Open for drop-ins Monday through Friday from 8:30am to 6pm. No reservations needed.
1617 Boylston Ave, Second Floor, Seattle, WA 98122 - (206) 323-6500 -
info@officenomads.com
Since our inception, Office Nomads has found a fantastic partner in Biznik, the small business networking hub that was founded in Seattle by our good friends Lara and Dan. Their slogan “going it alone, together,” could double as a slogan for Office Nomads. Biznik brings independent small-shop business people together to learn, share, and network for the collective strength of the small business community. Office Nomads is a big, big fan of our friends at Biznik.
With that in mind, we’re excited to announce a new special for our Biznik friends – get 50% off your first month of Part-Time membership at Office Nomads! That’s right – if you’re a Biznik member, you get yourself a sweet deal on your first month as a member of Office Nomads. Just show us your Biznik profile and we’ll be happy to extend the special to ya.
Sound good? Get in touch with us and let us know. Better yet, swing on by the office (M-F between 8:30 and 6) and we can tell you all about it in person.
Well, everyone – it’s been a pretty darned significant week here at Office Nomads, as well as in the coworking world in general. A few exciting things to note:
The acquisition of coworking.com by the coworking community. The coworking community received a great opportunity this week to collectively purchase the coworking.com domain to utilize as a tool for the coworking community. This has been a truly inspiring experience that both Jacob and I are honored to be a part of. The domain purchase has also kicked-off a continuing conversation on the future of coworking and how the larger community’s needs can be met. Read a nice long post on the matter by Alex Hillman of IndyHall in Philadelphia. See the initial website by visiting http://coworking.com. If you’re into coworking and want to see the overall conversation about the site and what it means for our community, check out the Coworking Google Group and hop into the conversation.
Great response to our new membership rates! After only two weeks of our new Office Nomads membership rates, we’ve seen 11 new members at one of the new Part-Time rates. Whoa! We’re taking that to mean that y’all dig the new rates, so we’ll keep ‘em around. As always, if you’ve been meaning to come on by and check out what’s happening at Office Nomads, now’s the time to take us up on that free trial day. The office is full and brimming, even on a sunny Seattle Friday!
Jacob and I have also been brainstorming away with how to help coworking grow and thrive in Seattle. If you’d like to join in the conversation, please join us at the next Coworking Seattle meetup on Thursday, February 25 at Indie Ballard.
Have a great weekend everyone. I can’t wait to see what happens next week!!
Thanks to flickr user digicla for use of the starfish photo above under the creative common’s license.
December is here and you know what that means… It’s the season for giving. This year, Office Nomads is in such a giving mood that we want to give you presents and maybe even help make your holiday shopping a bit easier.
For the month of December, come check out Office Nomads and if you like what you experience, take your pick of one of two great specials:
Now through the end of the year, new members who sign up at the Regular or Resident level can choose to pay just $100 for the first month or enjoy the third month for free!
OR if you’re feeling like getting in on the giving too, anyone who signs up for a Basic membership in December gets a free month of basic membership to give to a friend or colleague.
Remember, everyone who works at Office Nomads gets
High-speed 10Mbps internet access
Wireless (wifi) or wired networking
Use of three conference rooms
Basic print/fax/scan
Coffee/tea
Free notary services
Great company!
And membership at any one of our levels brings even more benefits including access to exclusive members-only events at Office Nomads.
So if you’ve been thinking that working at home just isn’t working for you, this is a great time of year to try out coworking at Office Nomads!
For more information, drop on by the office or send us an e-mail at info@officenomads.com.
(Thanks to flickr user fazen for use of this photo under the Creative Commons license.)
It’s officially time to celebrate Office Nomads turning two! That’s right, we’ll be crossing into our third year coworking in Seattle, and want to throw a party to celebrate. Here are the important details:
Office Nomads Turns TWO!
Thursday, October 8
6-10pm
@OfficeNomads – 1617 Boylston Ave., Second Floor
As usual, there will be drinks, food, and great people. We’ll also be featuring new art from Kuros Zahedi, who’s beautiful piece “Garden of Hope” has been living in our main conference room for almost a year now. More of his art will be out and about throughout the space, and it is not to be missed! This date syncs up with the Blitz! Capitol Hill Art Walk – so if you’re planning on attending the art walk, make Office Nomads a stop for sure!
Come on by, meet the awesome members of Office Nomads, and raise a glass with us as we celebrate our first two years.
Want to RSVP to let us know you’re coming? Here are some of the spots you can find the event online (because everyone has their favorite…):
It’s time for a new membership level at Office Nomads! We’ve heard from several of you that you’d love to see a basic membership that brings you closer into the community even if you are unable to be a Regular or Resident member. Well wait no more, Basic Membership is here! Here are the details, as pulled from our Membership & Pricing page:
Basic Member – $50/month
You want to be hooked into the Office Nomads community but know that you are not able to be in the office enough days to be a Regular or Resident Member. You want to drop in from time to time, stay connected with the coworkers you met in the space, and be in the loop when it comes to events and goings-on in the office. Get a Basic Membership and enjoy 3 drop-in days/month, with drop-ins thereafter at only $20/visit. You’ll have access to the space Monday-Friday between 8:30 AM and 6 PM.
So if you’ve been waiting with bated breath for us to finally announce this, your wait is officially over. Come on in and join us as a Basic Member anytime!
Today marked the fourth official time Office Nomads has been fortunate enough to have Karen Lindenberg of Phyzz Yoga come in and teach those of us who are interested an hour-long session of yoga.
After today’s session, I have a confession to make: until today, I doubted that we could ever regularly host yoga sessions in the office. Why, you ask? I am a big believer in the value of a separation between work and “home” (or gym, yoga, art) spaces. Well, today I realized that it was time for me to bend that guideline a little bit more than usual. Because yoga in the office ROCKS.
Our hour-long break with Karen each Wednesday is officially my new favorite thing about Office Nomads. Yoga at the office is providing me (and my fellow Nomads) with a great break from sitting diligently at our desks, a time to get our eyes away from our screens, and to enjoy putting our bodies through the paces that Karen leads us through each week. Coworkers stretch alongside one another, laughing in the moments when we all struggle to hit a pose or letting out a big collective sigh when we all get to relax on our mats. It’s awesome. And I’m coming to believe that it is a key part of an effective workday, even when it happens at the office.
As coworking spaces and other “alternative office spaces” emerge around the world, I imagine there will be a constant balancing out of the desire for office spaces to put in as much “fun” as possible in the interest of retaining members or employees (this idea reminds me of an old article I read in Utne, titled “Are We Having Fun Yet? The infantilization of corporate America” – the description of working at Aquascape was particularly wild to me) without overly complicating what they’re trying to do. You can overdo office “extras,” but with the right balance between productive work time and goofing-off time, it actually becomes easier to focus and the day becomes much more productive.
At Office Nomads we have a simple goal: to be a home for 40 independent professionals who are looking for a great place to work. But we don’t just want to be a place to work, we want to be a place where people & businesses grow, valuable conversations are had, connections are made. This means that (even if it blurrs my clearly defined lines between work and home), we get beers together, we go out to lunch together and yes, we do yoga together. And we’re all the better for it.
Well we finally went for it – Office Nomads synced up with Karen Lindenberg of Phyzz Yoga and took a yoga break in the office! As one of the participants, I have to say it was awesome. Not only was it a great way to break up the day, but finally I didn’t have to stress about whether or not I was going to get in some exercise today – it just happened right here.
Hands-down my favorite moment was when Karen told us to tighten our “C-3PO wires” in our midsections – this woman not only is a rockstar yoga teacher but really knows how to speak to her audience. We got to geek out AND get in a great stretch & strengthening session. How great is that?
We’re hoping to do more of these in the future as a great perk for our members. If you’re another office space in Seattle reading this post, we definitely recommend having Karen come by your office to do the same – it’s a blast! Thanks, Karen -we hope to see you here again soon!
The other night, I was walking back to my desk here at Office Nomads. It was a bit after 6 pm–later than I usually work–and the office was mostly empty except for a one or two other people. As I passed through the main room I glanced over at three pods of desks that fill the area there and was struck by how lived in they all looked. Office Nomads, I realized, has become a home office of a different breed.
The first time I came in here, way back in November 2007, it was just a day or two after Jacob and Susan opened the space for the first time. The space then was huge and empty. Clumps of desks were gathered around the few electric outlets and network drops while the front desk was just another able in a tangle of wires. There were no couches.
See. No couches
The other night though, as I walked through it, the space looked and felt lived in, and I mean that in the best of ways. Those of us who spend our days here have made it our own. Desks, which now share the space with couches, tables and shelving, are filled with decorations and work tools. People have their own favorite desk chairs and for some reason, one chair is adorned with a sideways smiley face. In short, we’ve all become so comfortable here and with each other that an office–something that is generally thought of as a sterile environment–has become a home for us all in a relatively short amount of time.
Interestingly, I think this means that the physical manifestation of the coworker’s desire not to work from home is fast becoming a new breed of home office.
What the heck is that? Good question. It is a CoCollage screen and it is the newest addition to the Office Nomads space. A CoCollage is a basically a virtual refrigerator door. A local company puts a large flat-panel screen in community gathering spots such as ours visitors (or residents) a place to post, well virtual detritus of the sort that, if it were real, you’d stick on a refrgerator door with a magnet. According to the company, they want to help people mix their virtual and “real” worlds. They were pretty excited to hang it here since all their other installations are in coffee shops. This is the first one with a stable, recurring user base.
To be honest, it’s kind of strange right now, but I think that’s because it’s so new and we’re all not really sure what to put up there. During the testing/seeding phase, Jacob put a bunch of pictures up there from his house remodel and Susan added shots of our last Open House. Ol’ #2 (Tim) loves to send cranky quotes to the screen and Suzi is putting up some of the more interesting science pictures she has in her store. Tim also likes to mess with people who walk by his desk on the way to the kitchen where the screen is. The other day I passed him only to be ordered back to work by the screen. Creepy.
Anyway, we’re definitely guinea pigs for this new company so the sky’s the limit with what can be put up there and how we use it. All CoCollage wants back is our feedback and you can be a part of it by checking out and adding to the stream from the office or online. So if you’re in the neighborhood and looking for some place to display your latest macaroni art or witty thought, stop by and log on! Actually, you don’t even have to be here to add our ongoing mash-up. Just create an account and start uploading (though, your stuff shows up faster and more often if you’re actually in the space).
Ideas can spread like wildfire. Sometimes all you need is a spark to set one off. Last week, Susan provided that spark to some members of the coworking Google Group by announcing the release of an Office Nomads video tour of the space (It’s our second video, as a matter of fact). Said video is now available on the main page of our site, and, well look at that! It’s right below this paragraph as well!
Now, I KNOW those aren’t the only coworking videos out there (in fact, I featured a couple from Affinty Labs in Washington, D.C. and BlankSpaces in LA late last year which are worth watching again), but they’re the ones I know about. So, if you have more, let me know in the comments, on the Google group or in an email. I’d love to get video of as many different coworking spaces as I can up here.
