Writing Maps @ Jelly
June 19th, 2009
I spent the day the other day working at the Space Gallery in Portland with other people who work from home more often than anything else. It was an event called “Jelly”. Jelly was originally started in NYC in 2006 by two roommates and has expanded from there. You can find more information at http://workatjelly.com/.
Everyone I talked to was really excited about getting out of the house and it was definitely a good opportunity to meet people and network. There is also talk of holding this event once a month somewhere in Portland (There’s actually one scheduled for July 7). You can keep up happenings via its Facebook group: Portland (Blueberry) Jelly.
I think this is a great idea to help people brainstorm, get refocused, and be very productive.
One other new project I have gotten to work on lately is site mapping. I am using writemaps.com which can be made public so more than one person can edit it. It reminded me a little of building a family tree, only it functions much better than most of those I have tried. It is very easy to show how the pages drill down.
This project, however, gave me a much larger respect for everything that has to go into a website. This site map was for a bank so it was more complex than some of the other sites we come across but any business is going to have many many pages and subpages. It’s something you don’t really appreciate, and therefore don’t appreciate the work that goes into building them, until you look at each and every one.
I’ve also set up another FB group for coworkers: Portland Coworking, for local peeps looking to network with other like-mindeds.