@madpilot makes

Oh how I love alliteration. Especially on a leap year. This Friday, the 29th is the next installment of everyone’s favourite open house co-working day, Freelancer Friday. At this point I would make some smart-alec remark about how Freelance Fridays would only fall on a leap every x-number of years, however, I can’t be bothered working it out (I’m sure someone out there who will) so instead I’ll point you at the wiki, where you can put your name down. Hurry, time is limited.

I can’t believe we are almost 0.083333% of the way through the year. By now everyone should be back at work – those of us at the Silicon Beach House are. Well as a result, Freelancer Fridays are back! Keeping with the “Last friday of the month” timeline, the next Freelancer Friday is on 25 January at the Silicon Beach House – Level 2, 90 King St, Perth WA. Turn up anytime between 9am and 5pm.

If you are interested in turning up (as always) add your name to the Work@Jelly wiki.

Today, I was discussing with one of the housemates, Angela about the problems in finding other freelancers when you need to do something outside of your skill set. We discussed what I called Company-as-a-Service and came to the conclusion that Freelancer co-ops were definitely plausible. Well, to facilitate some better communication between us freelancers, I’ve created a Google Group: http://groups.google.com/group/australian-freelancers. If your are a freelancer, please sign up, that way we can all support each other, and find experts when we need them!

We are hurtling into the wacky end of the year – before you know it, we’ll all be drinking egg-nog and having seedy older men/women hitting on us at office Christmas parties (or vise-versa if you are said seedy man/woman). Well to celebrate, the Perth digital content community is throwing some awesome events over the next couple of weeks: Namely ByteMe! and PerthMassive,

ByteMe! is the brainchild of Kat “I must be taking something because it is impossible for one person to do the amount of stuff I do within a 28-hour day, let alone with in the bounds of current time” Black – it is a free week-long festival that will be show casing the best 1’s and 0’s of the Perth digital community. Not only that, there are some pretty god-damn kick-arse speakers (See for yourself). It it December 2-9 and did I mention free? Oh and AWIA will be running a BarCampNano on the Sunday from 1-4pm – so if you have anything you want to show the world in 20 minutes or less, rock up between those hours to the Perth Town Hall.

Speaking of AWIA, please note that there will be NO Port80 in December because of the biggest digital Christmas party this side of Omnicrone-4, Perth Massive is on! So free up your schedules for the 6th 4th of December 2007, and head over to the Library in Northbridge (The niteclub, not the repository of books) and meet-up with others that like to do what you do (Unless what you like to do is macrame – unless the macrame usergroup shows up). Also free. Free as in beer. And there is Free beer. Which is free as in – beer. Make sure you go and register though, so the organisers knowhow much free beer to get.

Oh, whilst I’m at it, We are having the next installment of our exciting Freelancer Friday initiative at the Silicon Beach house on Friday 30 November 2007. We had about half a dozen people last time which was awesome and since the last one have knocked down some walls and stuff (shh, don’t tell the landlord) so there is heaps more desk space now. If you are interested, drop me an email, or throw your name on the Work@Jelly wiki under Work@ Jelly Perth – Freelancer Friday.

So get your dancing frocks and red (Reebok) pumps and lets rock this Popsicle stand!

Anyone who has ever freelanced knows that being your own boss is great, but it can also be lonely. Being able to work in your pyjamas is convenient but not being able to bounce ideas off other people can be frustrating. As many of you know, I work in at the Silicon beach house which is a shared office space and we have a board room table and some couches that are less than utilised, which kinda made me think – we should have a freelancer day! And so you, kind people of the intarwebs, I present Freelancer Friday.

The idea is simple – bring your laptop and bring your work. We all sit around doing said work, but we can bounce ideas off each other, try different things out or just generally find was to distract each other :)

It is really similar (if not exactly the same) as the Work At Jelly initiative, so if you have heard of that, you will know what we are talking about.

So we will be running the first Freelancer Friday in two weeks on 26 October 2007 at the beach house – Level 2 Kings St, Perth. There will be someone there by 9, so any time after that is cool.

Grant and I are feverishly plugging away at building a web site around the idea, and it should be up soon, but we don’t have to wait for that. If you are interested, please email me on myles@madpilot.com.au

Edit: Oops, nearly forgot – if you aren’t in Perth and think the idea of a Freelancer Friday is cool, start your own one up! Invites some freelancing mates over to your house and get to work. It’s really easy to do. They don’t even have to web type people ;)