{"id":4075,"date":"2015-02-18T10:00:01","date_gmt":"2015-02-18T10:00:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/ukgcucco0.web01.sundaramdesign.com\/?p=2053"},"modified":"2015-02-18T10:00:01","modified_gmt":"2015-02-18T10:00:01","slug":"colearning-coworking","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/gcuclegacysite.wpengine.com\/colearning-coworking\/","title":{"rendered":"Colearning Before Coworking"},"content":{"rendered":"

by Melissa Geissinger,
\nPresident & COO of WIMP<\/a> and General Manager of WIMPspace<\/a><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/strong><\/strong>A geek. A nerd. A dork. If you\u2019re anything like me (a 30-something tech entrepreneur who built her first website in 1996), you\u2019ve been called at least one of these things at some point in your life. The crazy thing? These days it\u2019s actually cool<\/i> to be identified as one. Well these days if you wander the streets of Santa Rosa, California<\/a>, about an hour north of San Francisco, and someone yells, \u201cHey! You\u2019re a Wimp!\u201d fear no more – that\u2019s actually a good thing.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/strong><\/strong>The North Bay<\/a> is a very rural area. Think farms, wineries, redwood trees, rolling hills and a population density of about 280 people per square mile vs. San Francisco at 3,611. People are more spread out and everyone kind of does their own thing. Unlike our neighbors to the south (Silcon Valley included) where you can\u2019t throw a rock without hitting a tech entrepreneur, here it required effort to meet members of our own \u201ckind\u201d.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/strong><\/strong>In 2011 my world changed. My web design business<\/a> was growing and it became clear: I couldn\u2019t do it all alone; I needed to work with other people who I couldn\u2019t find on Craigslist. I connected with my partner Joshua Simmons<\/a>, a web developer and fellow business owner, and we decided to start a Meetup group<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/strong><\/strong>WIMP<\/a>, an acronym for Web & Interactive Media Professionals, was born in April, 2011. At our very first meetup, 25 people showed up with absolutely no action beyond saying \u201chi, we\u2019re here!\u201d Very much a \u201cbuild it and they will come\u201d moment. Where did they all come from?!<\/p>\n

\u00a0Word spread. 1 month, 42 members.<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/strong><\/strong>We started out having one potluck-themed meetup each month. For some we had speakers, for others we had panels, and others still we simply had a topic and lead a group discussion. Topics ranged from responsive web design (before it was cool) to sharing client horror stories as we passed around a flashlight in a dark room the week before Halloween. We began to host lunches and launched a Facebook group<\/a> to continue the conversations in-between events.<\/p>\n

\u00a0The community grew. 6 months, 91 members. 1 year, 151 members.<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/strong><\/strong>In 2012 we hosted our first unconference, WIMPcamp<\/a>. In 2013 we had our first charity hackathon, WIMPgives<\/a>. We began to get recognition<\/a> from people outside of our own Wimpy community and we started hearing more stories about people having success in their careers based on connections made through WIMP.<\/p>\n

\u00a02 years, 288 members. 3 years, 395 members.<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/strong><\/strong>We continue to maintain an average of 80-90% attendance rate at our meetups, where the average is somewhere in the 40% range. People didn\u2019t just come to our events if it was convenient, they committed to the community.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/strong><\/strong>It wasn\u2019t until after we concluded a round of crowdfunding<\/a> to grow WIMP as a business and not just a hobby that we realized we had a huge need for our own physical space. We needed the freedom to run events as often as we needed without the limitations of borrowed and donated space from our friends and partners.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/strong><\/strong>And then it came to us – if we had our own event space, it only made sense to open it up to coworking during the day. So WIMPspace<\/a> came to be, almost by accident.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/strong><\/strong>WIMPspace has only been open for 5 months and the coworking side of the business has a lot of room for growth. We have much to learn and we\u2019re not yet breaking even, but we have plans to (very soon) better leverage the 1,000+ members in our world-wide community. We\u2019re launching a premium membership where – get this – basic coworking access is a perk <\/i>of membership rather than the other way around. Crazy, right?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

by Melissa Geissinger, President & COO of WIMP and General Manager of WIMPspace \u00a0A geek. A nerd. A dork. If you\u2019re anything like me (a 30-something tech entrepreneur who built her first website in 1996), you\u2019ve been called at least one of these things at some point in your life. The crazy thing? These days […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"content-type":"","inline_featured_image":false},"categories":[13,15,81,1],"tags":[137,134,106,136,119],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/gcuclegacysite.wpengine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4075"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/gcuclegacysite.wpengine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/gcuclegacysite.wpengine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gcuclegacysite.wpengine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gcuclegacysite.wpengine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4075"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/gcuclegacysite.wpengine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4075\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/gcuclegacysite.wpengine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4075"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gcuclegacysite.wpengine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4075"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gcuclegacysite.wpengine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4075"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}