Brian Kerr

Today is the one-year anniversary of µcoworking / microcoworking. It’s a thing that happens at certain intervals. Here’s the original invitation:

Microcoworking calendar for folks in and around Ann Arbor. If you have work to do, but not a place to work, you are invited to join us whenever and wherever there is something on the calendar. You may also add time to the calendar, just make sure to be there.

Over time, this got burned down to:

You are invited to microcowork (e.g. work together, or alone but in the presence of others) at any of the times and locations on the calendar.

People have been sitting around in cafes or on benches or in other folks’ conference rooms or the like bitterly fighting off structuration and incubation and all that control addict bullshit for longer than a year. But/and before during and after that flickering timespan when “coworking” meant anything to anybody, y’all have wanted this fire in the Delta City.

But today, after a year of Wednesdays, observe. A nice thing about µcoworking, as opposed to other non-membership-based non-organizations, is that you can drift towards and away from it without distress. There’s nothing at the center besides a calendar and a cup of coffee. You come and you go.

Limited peripheral participation (read: ripeness) is all.

(tags: coffee cybernetics fire invitations microcoworking network notwork time year)

Try something tomorrow that you haven’t done today, temporarily and for the activity’s own sake. Don’t eat. Don’t sleep, and work on your favorite project vigorously through the night. Disable Verdana and browse the web.

Find a limit and push it gently.

(tags: cybernetics invitations self)

(tags: annarbor ☄ cybernetics invitations michigan ypsilanti)

October 27 2007 — you’re invited — arbcamp.org — clickthrough urgently

(tags: annarbor arbcamp attend events invitations logo october 27 2007 urgently)

Kaliya is putting together this event:

The She’s Geeky (un)conference will provide an agenda-free and friendly environment for women who not only care about building technology that is useful for people, but who also want to encourage more women to get involved.

It is designed to provide women who self-identify as geeky and who are engaged in various technology-focused disciplines with a gathering space in which they can exchange skills and discuss ideas and form community across and within disciplines.

If you’re in the lesser rustbelt area and interested, I can put you in touch with a few Ann Arbor area folks who were thinking about making the trip — in which case you could begin your week with She’s Geeky and end it by telling us about what happened at ArbCamp that weekend!

(tags: events invitations mountainview october 22 2007 shesgeeky)

 _________________________________________ 
/ ArbCamp is coming up soon! It's a       \
| one-day event we're organizing, to be   |
| held on Saturday October 27th at WCC.   |
| The challenge is to try to attract a    |
| diverse or interesting crowd, keep      |
| everybody in the same space for a few   |
| hours, and hopefully make a bunch of    |
| connections and cool ideas, not losing  |
\ (too much) money in the process.        /
 ----------------------------------------- 
        \   ^__^
         \  (oo)\_______
            (__)\       )\/\
                ||----w |
                ||     ||

 _________________________________________ 
/ For me the major reference point is     \
| RecentChangesCamp, both the 2006 and    |
| 2007 versions. From 2006, see the       |
| budget; ArbCamp will be smaller, but    |
| this is about the right level of        |
| financial transparency to shoot for.    |
| The 2006 wiki at one point had scanned  |
| receipts for expenses, but I can't find |
| that page tonight. From 2007, see notes |
| from 'What to remember for future       |
| events', which I remember as a          |
| frustrating and productive highlight of |
\ RCC 2007.                               /
 ----------------------------------------- 
        \   ^__^
         \  (oo)\_______
            (__)\       )\/\
                ||----w |
                ||     ||

 _________________________________________ 
/ The key here is that there's a certain  \
| kind of unstructured structure you need |
| to pull off an event like this, and     |
| it's a larger, more diffuse, amount of  |
| work than you'd expect. And if all else |
| fails, just do everything in public,    |
| and hopefully someone will make         |
\ corrections as things go awry.          /
 ----------------------------------------- 
        \   ^__^
         \  (oo)\_______
            (__)\       )\/\
                ||----w |
                ||     ||

 _________________________________________ 
/ The other reference point is opening    \
| space, or open space technology         |
| (dorkily abbreviated OST) -- but        |
| whatever you call it, it's just a       |
| pattern of bringing people together in  |
| a certain way. Many people have spilled |
| many words about open space stuff, but  |
| a really good starting point is Michael |
| Herman's very concise 10-page guide to  |
\ organization and invitation.            /
 ----------------------------------------- 
        \   ^__^
         \  (oo)\_______
            (__)\       )\/\
                ||----w |
                ||     ||

Links

• ArbCamp
• RecentChangesCamp
  • 2006 — Budget
  • 2007 — What to remember for future events
• Michael Herman — Inviting guide (PDF)

(tags: annarbor arbcamp invitations process web)

Text of an announcement I tried and failed to send to the a2b3-coworking mailing list:

Introducing ‘a2b3-microworking’ a public calendar over on Google Calendar.

HTML: http://tinyurl.com/37neb2
ICAL: http://tinyurl.com/3a4m8d
RSS:  http://tinyurl.com/377xnk

Syndicated at http://a2pla.net/a2b3/ and etc.

What is microcoworking? http://wordie.org/words/microcoworking

Why not Yahoo calendar? because it’s more stingy with feeds and I bet more of us use Google Calendar anyways. The only grossness is that one of the people who are using it already will have to ’share’ calendar posting access with you.

I’ll conclude with the description I wrote for the google calendar:

“Microcoworking calendar for folks in and around Ann Arbor. If you have work to do, but not a place to work, you are invited to join us whenever and wherever there is something on the calendar. You may also add time to the calendar, just make sure to be there. Send a note to brian@joechip.net to get magic calendar posting privileges (sorry for the hassle).”

If any of you putative microcoworkers have ideas for how I can make this work better for you, let me know.

(tags: annarbor coffee collective invitations microcoworking public-transportation)