A few days ago, the group received an e-mail from Gerrit at The Coworking Intitute, the owners of coworking.com
http://groups.google.com/group/coworking/browse_thread/thread/5e4e84c5ef869ae As he mentioned in the e-mail, he and his partner Bernie were recently approached by a commercial entity with interest in buying coworking.com from them. While the offer was "one they could not refuse", they agreed to turn to our community first and give us a chance to counter-offer. I've been corresponding with Gerrit on the side and have had a very positive dialogue. We've agreed to a counter offer (which they have accepted) of 5000 Euros, or ~$6800 USD. I've never spent this kind of money on a domain before, so I've spoken with a group of some of the longest-standing contributors to the coworking community to see if I was off my rocker. We've agreed that this is a great opportunity to put a stronger stake in the ground for the brand of coworking, the core values that this list upholds, and a better technique of communicating with people who are just finding our community. What do I think should be done with the domain? *My plan is as follows:* The wiki, blog, and google group will be aliased appropriately from subdomains of the coworking.com domain. Coworking.com will contain a home page explaining those properties and their contents, as well as some curated press links that will be user submitted. Additional ideas are welcome, but this is where I'd like to start! In the last 24 hours, I've kicked off a pledge of $500 from my own pocket (IndyHall still has some debt to pay back from our move last spring and we consider that priority), and have been followed by the following pledges: $500 - Alex Hillman/IndyHall $500 - Tara Hunt/Citizen Space $250 - Felicity Chapman/Cubes & Crayons $250 - Steven Heath/AltSpace $1000 - Susan Evans & Jacob Sayles/Office Nomads $500 - Chris Messina $500 - Patrick Tanguay/Station C That means we've been pledged $3500, just about halfway to the $7k mark we need (including paypal fees and impending wire fees). That's enough for me to transfer 50% of the asking price to the sellers to begin the transfer to us. Now...what are these contributors getting for their hard earned money? I've come up with a very simple structure to encourage consistent contribution amounts: • *Any contributor of $250* or more will have lifetime (of the domain) access to a subdomain of their choice (http://yourchoice.coworking.com), so long as the content of the subdomain falls within the values of the Coworking Community Manifesto: Community Collaboration Openness Diversity Sustainability see Citizen Space <http://citizenspace.us/about/our-philosophy/> and Station-C <http://station-c.com/en/community-manifesto> for citation of what those values mean • *Any contributor of $500* or more will get a subdomain of their choice as well, and additionally up to 5 email addresses hosted at a Google for your Domain account set up for coworking.com • *Any contributor of $1000* will get a subdomain, 5 e-mail addresses, and a "sponsor" link in the footer of the coworking.com home page linking to the coworking community/space website of their choice. No single contributor over $1000 will be accepted to give enough fair chances to contributors across the community. *There's no tricks, no scams, no funny business. * Disclosure: I will be maintaining the domain name and its DNS records on behalf of the community until, at some point in the future, there is an entity that supports *this community* that can take over. I will also be donating web hosting, again, until an entity that supports this community takes over. How do you become a contributor? Go to this form: https://indyhall.wufoo.com/forms/help-buy-coworkingcom/ Everything I've outlined in this e-mail is there as well. I look forward to this rallying point for the group, and having a great domain name to continue the growth of this community. -Alex /ah indyhall.org coworking in philadelphia -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Coworking" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/coworking?hl=en.
