Another normal week here at Office Nomads except for CHARLIE’S BIRTHDAY! Hooray for Charlie turning 23!  Also, Sustainable Capitol Hill is meeting tonight at 6:30 here at Office Nomads.  Hope you all have a good week and we hope to see you soon!

It’s a short week here but it’s loaded with fun. Well, at least Wednesday is.  Yoga, pies and beer, and then a farewell/congrats/good luck Happy Hour for Ryan Salva.

Remember, Thursday and Friday we will be closed.  Hope you all have a fantastic Thanksgiving!

Today’s current standings from our Neighborhood Campaign are as follows:

1. Ballard
2. Fremont
3. Greenlake / U-District (a tie!)
4. Columbia City
5. West Seattle

Thanks to all who have sent us their feedback thus far! If you wish your neighborhood was in the #1 place, be sure to get your vote in!  We’ll be keeping the polls open through the end of the  year, and are excited to hear where it is you’d love to see our next coworking space.

Oh and hey! Did you see the piece the Seattle Times did on coworking in Seattle? It’s a great article – you should read it!

Seattle Night Owls, we hear you! We’re excited to announce that Office Nomads will now be offering extended hours every Thursday! Our office will be staffed and open until midnight each Thursday, starting October 7th.  How great is that?  Membership rates are the same and managed the same way (non-resident members sign in when they get here). This will help out those folks who can’t get to the office early enough or who work best when it’s dark outside.

This is just a trial that we’re running until the end of the year. If all goes well with these first couple of months, we’ll look to make it a permanent staple of our offerings.

Have any questions?  Interested if it’d be right for you?  Drop us an email and we’ll be happy to help you out.

Thank you to Flickr user mrhayata for use of the great owl photo!

Over the years, we have heard many work-from-home stories from folks who come through our coworking space.  Many start with “I love working from home, but…” followed by a long pause.  It seems everyone has something that makes working from home not work for them.  For some it’s the isolation of being alone all day without enough human interaction. For others it’s being a work-at-home parent with a child who doesn’t understand that “mommy’s working right now.”  And others got tired of waiting for their cat to come up with their next great business idea.

For whatever the reason, many work-from-homers need a break from time to time and that’s where we’re excited to come in and help out. Whether you need to escape the drudgery of the home office once a week or full-time, Office Nomads has some great options you can mix and match to fit into your schedule and budget.  Take a look at our updated membership & pricing page, and then switch back here for an example of what we are talking about.

A real world example

So, you’ve finally got your consulting business up and running, and things are going well.  You’ve got several clients, but are still looking for more.  You started up out of your living room, and occasionally head out to the coffee shop when you want to shake things up.  You are still excited to be your own boss and yet also feel like you’ve plateaued.  While seeking something to break the stalemate you look into coworking.

You don’t need a full-time office, but dropping in a few days a month would really help revive your productivity.  You decide to give things a try and sign up for a Basic membership at Office Nomads ($50/month).  While chatting with Alexandra at the front desk, you learn about Biznik, a Seattle-based networking group for indies just like you.  You whip up your free profile, go to a few events, and soon realize the value of upgrading to a Biznik Pro membership ($10/month).  Now you are gathering clients faster than ever, and more and more people know who you are and what you’re all about.  Realizing that you might want to register your consulting business someplace other than your home, you add a Business Identity Plan to your membership at Office Nomads ($35/month).

One month later, you’ve got an impressive new office to bring your clients to, a vibrant community of coworkers to collaborate with, a wider network of independent entrepreneurs to learn from, and a professional address associated with your business, all for less than $100/month.

Sounds pretty awesome, eh?

Again, check out our updated membership and pricing page, and then mosey on over to our list of friends & partners to see what other opportunities membership at Office Nomads might bring!

Thanks to Flickr user Fayez for use of the beautiful photo above under the Creative Commons license.

Office Nomads is proud to announce a new partnership with Zipcar, providers of shared vehicles to the masses. We are always excited to forge partnerships with fantastic services for our members, and this one gets us particularly stoked. Talk about a fantastic nomadic package – get a shared office space and along with it comes sweet deals on shared vehicles. Now you can kick your work-at-home habit goodbye AND ditch your car payment, all in one fell swoop. How great is that?

So here’s the deal: Office Nomads members (folks on one of our monthly plans) can now join the Office Nomads affiliate program. This gets members access to discounted annual rates, lower hourly Zipcar rates during the work week, and more.  It’s a fantastic offering for our members that helps to round out great access to shared transportation options.  Now you can walk, bike, take the bus, or grab a Zipcar to get yourself to and fro Office Nomads. As soon as the light rail gets here, we’re going to be unstoppable!

Thanks to Zipcar for sweetening membership at Office Nomads for us. Here’s to true nomadic joy!

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

Office Nomads started the process of removing a troublesome wall in our space. For us, this is not just the removal of a physical wall, but a social barrier that has been perplexing us for some time now. Check out the video below on the first step we took towards taking walls down in our space.

No more walls from Office Nomads on Vimeo.

Again, taking this wall down is more than just to complete another successful construction project at the office.  We’re taking this wall down because:

1. Coworking spaces are not about walls. In fact, most coworking spaces, ours included, have as few walls as possible. Walls (cubicle or otherwise) separate us from one another and create barriers to meeting each other. This wall had only served to separate some of our members from one another, so we took it down.
2. Walls = isolation. The majority of our members come to our space to get away from walls that isolate them from the rest of their community. We found that even on days where the rest of our space was brimming with coworkers, the closed-door room in our space rarely saw much traffic. No one wanted to be isolated back there, as it meant they missed out on the buzz and energy happening in the rest of the space.  Watching people sardine themselves next to one another while there was plenty of available space in the back room only encouraged us to take that sucker out.
3. Natural light is awesome! This separated room didn’t get nearly as much natural light as the rest of our office, making it a much less desirable area to work in. So we knocked that sucker down and let the light flood in!

We are only partway finished the project and are excited to take the next step (reframing, finishing, etc.).  We’ll keep you posted!

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.

That right there deserves a starfish high-five.

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:

1. 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.
2. 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.