The summer open house is going to ROCK! Please join us this Thursday, July 8th from 6-9pm for an evening of photography, info on sharing resources in Capitol Hill, and all the usual shenanigans you find during our quarterly celebrations. RSVP here and let us know you’re coming! Here are all the details on the fun:

• New art! We are incredibly pleased to welcome Youth In Focus to the office walls for the next several months. Youth In Focus is a fantastic Seattle-based nonprofit dedicated to empowering urban teens, through photography, to experience their world in new ways and make positive changes in their lives.  As part of the Blitz! Capitol Hill Art Walk, we’re incredibly excited to host this new round of art!  You can read more about the featured show by clicking over to our Featured Artist page.
• Zipcar in the House! We’re not the only ones in town who think that sharing resources (like offices) is a great idea. We’ve teamed up with Zipcar to offer great discounts to our members, and hope to step forward even more to inspire our Capitol Hill neighbors to share with one another. Sharing resources like cars and offices means that we can each make less of an impact on the planet as an individual. Come and chat with the good folks at Zipcar at our event to learn more about what they’re doing in Seattle and in other great cities across the country!
• Coworking Seattle Meetup! If you’re interested in joining in for a great pre-event, please join us for the Coworking Seattle July meetup. Our group will be talking about great opportunities to share marketing costs, and how our little organization can help to promote coworking throughout our great city. You can RSVP via the Facebook Event if you’re up for joining us!

That’s about it!  If you’d like to join us, you can RSVP to let us know you’re coming (and help us determine how big the keg will be!).  All are most welcome, so bring a few friends along and make us a part of your summer Thursday night.

**Important PS: We’ve got A/C, so if you’re out there sweltering in the new-found Seattle heat, come on in for some relief and a cool refreshing drink.

Office Nomads currently is the lucky “temporary home” for “The Garden of Hope,” a gorgeous piece in our main conference room by Bellingham artist Kuros Zahedi. We have been housing it for over a year now, and would love to make this amazing piece a permanent part of the office!  We need your help to do it.  Here’s the story:

“The Garden of Hope” was created as a part of Sustainable Capitol Hill‘s 2008 summer festival – Imagine Capitol Hill.  Much of the festival was planned out of Office Nomads, with weekly volunteer meetings and volunteer trainings happening in the space.  Kuros responded to an RFP we put out for the event for creative, collaborative art pieces.  For his piece, Kuros gathered a group of volunteers the day before the festival to collect trash from around an area of the neighborhood.  After it was all collected, he spent the entire day of the festival putting the trash onto these four doors with the help of any festival attendees who wanted to come.  The result was awesome!

After much time art-sitting this piece, Office Nomads would love to make The Garden of Hope a permanent installment at Office Nomads.  Not only would it be great to know it’s going to stay, but it would support the work of an artist we greatly respect (and who has been a featured artist in the space before!)  Kuros has adjusted the price significantly for our purchase of the art, as he really wants us to have it.  So, we need to raise $2500 to secure these pieces for Office Nomads’ future.

Want to chip in?

We could use the help!  Office Nomads is accepting donations (not tax-deductable, sorry!) of any amount to raise the funds to buy this gorgeous piece.  If you are a regular user of the main conference room, you know how great the panels look in there, and how they brighten the room.  They also tell a great story of the type of projects Office Nomads loves to be a part of.  We’d love to keep the story alive and collectively raise the money to purchase this piece and support an artist we adore.

If you’re interested, head over to the front desk and let us know how much you can contribute.  You can write a check, add on an amount to your monthly bill, or empty your spare change into the jar on the front desk.   Anything helps!

All the love,
Susan, Jacob, Alexandra, and the rest of the ON crew

It’s January so that means it’s time for our January Open House!  Fitting, right?  Well, we are really excited for this month’s open house on January 14th from 6 PM to 9 PM when we’ll open our doors to the wholecommunity to celebrate art, coworking and each other.

What: January Open House

When: Thursday, January 14th from 6 PM-9 PM

Where: Office Nomads- 1617 Boylston Ave, Second Floor

Food and Drink: We’ve got the goods, just bring your pint glass!

We are proud to be part of Capitol Hill Art Walk again this month and are featuring the beautiful photography of Mychal Richardson of Lost Photography.  His show, “Faces of Washington” was created for the ACLU and includes seventeen 36″ by 36″ black and white portraits of courageous individuals from all across Washington State who fought for their rights and the rights of others.  It is an inspiring show and one not to be missed.

Something we are very excited about is the opportunity to be part of the art!  Andy Aupperlee of Explosion 5000 will be here taking photos of you and your New Years Resolutions.  Andy is really excited to have some fun with these photography so bring a big smile and your creativity to be expressed in the photobooth.  At the same time, we have partnered with a couple local businesses in an effort to tempt you away from some of those New Years Resolutions. Ice cream from Bluebird Ice Cream and beer from Elysian Brewing always are incredibly delicious and will both be here.  Make sure your bring a sweet tooth and your pint glass!

The only thing that could make the Open House any greater would be you!  We hope you can join us and bring along your great friends and family.  What better way to celebrate winter, photography and the neighborhood than with our community?  We look forward to seeing you!

Trevor Smith

http://trevor.smith.name

Member Since: April 2009

Type of Member: Resident

Trevor’s work is about helping creative individuals realize their visions.  “In general, I help people who have ideas about doing something interesting with technology.”  Sometimes that means working with an artist or with a biologist.  They all find Trevor to help them manage software development, helping find material for fabrication, etc.  “These people always have 4000 more ideas that they can’t do and that is where I fit in.”

One such project is to do the software infrastructure for a robot that will be installed in the San José Airport.  The robot will be able to react to the people, lights, the flights landing and many other factors surrounding it.  He is also building software for an installation that will be pillars covered in LEDs and his software will make the patterns in the lights.  Trevor has been a part of a diverse range of projects and his website does a great job a cataloguing them, from the robot to the websites.

Trevor is a one-man operation based in Office Nomads. Here he pours his creative energy into his projects without the distractions he found while working from home. “Raw productivity almost doubled when I came here.”  He sticks around until his daughter’s school, which is only down the street, let’s out and then they grab the bus to the door of his house.  At home he finds that he doesn’t have his own art because, he says,” All my creativity goes into helping other people solve their problems.”  He does, though, have the time to train for a half marathon he will be doing in January.  Trevor’s sister has challenged him to the Key West half marathon and, turns out, Trevor is willing to get competitive if it’s an excuse to go to Key West in January.   The Nomads will be rooting for him.

Eager readers line up to buy Michelle's most recent book - "My So-Called Freelance Life."

A belated thanks to all of you who came out for the Fall Open House – what a great time we had!  Michelle Goodman brought an excellent addition to our seasonal open house, reading excerpts and answering questions about her book – “My So-Called Freelance Life.” A big crowd of budding freelancers came to soak up the event and to hear some of her helpful hints in person.  Congratulations to Michelle on another great book for the freelancing world!

Another big thanks goes out to Michelle Bates, our fall artist on display!  Come by the office anytime to take a look at two of Michelle’s gorgeous photo series.  They are providing a great new atmosphere in the space and we are feeling very lucky to have such great work up on the walls.

Kelly shows ON some love.

I’m wishing I had taken more photos throughout the evening, but I was much too busy having a great time!  If anyone else has photos from the evening, feel free to add them to the Office Nomads Flickr pool for us – we’d be glad to see more shots from the great night!

PS -Keep your calendar’s free on Tuesday, January 13 for the ON Winter Open House, which will be combined with the neighborhood Seattle Greendrinks!  That’s right, folks.  We’re in the pre-planning stages for right now, but Pizza Fusion and Sustainable Capitol Hill are teaming with Office Nomads to present a Greendrinks event for the Capitol Hill neighborhood.  Should be excellent fun, so save the date now!

If you’ve spent any time at Office Nomads since March, or if you’ve kept an eye on our calendar of events,  you’ve probably heard of Imagine Capitol Hill. Not only has Susan been hosting planning meetings for this weekend’s street fair at ON, she’s been one of the major planners of it. The street fair, which organizers hope will inspire participants to imagine what Capitol Hill could be like as a more sustainable community, promises to be a really great time.  I don’t know all the details, but according to the Sustainable Capitol Hill site, it’ll include an outdoor street café with free tea & coffee, sustainable cooking demonstrations and a bike repair clinic (which I desperately need to attend).

But wait, there’s more. Office Nomads will also have a booth there. Susan and Jacob will spend the day extolling the virtues of having a commute-free workspace in the neighborhood. They’ll have couches out for folks who feel the need to take a load off or want to chat with their neighbors (and maybe even get some work done on a Sunday, if they want), displays about the space and, most fun of all, an interactive art project.

The art project will ask folks to put their thinking caps on and imagine (get it?) what they would do with all the time they’d save by not commuting to work by working at a coworking office in their neighborhood. An array of colorful post-its will, I’m sure, have some pretty awesome ideas. We’ll report on the best next week.

So if you’re in the ‘hood, drop by Imagine Capitol Hill this Sunday between 11 am and 4 pm and make sure to say hi to Jacob and Susan!