Collaboration Chronicles

Collab21′s wheels have been rusted for a long time now. I just applied some WD-40 and have ordered some grease to repack the bearings.

Our renewed focus is going to be on reaching short term goals rather than our current main goal of moving into a space. Some of these short-term goals are a result of a question posed to me by a principle of the company I work for, “Say you get a space, what are you going to do in it?”

I responded, “I have a prioritized list of 1000s of things.”

“Do those.”

Ideally, I would have a prioritized list of 1000s things to do. In reality, the list is closer to 50. Some of the things on the list actually require having a space, a kitchen, whiteboards, microphones, computers, etc. So I had to eliminate most of the ideas as post-space goals. Of the ones leftover, there were a couple that really stuck out to me:

1. workshops/classes/collaborative work sessions, and
2. Video podcasting

I’ve been working on re-designing our WordPress theme to fit with the palette of our company’s website, with the idea that it will be the primary site, but will park on top of this one. Ultimately, this will be our primary website.

One of the WordPress Plugins I added is called Gigs Calendar, which is designed to be used for displaying a list of upcoming gigs for band websites. It was the best calendar I found for free (leave suggestions for others in the comments).

I’ve so far only set up two events. One is a learn to make beer class, the other is collaborative and will be ongoing from now on. My idea of video podcasting is to film the classes, edit them a bit and post them on the blog for free. There will be a list of all classes on a separate page. I think this will be a great benefit for Collab21.com and for the community. Most of the topics I want to have classes on are passions of mine. I’m sure these will inspire more as time goes on.

Jesus teaches survivalism through parables

Finally, I’d like to announce that there will be an ongoing theme of our classes/workshops, which will be roughly related to survivalism. Call it self-sufficiency or life fundamentalism, it’s learning how to take care of your basic needs with limited or basic resources. I live in a city that’s obsessed with local food and I think that is a good thing. People are looking back at their roots. Farming is what made it possible for us to not have to hunt and gather. Our country has for too many years been separated from the things that sustain our lives. Things like water quality, food production, soil, air quality and shelter are extremely broad topics, and it’s few and far between when I meet someone who can speak to all of these things. Our goal is to learn and teach about topics that will change this.

If you want to read about freelancing, self employment, or running your own business, here’s a post about my little personal niche. This is a catch-all for some general ideas that are always floating around in my ever-adapting pursuit of a living with maximum personal satisfaction. (Not maximum money, by the way.) It’s a sequel to this post, A triple strategy for staying afloat with self generated income.

I like challenges and personal rewards. There wasn’t much of that back when I was a young person working in depressed, cheap upstate NY. It led to hopping around in disposable jobs (but the variety actually became quite helpful later.) The list was pretty long- animal care, cabinet-maker’s assistant, graveyard groundskeeper, porn store clerk, kid’s summer camp counselor, co-op living/dumpster-diving salvager, flea market/antique mall dealer- none lasted more than a few months. Then I finished school, traded the flea market for selling stuff on the internet, and got to be artist at a TV animation studio for 2 years.

The long term prospects in that area were dubious so I quit to move to the San Francisco Bay Area in late ’07. Good timing, because many of my former co-workers were hit with surprise cut-backs and lay-offs.

In that year I did creative freelancing for the first time and learned tons of new skills, mostly for hustling up work and handling finances. Half of my year’s income came from animation, and half from internet sales.

Bad things happened to the economy. In December I went from having a streak of the best animation work yet, to zero. I had an inquiry from a big movie studio recruiter, then 2 weeks later his replacement followed up with news of a hiring freeze.

In creative work the competition is fierce, and if hot work stops coming there’s a plague of locusts waiting. Take a look at this generic freelance job on an average job site: Winning bidder’s rate is $8 an hour. I don’t even bother wasting time looking at those sites. Some competitors for the same work I do – animators in India or wherever- are locked in their employer’s studios as 24-hour wage slaves, in the sense of the term coined by Karl Marx. (It’s annoying when people act like it came from suburban teenagers.) I think if foreign workers are available that cheap, they can have it- if there’s no floor, there’s no competing with them, no matter how hard you work.

I had to adapt again so I changed my home business model to an equal-paying replacement for animation pay. Meanwhile I’m benefiting from the time to polish up new skills, helped by some access to free learning.

When hard work doesn’t get you ahead, flexibility can. Some keys to flexibility:

Maximize resources – combine your means
Minimize liabilities – live within your means
Expand your skill set
Know your limits

——–

Maximizing resources:

1. I use the previously-posted triple strategy
2. I’m using spare time and free learning
3. Here’s a long post I made about a public service I’m lucky enough to have access to for health care. Healthy San Francisco

Minimizing liabilities:

When I moved across country in ’07, I considered renting an expensive, crappy, gas-guzzling truck. Instead I bought a used van at the same price and moved with my own equipment, using the built-in bed too. When I got to the bay area I found that the urban neighborhoods were so dense that a big vehicle wasn’t needed to get around, and the extra parking costs were quite heavy. I sold that van at enough profit between the NY price and the bay area price to cover the cost of a 3000 mile trip. The idea of handling my internet sales on nothing but a bike was daunting (stocking up goods, and hauling crates of mail to the post office)- it’s worked out quite well. The cost of owning a big vehicle that demands to get used can greatly offset the benefit of expanding the range of my business.

Moving across country from the least expensive city to the most expensive demanded a big stash of savings. Around the time I was thinking of moving, I considered other options. In mid-’07 the house I was renting went up for sale at mid 5 figures. I let the agent ooze a no-money-down mortgage sales pitch at me, until I said no and dodged a bullet. The people who bought it spent as much as the house cost for a new roof and remodeling, and then couldn’t find tenants. My neighbor who owned 4 houses across the street gave a nibble too, then he had to dump all of those houses at a 6-figure loss.

Expanding skill set:

Freelancing in animation or working at a small studio means wearing many hats. Unfortunately, the wider my range the less I can specialize. I like variety but don’t expect to work for a big studio without specializing. (A lot of high-end job ads ask for someone who’s expert at 17 things- a colleague is always saying, “who are these people”? Other people say they don’t exist and those ads are often formalities hiding a nepotistic crony system.) Anyways, specializing vs. diversifying is a constant balance. I decided that I was losing certain jobs without the ability to do character animation in Flash. Here’s a small partly-done animation scene I’m still working on.

Knowing limits:

This covers all of the above: know how hard you can compete, vs. how flexible you can be. Combine and live within your means. Balance specialty vs. variety. Here’s another limit: When you’re employing a freelancer, you can get the work fast, good or cheap- but usually only 2 of those.

When you’re in charge of your own living, I think you can choose variety, making lots of money, or personal satisfaction- but usually only 2 of those.

I don’t make a lot of money, but I like having freedom to do a variety of work I want to do, and doing OK in one of the most expensive and competitive cities.

I had an idea after watching a TED video with Cameron Sinclair, founder of Architecture for Humanity.  His TED wish was to create a database of design and architecture ideas so that areas without access to good design can build and be inspired from it.  One thing he mentioned was to put workshops “in ever favela”.  This struck near to my heart.

What could Collab21 do, if we got things running in San Francisco, to help contribute to this idea?  Wouldn’t it be something to put wood and metal workshops and training in every slum in the world?  These people put houses together from scrap, image if they had proper tools and training.

Glass Factory in Italy

So this idea is just a seed.  I’d like to explore it further and possibly do some research before I continue with it or add it as a goal to our Mission101.

Any feedback, advice or direction in this regard?

Website

Some of the Collab21 folks and I are going to be working on redoing our web presence.  We have a few sites set up right now:  Sharks in the Park, Collab21 and this site.  We want to consolidate our business use and public face with a standard design and access it all from one site.  We’re going to sit down next Thursday after our jobs and crank out as much work as we possibly can.  Hopefully it will carry into the weekend so we can have something by the following Monday.

Collaboration

I think this is what collaboration is all about.  Get together as a group, come up with 100s of fantastic ideas, get a few of them started, then buckle down and focus the better ones.  We’re finally at a point where we can start to focus on business.  It took a while, but I’m ready to start exploring new experiences and growing and sharing collectively.

Someone asked me today what the vision of Collaboration Chronicles was.  What is the purpose?  I found myself stuttering.  I started to explain that we’re using to blog about collaboration.  But then I realized that we haven’t really blogged about collaborating between all of the members of the group.  There are some posts about this topic, but the majority of our posts are about individual passions.  Therefore, I’d like to modify my response to include the following five things:

1. Collaboration – working together to solve problems
2. Inspiration – we are inspired in order to inspire others someday
3. Contribution – actually doing the work
4. Communication – transparency in projects and business and open feedback policies
5. Vision – understanding goals and realizing them

Collab21

We’ve met almost every Wednesday since October 2007.  We’ve missed maybe three of the Wednesdays.  We haven’t always had a formal meeting.  It started out with me emailing everyone I thought could contribute and may be interested in this idea I had of mashing The Tech Shop in Menlo Park idea with Hat Factory.  We organized and filed for an LLC, drew up some ByLaws, had some shuffling of members, attracted the attention of a member of Hat Factory to give us some guidance, sold snowcones in Dolores Park on a cold day and brainstormed down to our spinal columns.

What is the result of this?  We have some money in the bank.  We don’t have enough to get into any type of Industrial or Commercial space in the city.  None of the members really need the space to do their work anymore.  But we’re all still very passionate about having some space to do projects in, and potentially use for freelance work.

We have a mailing list with more than 50 people on it, but only two or three have actually shown up to events we hosted in the past.  We wanted to keep hustling this, but got discouraged and started doing other things.

Then I had an idea that we would host mini workshops in my apartment instead of having meetings every Wednesday.  I thought I would called them “Workshop Wednesday”, and the premise is the same as any coworking place: bring your laptop, drink some coffee, get your damn work done.  A couple people showed up to these as well, but nothing really significant.  We don’t have any drawing power.  The experience isn’t really there.  We’re still really just a group of friends who have big dreams and no capital to even being to realize them.

I’ve been inspired since the first to do greater things with business.  We’re going to rebuild our site and our brands and start invisioning our futures better.  We know what we can do, now let’s do it!

The first thing we’ve discussed is hosting real workshops with a real marketing campaign.  There’s a lot of prep we’d need to do to get this going.  The website redesign is the first step.  Keep reading if you’re interested, because we’re not done yet.

My tax guy let me know that I have a little slack after paying the government more than necessary for the first 3 quarters of 2008. It seems like a good time to work on a plan I have to animate stuff for a new website. It will have a lake (ho ho, my last name), with a loch ness monster and etc. I felt like doing some field sketch for research. (Also, I always have concrete fatigue living in the Mission.) So I decided to take a few hours for a bike trip.

Googling led to the bay area hydrography wiki, which had a list of aquifers- bays, creeks, springs, and lakes. I wanted a small one that wasn’t landscaped and might have frogs and herons and seclusion. Jewel Lake looked good, and it was a 45-min. BART ride and a 2-mile bike ride into Tilden Park.

2 miles over a mountain- arrgh. Plus I’m slightly sick with a sore throat, so that was murder. Dragging myself out the door late also meant I didn’t get there until after 4pm. There was just an hour of magical sun over the mountain.

I wandered around taking pictures of mossy shit in the woods with my fancy new googleyphone (the 3mp camera is supposed to be good.) Then I sat on a log to have an orange for lunch. A berkeley hippie in all-white was there, and he started chatting. It was amusing at first, until he got into talking about liver cleansing and the alchemical properties of hallucinogens. It was harshing my mellow, man, so I just answered “mmhmm” and after a while he left to berate someone for smoking. I managed to squeeze in 1 sketch (no warm up) at twilight. The air suddenly chilled and I left, last out of the park. Next time I want to spend at least 3 hours drawing.

Let me preface by saying that I promise that the links in this post will lead you to information that will be relevant to collaboration through either Collab21, Collaboration Chronicles or Fog City Gardens in the future.

This morning, I opened my feed reader (I use Google reader) and read a post on Get Rich Slowly about Gary Vaynerchuk.  This is a name I had not heard before.  However, one of his sites (http://winelibrary.com) I had.  Last March, I was searching for software that I could keep a log of what I was spending on wine, which wines I owned, which I had consumed, notes on wines and other information about a blossoming interest I have.

I followed a link to Wine Library TV to see what it was all about.  After watching the current episode, I was hooked.  Not just because I have an insatiable love for wine, but because here was a guy who was totally unpretentious about what he was drinking, sitting next to a master sommelier, telling him things that he could smell and taste that the sommelier could not.  He was full of energy and it was all directed to giving a good show for the 40 odd minutes that the video took up.

I had to research this guy.  What did he have that we are all lacking in our Wednesday meetings (except David when he shows up)?  His blog has a couple of really great video posts, too!  Damn!  I went back to the original blog I was actually reading and realized that Gary had given a keynote at the Affiliate Summit West conference.  I had to watch this, and I shared it with anyone I thought would care, including my girlfriend.

Watching all of these videos really inspired me.  I had plenty of ideas.  I now know I need to concentrate on being creative, because that’s what I’m good at.  I can direct that creative energy to business, but getting into the marketing side is going to be impossible for me.  I need some help.  This is what collaboration is all about.

I signed back up to Twitter after a 2 year hiatus.  The purpose of using Twitter is for holding reminders on good ideas, as well as charting personal growth progress.  Eventually, it will be used for marketing whatever it is I’m slinging.  For now, I have to dig deep to figure that slinging part out.  So, for the time being, I’m exploring what I can claim I am a relative expert in.  The first three were easy…it doesn’t take much to push myself into the range of expert:  just paying attention and more experience, both of which are easy to get.  I’ll figure out what it is I’m going to be doing with an online presence and with these collaboration sites soon enough.

The best part of my day is that Gary Vee added me back on Twitter.  He really does pay attention.

Recently I have become a part of a local company called Natural Nannies. It started here in SF as a co-op of women looking to create a group to support each other in their childcare positions. It is now an LLC designed to teach and support its unique group of nannies.

I recently went on some field trips with other nannies to local attractions with a group of children. Seeing the Academy of Science from the perspective of a child is a amazing thing to witness. Something as mundane as a school for fishes swimming by suddenly becomes a sight worth stopping for. And an albino alligator becomes a mysteriously pale creature worthy a hundred questions. The penguin show was also a great exhibit; a wall of glass revealing underwater tunnels full of curious birds bobbing up and down. So close to the glass that a small hand could almost stroke the tiny feathers shining under the false sun. Another surprise hidden on the delicately painted walls of an African exhibit was the miniature elephants. A family of ghostly elephants walking across a distant savannah magically appears from the painted bushes only to disappear in a stand of coloured trees. A fantastical illusion to a child becomes merely a technical mechanism to an adult, a projector placed out of sight.

All and all my second tip to the Academy of Science was a wholly different experience given the context of children. It is always refreshing to experience a new perspective on life, through different eyes.