Independents Hall Archive

During my trip last month to Philadelphia, I had the chance to meet Alex Hillman. Alex runs a company called WeKnowHTML and you can also check out the startup tips he provided in June. During the BlogPhiladelphia conference, Alex spoke about coworking and his new coworking space called Independents Hall. In April I asked if coworking is the way we will all work in the future. Instead of working for a company full-time, many developers and designers will freelance/consult and work in spaces such as Alex’s. I can say after working for myself for 18 months, I miss the water cooler talk and the “let’s go get a coffee” chats. Coworking aims to fix this by offering a space to work, get help and mingle.

The Independents Hall official grand opening is on September 1st and Alex has created a video walkthrough of the space which I have embedded below. The space was featured in the Philadelphia Inquirer newspaper today and the story is worth a read. A couple excerpts:

In Philadelphia, Hillman and DiMasi signed a lease on Aug. 10 for Independents Hall, a two-story, 1,500-square-foot space on Strawberry Street, an alley off Market Street in Old City. Hillman spent $1,000 for cheapie yet chic desks and chairs. Hillman, DiMasi and Bart Mroz, an independent Web-project manager, are the quasi-leaders.

“I think when people work at home they have to come up with new ways to interact with people,” said Daniel H. Pink, one of the first authors to write about independent contractors in his 2001 book Free Agent Nation.

“They miss one of the joys and banes of being in an office - the interruptions, the inadvertent contact on the way to the bathroom that sometimes leads to interesting ideas,” he said. “Co-working gives a set of colleagues who will interrupt them on the way to the bathroom.”

While coworking is awesome in the good times, will it be able to survive if we have bad times?