Posted on May 5th, 2008 by vaguery
What: Ann Arbor Coworking “town hall” meeting
Coworking is any long-term arrangement in which independent professionals can work in the same space, whether full- or part-time. You may have seen mention on CNN.com, in the New York Times, or local media.
We’re trying to gauge interest in developing a permanent dedicated coworking space in downtown Ann Arbor. This might include shared office space, meeting and training space, a private cafe, a “makers’ den” for electronic and other fabrication projects. Any or all of those. The space might be run by a private concern, a nonprofit organization, or an ad hoc collaboration. It might be a membership organization, a business of its own, or a cooperative. Or something else.
Let’s explore what it might be, and why you might want to participate.
Where: Ann Arbor District Library Freespace, 3rd floor, Downtown Ann Arbor library building
When: Monday, May 19, 7-8:30pm
The meeting space is reserved from 5pm through 8:30pm, but we will officially begin proceedings at 7pm. If enough interest is generated, we may run two 90-minute rounds of discussion. Please let us know if you’re coming.
Who: Organized by Not An Employee, LLC
Space in the Library conference room is limited to 32 people. If more want to attend and discuss the prospects for coworking, we will try to arrange a second session, and extend discussion after the meeting at one of the other local meeting venues.
Please let us know if you’d like to attend. You may want to use the free service at Upcoming.org to coordinate.
Posted in NAE News, Serious Business | 1 Comment »
Posted on March 31st, 2008 by mitten
One of the tricks they used to tout for helping tiny babies go to sleep was to play a special cd with quiet, muffled whooshing noises. It was meant to simulate the noises a baby would hear while in the womb (her mother’s blood rushing past, presumably) and thus calm and console her enough to let her sleep.
So now that you’re out of the employment womb (um, maybe that’s not the best visual), do you have trouble working because you miss the sounds of the office? Well, worry no more: the fine folks at Thriving Office have the perfect solution for you. They are offering a ‘Sounds of Success’ cd that should make you feel right at home. It even has busy and very busy tracks so you can vary your experience appropriately. If you’re having trouble making the transition from employee to not an employee, this cd is sure to help you stay productive!
Posted in Serious Business | 2 Comments »
Posted on March 30th, 2008 by Barbara
Something they teach you in business school (and should do in high school) is basic financial accounting. Something else they teach you in business school is managerial accounting. These two topics are related like competitive and social Magic the Gathering. One emphasizes the rules, while the other emphasizes the story, but they’re both based on the same information.
The awesome Cosma Shalizi sent me a link to an article which describes a Wharton professor’s work on accounting and managerial bias. Two reports are profiled: one showing that budgeting and internal reporting can help improve forecasting (provided the management believes it), and the other showing that entrepreneurs have a tendency to be overoptimistic — they start to believe the story they’re telling to their own detriment.
You might be asking why I'm bringing this up. After all, as "Not Employees" we don't need no stinking accounting. If you believe that you're not ready to work for yourself. You may not need fancy cost accounting, but you better be sure to have a decent (and reasonable!) forecast. Want to get a loan to advance your business? How about one to fix up your home office? You'll need to show the bank that you know where your income is coming from and how under control your expenses are. Reasonably-priced credit belongs to the well-accounted. Don't get caught with stars in your eyes.
Posted in Readings | 2 Comments »
Posted on March 23rd, 2008 by Barbara
One of the themes of Not An Employee is collaboration. Here we’ve created a little website and a small business run by people who have never once sat down and said “Ok, we’re going to start a business and have a website and Laura will design it and Barbara will handle the paperwork and Brian will quote stuff and Bill will do whatever it is that Bill does.” We are lucky(?) that our skills complement each others’. We collaborate, but it came about almost by accident.
Just over the past few months, Not An Employee has raised more questions than it’s answered: Is this serendipity normal? How do we work with others in a way that is more fulfilling than just getting paid? (Pay is awesomely useful, but if that is all that mattered we wouldn’t be doing this.) How do we become “collaborators” where others see “contractors”? Is it possible to contract collaboration?
I certainly don’t have any answers. Together we may be able to generate some ideas, though. You know, through collaboration.
Posted in Philosophy | No Comments »
Posted on March 22nd, 2008 by mitten
Paul Graham has posted an essay on the idea that human beings were not meant to have bosses. He argues that we, as a species, are simply not meant to be organized into very large groups. It goes against our evolution.
Watching employees get transformed into founders makes it clear that the difference between the two is due mostly to environment—and in particular that the environment in big companies is toxic to programmers. In the first couple weeks of working on their own startup they seem to come to life, because finally they’re working the way people are meant to.
The full essay is well worth reading and supports our feeling that we’re better without bosses.
Posted in Philosophy | 2 Comments »
Posted on March 22nd, 2008 by vaguery
From The Federalist No. 10: The Utility of the Union as a Safeguard Against Domestic Faction and Insurrection (continued), appearing in the Daily Advertiser of Thursday, November 22, 1787:
Liberty is to faction what air is to fire, an aliment without which it instantly expires. But it could not be less folly to abolish liberty, which is essential to political life, because it nourishes faction, than it would be to wish the annihilation of air, which is essential to animal life, because it imparts to fire its destructive agency.
Posted in Resources | No Comments »
Posted on March 20th, 2008 by vaguery
A gentleman of my passing acquaintance, who is a prominent local businessman, mentioned today that he was “happy to see another talent collective” in our town.
I went to substantial lengths to correct him. Which leads me to jot a few notes, and to share them with you.
Sure, yes, there’s Not An Employee, LLC, a company we formed to sell stickers. But that’s a piece of legal chaff for PayPal accounts and to give us a shared ontological framework to use as an interface with banks and Chambers of Commerce and suchlike.
No. Whatever it is, maybe an institution or collective or organization or movement—-whatever we finally call it—-this thing “Not An Employee” is not a consultancy, headhunting agency, subcontracting network, social club, networking infrastructure.
Not a “talent collective” or a union. Not a cooperative.
Not a coworking facility, and not coworking itself.
Not boosterism, not economic development, not merely a scam to sell stickers or present hack poetry or invoke the ancient Titans of yore. Not a cult, not a jape, not a sorry-ass quixotic windmill-tilters association.
Not even a way to change the world.
It’s a tag. That’s all it is. A tag. A complex adjective. A thing used to describe. A nonexclusive classifier.
So you are asked, What are you? And you say: I’m Not An Employee.
Tell that to me, and having thought long and hard about it I promise that I won’t assume I understand the details of what you mean. But I will suspect some of what it implies.
What are you? Not an employee. What do you do? This.
I think I’m starting to understand.
When we founded Not An Employee, we decided that we would build a new Founders’ Myth with every telling; that every face-to-face version would be measurably different. That still applies; ask any of the others around here what this thing is, what it’s for, and you’ll get a variation. Some overlaps, some differences. Some realistic but stereotyped details thrown in to make it more feasible, make it sound like it’s a general-purpose answer other folks would give as well.
They’re all different, but every one of them is the truth.
So when you tell me you’re Not An Employee, I hear you. After several months, and years before that, I think I’m starting finally to get it. A lot of people I meet every day, people with Prometheus stickers on their computers and “Better Without Bosses” badges on their lapels, I bet they’re starting to understand too.
Tell that to any of us, and we’ll suspect that you have a truly marvelous life which this margin is too narrow to contain. That you’re there, you’re in there behind your eyes, somebody watching back. Rare bird. You’re saying something important about your work, life, that it’s all complex and contingent and varies from time to time in unexpected ways.
We’ll know, more than anything, that you’ve spent a little time thinking, and have decided that the standard glib explanations just don’t work.
What do you do? What do you want? Where do you work?
Does being not an employee prohibit you from being anything else? Does it keep you from having any other tags? From being a programmer or a maid or an inventor or a mom, a gardener or a golfer or a Spaniard or a soprano?
Don’t be stupid. You are also everything else you are. It’s just a tag. A phrase that describes you. One of many.
Being a thing does not keep you from being other things. Being Not An Employee, having that tag, presenting yourself with that label, it doesn’t even keep you from being an actual employee.
If you ask me, it’s risky to assume the world is as simple as you’ve been told. Even the simple white lies you tell yourself? They’re still lies.
Every time you accept a simple explanation, you open yourself up as a tool to be used to others’ advantage. You become of use.
Now you may want to be of use. That’s a life of service, and it is admirable and honest work of its own. Many of the most blessed among us, they’ve served.
By choice. Remember that the blessed ones, they lead their lives with their eyes open. They lead regarded lives. They pay attention, and I would wager that their assumption-to-consideration ratio is really kinda low.
Not all of us choose lives of service. I haven’t, not really. And so like me you may find yourself telling somebody it’s more complicated than that; it’s not what you assume.
The more you do that, the more likely it is you’re Not An Employee.
Among other things.
Posted in Philosophy | 6 Comments »
Posted on March 17th, 2008 by bkerr
From Market Ideology and the Myths of Web 2.0 by Trebor Scholz in First Monday Vol. 13 No. 3:
The language of Web 2.0 is a placeholder for several agendas. It burns the torches of 1960s–style rebellion, a “business revolution” of self–declared anarchists who frown upon authority and control as bad and deem openness as always good. But the fire is held by business elites who are trying to mobilize novelty as marketing ploy. There is some resemblance to the dotcom boom that captured the late ’90s (too much, too fast).
Posted in Resources | No Comments »
Posted on March 14th, 2008 by bkerr
From The Man Who Was Thursday by that ancient asshole G.K. Chesterton:
“Do you see this lantern?” cried Syme in a terrible voice. “Do you see the cross carved on it, and the flame inside? You did not make it. You did not light it. Better men than you, men who could believe and obey, twisted the entrails of iron and preserved the legend of fire. There is not a street you walk on, there is not a thread you wear, that was not made as this lantern was, by denying your philosophy of dirt and rats. You can make nothing. You can only destroy. You will destroy mankind; you will destroy the world. Let that suffice you. Yet this one old Christian lantern you shall not destroy. It shall go where your empire of apes will never have the wit to find it.
Posted in Resources | No Comments »
Posted on March 10th, 2008 by vaguery
As a point of clarification, since we’ve received a number of comments and emails about the site design. Mitten did all the visual work, the typography, the design, and established the overarching aesthetic impact of the Not An Employee site herself.
But the items you see in the margins? The phrenology bust, the Gammatron transmitting tube, the bakelite phone, the ham radio mike, the cameras, the oil can, the multimeter, and the desk itself? That’s from my office. Real stuff. Laura photographed it, in situ, and made the site from actual, real stuff from my office in Ann Arbor.
I have a sense there’s something symbolic about that.
As we receive our share of supportive and dismissive comments (thankfully more the former), it will probably be useful to point out that much of what looks polished and professional, glossy and heavily designed… that’s real. A lot of work, a lot of thought, a lot of energy went into it. And we think there’s something to be learned from that, if one is willing to take the time to ask about it.
That goes for the words, too. And the ideas.
Posted in Philosophy | No Comments »
Posted on March 7th, 2008 by bkerr
Star Wars: A New Hope; you remember this part. Think about it:
Grand Moff Governor Wilhuff Tarkin (to Darth Vader): The Jedi are extinct; their fire has gone out of the universe. You, my friend, are all that’s left of their religion.
Posted in Resources | No Comments »
Posted on March 6th, 2008 by bkerr
Party like it’s 1674! Paradise Lost (book II, ll. 910 — 920):
Into this wilde Abyss,
The Womb of nature and perhaps her Grave,
Of neither Sea, nor Shore, nor Air, nor Fire,
But all these in thir pregnant causes mixt
Confus’dly, and which thus must ever fight,
Unless th’ Almighty Maker them ordain
His dark materials to create more Worlds,
Into this wilde Abyss the warie fiend
Stood on the brink of Hell and look’d a while,
Pondering his Voyage; for no narrow frith
He had to cross.
Posted in Resources | No Comments »
Posted on March 5th, 2008 by Barbara
One of the events that lead to the formalization of Not An Employee was the threatened, enacted, and then rescinded sales tax on services in the state of Michigan. Some of us were expected to charge sales tax on some services (like graphic design) and not others (web design). (Or perhaps more interestingly, on phrenology but not golf.)
Luckily for us (maybe not so for the state budget, but that is neither here nor there) the tax was rescinded before it could take effect.
Not before we’d hatched the basic design of the NAE Badge, however. And since it’s really cool and we all wanted stickers of it, we thought other people would, too.
Guess what? We have to remit sales tax to the state for in-state sales of tangible items.
Posted in NAE Business | No Comments »
Posted on March 5th, 2008 by bkerr
From The people, yes by Carl Sandburg. There’s more where this came from, but you’ll have to go to the library and see for yourself:
The steel mill sky is alive.
The fire breaks white and zigzag
shot on a gun-metal gloaming.
Man is a long time coming.
Man will yet win.
Posted in Resources | No Comments »
