Today's meetup was all about vacationing past and future, travel and airline tips and tricks and astrology. In case you wondered. 
Present were Jane, Kelly, Eric, Stefan and Christine. We updated the meetup crew on our latest development. The Alki space turned out a little too small. Great location, just not doable for us. The bar space turned out a little too small with too much work. The schoolhouse is still in the running and our favorite by now. We still wait for approval by the board, so wish us luck. It would be a nice work environment with some historic and creative flair, also great parking, not quite in the center of West Seattle but still at a hub. Lots of options, great route to ride your bike to.
We have 2 more space to look at this week and a meeting with an agent.
Sorry, we forgot to take a picture.

Another week passed with lots of opportunities. We just came from a meeting and were looking forward to share our updates with the group.
Laura, Jane, Eric, Betsy and two new participants Jason and John, Stefan and Christine attended. After a round of introductions (writers, retail/business consulting, construction, online retail, software training and lawyers) we presented 3 different ideas for Coworking spaces in West Seattle.
One is a bar which would fit about 10 desks with a meeting space upstairs. It is a little smaller, has no separation between focused vs. collaborative space, no kitchen and no space to grow but a fun atmosphere. We would go with a Pirate theme. One is a small, temporary space on Alki for approx. 8 desks but no separate meeting room. We still would have to keep looking and move to a permanent space in the upcoming months. And one is a schoolhouse with space for about 15 to 20 desks. We would share the building with other tenants (mainly small businesses as well),and it's a great creative space with great parking, also right on the C Bus route. We got some valuable feedback to all three and will explore further options and more details on all three this week. Wish us luck!

Stefan and I met at Uptown with Wendy, Jane and Eric today. This weeks meetup was dominated by writers/content freelancers and lots of creative spirit. Jane joined us for the first time and had plenty of great ideas for creative space hunting for us. Thank you, Jane. We spent the first 45 minutes with introduction, updates on our location search and brainstorming other locations. We talked briefly about each others projects and business ideas.
We shared a quick history of our location efforts in the last 12 weeks diving into our latest adventure touring a beautiful space in White Center last Thursday. The space seemed to have it all: great lighting, great location in Downtown White Center, open space, newly remodeled, great lease terms. So we started to work on a timeline with the opening date March 1st, drawings for the build out adding meeting space and kitchen, created a new website for the space, a shopping list for office furniture, talked with our insurance guy, looked for service provider and toured the space a second time to measure and agree on lease terms. After our tour we decided to visit other tenants in the building and some businesses for a neighborly hello and to ask for input on our coworking idea in the neighborhood and this is where it went awry. There is actual an article in Seattle Met written about the 'situation'. After listening to different sites of the story Stefan and I decided this is not the space for us after all. The main issue would be parking paired with security concerns, both things on top of our wish list for our space. We were really disappointed when we realized our third attempt to lease a space won't come to reality. 
We heard some nice words from Eric encouraging us to keepdoing what we are doing and the opportunity will rise. 

After our winter break we hosted our first meetup in 2013 at Uptown. Kelly and Kerrie met for the first time, both attending regularly, but always missing each other. Michele joined for the first time and Wendy and Betsy came after joining us for the Holiday Party.
We switched our meeting format slightly to a brief introduction round, an update about our location search, and then rest of our meeting with lots of laughter, anecdotes, real world problems, asking and giving feedback on business ideas and projects.

In particular, we talked about an upcoming very "soft" software launch from Betsy and Wendy, listening in on Kerrie's engagement in the Genesee-Schmitz Council and recent developments, Kellys preparations for her upcoming strategy meeting, Michele's interest in using the coworking space for her curriculum work, Christine's future business ideas and path to start the coworking space with Stefan and Stefan's project work on backyard cottages for aging in place. We joked how we could age together in our coworking space and how we can apply the Wendy's timeline showing the time left on our watch.

We talked about the possibility of meeting weekly for a drop in session in a temporary space for the next couple of weeks to get a feel how to cowork in style. We also set a date for our next coworking meetup at Uptown on Tuesday 1/15 at 12 pm, as well as another Coworking Night Out on Friday 1/18 at Mind Unwind at 7 pm.