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.

Collaboration Chronicles and Collab21 is a post from: Collaboration Chronicles

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.

Inspiration from Familiar Places is a post from: Collaboration Chronicles