Room for a Jelly

Finding the perfect place to work is a challenge all freelancers constantly face. The obvious answer is to work from home. Having a home office can be very cheap and who doesn't want to go to work in their underwear once and a while. Maybe that is just me.

The downside is that your laundry is always there calling you to get done, your tv is likely to be on, or your kids are never entertained enough to leave you alone.  One of the biggest downsides is that you lose the interaction with other people who do the same thing you do. You lose the freedom to lean over and ask someone a question, or bounce a new idea off a friend. Twitter and IM can only take this so far and I doubt your cat knows the best way to float a div in IE 6.

Working around other people has benefits beyond the social.

You could go to a local coffee shop or a internet cafe and sit on the old ratty sofa and be around a few other people who also have laptops and seem to working on something, but you still lack the proper context to productivly interact. If you start talking to them, you risk being one of the distractions they are trying to escape. You risk becoming 'that guy' and nobody wants to be 'that guy'.  You do not have a real reason to talk to them and so you don't. Eventually you leave and go back to the home office.

You had people around but you had no context to interact with them. So what if there was a way to get out of the house, and work in a social enivorment with built-in context? What if you had a place where you knew everyone there was looking for the same basic thing you were?

That what a Jelly is all about. A place set up specifically as a social work environment for people just like you. I have no idea why it is called a Jelly of all things and I bet that if you asked the people who participate in it, they honestly would not know either, but who cares, it sounds really cool right? 

The idea of a Jelly is that location flexible workers decend on a fairly casual workspace once in awhile and work around other people like themselves. You may show up and not talk to anyone, or you may show up and sit next to another designer and bounce ideas off of her for a few moments. Maybe you you work for awhile and then move to the social area and share some laughs with people you only talk to on twitter or facebook. The point is you are around people, but only to the degree you want to be.

Jelly have been popping up around the country, in places like New York and Chicago and Austin (of course) and now in there is one happening in OKC!

As part of the build up to the awesome OKC Co-working Technology Collaborative (okcCoCo) facility that is currently brewing, okcCoCo is sponsoring a Jelly that is being held Thursday the 11th of December, 2008 in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. You should come try it out for an hour or two or for the entire day. There will be coffee and breakfast served in the morning thanks to Patrick of Focus IT and maybe other food or snacks throughout the day. There will be free Wi-Fi and lots of cool people working around a neat space in midtown. There is no cost, so there is no reason not to sign up and stop by.

Check out more information about signing up at the okcCoCo website.

Learn more about Jelly's

What is Jelly? from Amit Gupta on Vimeo.