NGA blog and Birmingham coworking

This is the story of two items on today’s to-do list.

New Generation Arts Festival blog

BCU have hired several bloggers to cover different aspects of this year’s New Generation Arts Festival. As a fairly direct result of my work with My Fierce Festival I’ve been asked to cover the ‘online interactive’ side of things which should be very interesting. My first job was to get my ‘welcome post’ up. I’d have knocked that off a little quicker if I wasn’t enjoying chatting to people via Bambuser while I was doing it. Still, it’s done now and here it is – nothing to shout about really but comments are welcome.

Birmingham coworking wiki

In case you’ve not come across coworking the idea is that some types of workers – especially freelancers who are often homeworkers – would benefit from working around others of their ilk. There’s a lot of value in bouncing ideas off others, making connections, etc and so on. In some cities there are dedicated spaces for this sort of thing.

I had a conversation with Joanna Geary about this last night. In fact several people have been discussing this recently and the idea seems to be gathering momentum – apparently there’s a chance of something being set up in Birmingham which would be excellent. In the meantime, there are plenty of places around the city which would be suitable for people to drop into from time to time, it’s just a case of organising something.

I stumbled on Microcoworking.com the other day and thought that it was a workable enough model. They don’t have a single space to work in, they have many and they use a wiki to flag up where people will be and when. So…

I’ve set up the CoworkBrum wiki for the potential coworkers of Birmingham to organise themselves, coordinate sessions and generally do with as they will. I’ve put up a bare-bones layout, it’s now for the community to adopt it, nurture it or let it fade away.

Thanks to Sixball, Kev, Bluemilkshake and Joanna who visited my ramblings on Bambuser while I was doing this.