one today.
We’ve recently rekindled our relationship with Philly Car Share, and will soon be resuming our movie night event that we had a blast holding last fall. Unfortunately, the date we set on our calendar for the first one this spring snuck up on us and we haven’t done a very good job putting all of the pieces together in time. For now, the event that was supposed to be this upcoming saturday will be postponed for a Saturday in the very near future.
This summer, when PCS resumes it’s Drive-In Movie event, we hope to get a big group of IndyHallers to attend together. Be sure to stay tuned for that.
Things have been very busy at IndyHall for the last few weeks. VERY busy! Here’s a quick overview:
First off, after the blood drive we took an opportunity to rearrange and clean up the office. This includes:
Our main “team floor” area has been rearranged to accommodate 8 full time desks, and 7 desks for lite and basic/drop in users. This is one additional desk more than we had before, and the room is MUCH more efficiently laid out. Come by and check it out!
Our upstairs work loft has been reassembled and will now be available as a “quiet work area”. It’s no secret that sometimes, the social aspects of coworking become overwhelming and if you need a place to be where you won’t be interrupted, we’ve now got that. The work-loft desk breakdown is still being determined, but like the downstairs we’ll be designating part of it for full time users who prefer a more heads-down environment, and the rest for the more migrant flavors of our membership. It’s currently laid out to accommodate 7 desks.
Workshops and events continue! We’re going to continue to make the majority of our programming free (stuff like this past week’s Illustrator and Wordpress workshops), but we are graciously accepting donations. This past Saturday we got some VERY generous donations from people who we can only presume got a great deal of benefit from our event. As long as you keep doing things to tell us we’re doing a good job, we’re going to keep doing those things! We’ll have a Paypal donation button up in a few days for those of you who don’t carry cash/checkbooks, and seriously…thank you!We’re also going to be opening up to hosting more external events, both social and educational. So if you’ve got an idea, feel free to drop us a line.
Faster, better internet & network! For those of you who have been here on busy days or during a workshop, you’ve felt our pain: our internet slows down, and our wireless has dropped out. Not for long! This Friday we’ve got a new commercial line coming in that gives us 8mb down and 1mb up, bursted to 16 down and 2 up! Additionally, a couple of our members are coordinating a room rewiring initiative to get hard lines to as many desks as possible. Transferring files between 2 computers in IndyHall at full gigabit speed will soon be a reality!
IndyHall Labs - the details of this one are going to remain a little sneaky while we sort some things out, but so many good ideas and so many bright minds sit in the same room these days, we can’t help but want to give them some new resources for productivity. More on that soon.
More information is in the works regarding our current membership standings, and some other exciting updates, but we’re happy to give you this Monday morning update for now!
This Thursday (4/10) at 6pm, we’re going to be schmoozing our usual spot but this time with a special guest!
Matt Mullenweg, founding developer of Wordpress and founder of Automattic, will be in Philly for a few days while he accepts an award at Temple University. Congrats Matt, and welcome to our city!
I’ve coordinated with the dudes (and dude-ettes) at National Mechanics to show Matt what our crew is all about: good times with good friends!
There are a LOT of Wordpress fans in our community (if by no other measure, we have enough to have our own track of Wordpress workshops).
I look forward to seeing many of them out, and a fun evening of geekery.
IMPORTANT UPDATE: Location changed to 5th and Cambridge this Saturday (evidently they have too many people coming to Penn Treaty Park)
This Saturday April 5th at 10am join Indy Hall and 10,000 other enthusiastic Philadelphians as we work side by side with Mayor Nutter in giving our city some well deserved TLC
The Challenge: “During my 2007 mayoral campaign I pledged to clean up Philadelphia. As your Mayor, I am going to fulfill this promise by reducing the amount of litter and trash that plague our city’s neighborhoods, streets, parks and recreation centers. I have made litter reduction a priority in my administration and am committed to making Philadelphia one of the cleanest cities in America.” - Mayor Michael Nutter.
The Oppurtunity: We need to give our city a good Spring Cleaning! On April 5th, join thousands of your fellow citizens in neighborhoods across the city as we try to make Philadelphia a more beautiful place.
The Plan: A group of Indy Hallers and friends will meet at Penn Treaty Park, under the statue,5th and Cambridge, at 10am to get their delicate coding/design/writing/typing hands dirty making Philly cleaner. Stay as long as you can, wear your Indy Hall T-shirts and follow @davespeers on twitter for news and updates through out the day.
Thanks to everyone who played along with yesterday’s little April Fools joke. IndyHall is NOT sold to anyone. Not even close. We love our space, we love our community, and its valuable beyond measure of money.
Just to show you how ridiculously awesome this group is, 22 people from IndyHall and supporting organizations (including WebLinc and Philadelphia CityPaper) donated blood on this past Saturday. Thanks to the push from friend of IndyHal, Reed Gustow, we had a great turnout AND this awesome video documenting the experience.
HUGE thanks to everyone who came out and supported. Even the few who could not donate for various reasons, we’re so grateful for your willingness to donate. And a big thanks to the Red Cross staff who ran the event efficiently and professionally, despite the guitar hero going on in our upstairs lounge. I’m fairly confident that was a first for them.
The other huge benefit to this event is the new configuration for IndyHall. New configuration? We’re not posting pictures just yet…you’re going to have to stop by to see it yourself!
And then, this morning, a great piece in the 
