I agree that transportation is one of the major issues.. and that college grads from Providence/RI schools need to be convinced that this is a city/state that has a lot to offer in furthering their career and lifestyle. 

We need more focus on great places in the city, strengthen community identity, bring businesses downtown.  A strong urban core will create momentum for the rest of the city.

It's not going to be one big thing.  It's going to be the many little things adding to the AS220s, the Waterfires, Prov Geeks, RI Nexus, Concentric events.  It's getting zipcar and shared bikes downtown, co-working facilities around the state, 3rd places focused on building community and collaboration, more investment banks/VCs to be looking here, issue-focused round tables, etc. 

We can only go the political route so far -- How can we use our connections, skills, interests to make conversations like this turn into some actual action?  What current organizations and assets should we be leveraging to make these smaller efforts make an impact?  It's that flywheel effect... it won't be overnight... but there is already huge momentum in the tech sector.  

We need to be working on the unsexy jobs as well...  the working waterfront, a huge existing asset,  desperately needs training for workers -- high wage blue-collar jobs that have a huge economic impact on the state.  More training programs for those guys.  

Ideally we'd put together Concentric-like events that put our minds toward solving issues in addition to the networking.

 

So.. to continue this conversation in "meatspace" and with the help of a number of this topic's online participants... we are slated to open up OfficeLAB downtown at the federal reserve building in the first week of September 2008. 

Thanks to Adam for starting the conversation online - and to bring things full circle, we are actually using Batchbook as our CRM.. 

Our web presence is still a bit rough - but we wanted to get up and running quickly.  Please do sign up through the site if you are interested in membership.   Or send me an email through RINEXUS.  We'll have some mingling events downtown leading up to the opening for those interested in seeing what we're all about.  

Hopefully this is only one of many alternative workplaces to bubble up in Rhode Island.. let's keep talking about this...  

Wayne 

 

I'm in the beginning stages of putting together a tech-centric coworking, and coop living project in a downtown building. I did speak to some people at the last Providence Geeks dinner that were very receptive to the idea and I've started to get a framework together to start pushing this project forward. The idea is for this to be a tech user/community driven project - and my initial vision was for this to be a 24/7 collaborative, socially engaging community... I'd like to start getting some good brainstorming sessions going in person. Send me an email if you are interested in helping me coordinate a meeting.