Independents Hall – An opensource workspace for freelancers

I like to think of Ben Franklin as a proto-freelancer. That is, when he wrote, whether it was an op-ed piece or a political cartoon for a colonial paper, or a piece for Poor Richard’s Almanac, he did like the rest of us: at home in his pajamas with his feet up on the desk.

Now that’s the father of my country!

If Franklin’s work day did look anything like mine does, he no doubt got tired of it, great as it is, just like I am. The freelance life is lonely, and sooner or later the bedroom office starts to feel a little too cramped, the washing machine gets a little too loud and all that “research” you’re doing on Digg starts to eat away your whole day.

So Franklin put on some pants and got out of the house. He started a group called the Junto, a loose collection of colonists devoted to self-improvement through improving their community. Through that group, Franklin created America’s first volunteer firefighting company and first public hospital.

Alex Hillman, founder of Independents HallSkip ahead 200 years, and Philadelphia is still full of freelancers sitting at their desks without pants, yearning for human contact and a chance to actually get some work done. Enter Alex Hillman, 23, who started working in tech support at the ripe old age of 10. “I walked into a computer shop and bought a motherboard and the guy was like, ‘what are you going to do with a motherboard?’ and I said ‘this is exactly what I’m gonna do with a motherboard,’ and he said ‘do you want a job?’” he explains.

After 10 years of IT work, Hillman got a little bored. “I was rotting my brain and I figured doing something creative would be good, so I got into doing web development,” he says. “I started working in a small agency for two years then another one for a year, all the while building up my freelance side work. So I went out on my own, sort of bringing the tech and the web development to places that basically had none, graphic design places where the clients would love the work and say ‘hey, let’s do a website,’ and they’d say ‘we don’t know how to do a website.’ So I’d get involved and then close up that circle with the clients. So that was my breakout to doing stuff on my own and then this whole idea collaborating to fill missing needs.”

Around the same time, Hillman went to San Francisco for a job interview. The job didn’t pan out, but while he was on the West Coast he met several people who were evangelizing a new concept dubbed “co-working”: a freelance community and collaboration space, where web designers, writers, photographers and other freelancers could work independently alongside each other in a drop-in environment with all the pros of both the home and the office, and few of the cons.

“What San Francisco had that we didn’t, besides the weather, is this community of support and interaction,” he says. “The segmentation is far less; everyone knows what everyone else is up to. Here, it’s very segmented. The independents and the entrepreneurs work on stuff and it stays in their basement. Sure, it gets put out on the internet, but there’s very little branding to say its from Philadelphia and there’s no way for me to know that a dude that lives four blocks from my house has been working on a ticketing application, like an independent version of Ticketmaster, for almost four years. I had to find about him through a large-scale event, which is totally ridiculous.”

Frustrated by the lack of channels of communication and opportunities to collaborate in Philadelphia, Hillman decided he was going to break down the boundaries one brick at a time. “I started with going to all these different meet-up groups and finding ways to bring them together and cross-pollinate them. I did that sort of physical outreach and then started a mailing list, which was just a place for people to converse about…whatever. It didn’t really matter to me at the time. As long as they were talking, it was good,” he says. Soon, Hillman and some friends and colleagues started face-to-face events of their own. A partner at a web design firm in South Philly, Punk Ave., was reading Ben Franklin’s biography, and brought Franklin’s Junto to Hillman’s attention. The Junto effectively started as a place where someone could come and talk about whatever they wanted and the group collectively steered the conversation.

Inspired, Hillman and company started their own. The first meeting consisted of four brave souls who came out in the middle of a snowstorm. The next one was a little bit bigger, and the next one even bigger. It kept snowballing from there says Hillman. “That whole visibility thing was finally starting to go somewhere, and people said ‘whoa I had no idea how much stuff was going on in Philadelphia. I had no idea that my neighbor was doing x-y-z,’ and I thought, ‘finally, people are getting this.’”

Hillman didn’t want to let the growing energy die, so the topic of discussion at next junto meeting was how to keep the initial energy and excitement going. Hillman and the group that had gathered around him started what they called the Cream Cheese Sessions, essentially co-working in a borrowed space. “That was sort of the proving ground,” Hillman says. “Was this even going to work? We got people talking, but are they going to execute? Are they going to put on pants and get out of the house and come down and work for the day?”

Independents Hall

The answer was a resounding “yes.” The Cream Cheese Sessions group started crashing cafés and eventually grew to the point where they were filling National Mechanics, a bar in Philadelphia’s Old City neighborhood. “As the group grew and grew I said, ‘ok we need our own place because we’re filling up National Mechanics and we need to be able to do this every day,” says Hillman. He started scouting for spaces and when one opened up just around the corner from Ben Franklin’s former home, it was all too perfect. Hillman announced on the listserv that he’d be signing a lease and within four days, the community that had grown around him, around the listserv, around the events, around the idea, had stepped up and gathered membership fees to pay for the space.

“These people were chomping at the bit to get in here,” Hillman says. “The first day we were in here, we didn’t even have desks. There were four people working on the floor until we went to Ikea. And there’s been people in here every single day, six days a week.

On September 1, Philadelphia’s first dedicated co-working opened its doors for business. Picture the hippest coffee shop you know. Now add broadband internet, a kitchenette, a shower, an air hockey table, a conference room, a mini-fridge for your beer, your own workspace and a handful of other like-minded creative folks. That’s Independents Hall. On one level, it’s a community of freelancers interested in getting out of the house while still independently doing what they love to do, as well as meeting, supporting and encouraging others like them. On another level, it’s a physical place for this community to do all that and more.

The loft in the Old City, just a few blocks from Franklin’s home and Independence Hall, follows in the footsteps of similar community workspaces in San Francisco, like CitizenSpace and The Hat Factory. Freelancers of all stripes pay a monthly membership fee, or a one-day walk-in fee, for a work space, internet access and use of the conference room. Membership also includes invites to both educational and social events, as well as a listing on the public member directory. Beyond that though, they get contact with the outside world, a chance to talk to someone other than their cat and a crew of fellow freelancers to trade ideas with, bounce questions off of, and challenge to a game of air hockey.

Work and play at Independents Hall

And it won’t stop here. The future of Independents Hall remains open source and user driven. “Now people want an Independents Hall library,” says Hillman. “So we put together an Amazon wish list and all of a sudden people started dropping off books or buying books and having them sent here.” Lockers will be available for people to store things overnight, “phone booths” are being set up upstairs for people to make calls and mail and phone services may be implemented if enough interest is expressed. Social events are also important and will expand. Happy hour trips, movie night, and a Wii bowling league are all gathering steam.

“You go to the crowd and create passionate users and then you enable them, that’s what it’s been about,” says Hillman. “I don’t want to say that we did this right, because that implies that other people did it wrong, but we spent an extended period of time finding people and now we’re close to breaking even, and full. I don’t know of any other spaces like that. To go from a community that wasn’t that interested in talking to people to people that are now saying ‘when can I come back? Where do I sign?’ has been absolutely incredible. A lot of people wanted it and a lot of people needed it. Maybe they didn’t know they needed it, but when they saw it, they said, ‘that’s what I needed.’ It’s been a crazy ride.”

Author’s Note: Due to the misinterpretation of some information during the reporting of this story, the author would like to clarify the following points: 1. The Junto was first suggested by Alex Gilbert (the gentleman who had been reading about Ben Franklin). 2. The staff at P’unk Ave. founded the Junto in March 2007 and continue to run it. Those seeking more info or wishing to participate should visit http://junto.org/. 3. Geoff DiMasi, a partner at P’unk Ave. is the co-founder of Independents Hall and a partner with Alex Hillman in the LLC created to run Independents Hall. 4. Bart Mroz was brought in as a partner before the space was set up and is, with Alex, a full-time office manager at the space.

The author regrets these errors and apologizes to everyone at Indy Hall and all readers.

Matt Soniak

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