The idea is that the works are large editions to keep the price down. Artworks include photos, prints, drawings, paintings, artbooks, etc. Simple small things that’ll make great gifts for friends, family or just for you. We aim to create a sense of excitement about next month’s artwork – a surprise and a new artistic discovery every month. We produce the works on commission with awesome artists, we pay the artists a fee and we are building a sustainable project with our club members. Edition number is based on order of subscription, so first in best dressed!

Help us make this happen by sharing this link on Facebook, Twitter, Email, etc.

SHARE NOW! http://bit.ly/artboxioclub

Join Now and get your friends to join too!

The more people we have the better the artist fees we can pay!

Last year, we joined a small but dedicated group of companies who are working to shift the meaning and future of business, by seeking B Corp certification. Electron Workshop, through our umbrella company Arktisma, is proud to announce that we’re one of the founding B Corporations in Australia and New Zealand!

What’s a B Corp and why is it important? B Corps are certified by the nonprofit B Lab to meet rigorous standards of social and environmental performance, accountability, and transparency. You could think about B Corp certification being to sustainable business what Fair Trade certification is to coffee. To learn more, or consider gaining certification for your business, check out http://bcorporation.net/

Unlimited hotdesk = $200/m!

It’s 2015, and it’s time to get busy!

To get you out of your spare room, out of the coffee shop, out of that boring day job, Electron Workshop has slashed our HotDesk pricing from this January. Come and join our community of entrepreneurs, creatives and freelancers and get started on that project you’ve always dreamed about. The pricing is simple: $20 per day or $200 per month for unlimited weekdays, 8:30am – 5:30pm.

You get: our awesome high speed internet and Wi-Fi; your choice of desk, beer hall table or beanbag; bike parking and showers; freshly ground coffee and the company of awesome people in our beautifully air-conditioned oasis in North Melbourne.

Just bring yourself and your laptop, and get shit done!

After experiencing a week at a prestigious multinational advertising firm last year, I decided that I needed to try the flipside. While I’ve always excelled at school and appeared to be on the trajectory of finding success down traditional employment paths, recently I’ve found this prospect growingly uninteresting, unchallenging and underwhelming. A few weeks ago, I suddenly realized that instead of hunting for ever more glossy corporate PR statements that offer me short term comfort in traditional career prospects, I should try to experience something completely radical and innovative. A coworking space.

Over the last few years I’ve been teaching myself web development and digital design. I’ve also been self-educating myself on entrepreneurship and business. Along with these subjects comes something that cannot be taught, it’s something that taps deep into your hard wiring and something that you have to choose to connect with, it’s a philosophy. The philosophy of technology and startups. A philosophy based on freedom, hard work and collaboration. This philosophy is something that has grown on me more and more and the ideas and values that this philosophy has spawned inside of me where first validated during my experience at Electron Workshop.

My name is John Strentz and the week I spent at Electron Workshop was probably the most life affirming thing that I’ve ever done. I now know that the people I’ve dreamed of working with are actually real, the environment I require to reach my full potential exists and the ideals and values I hold closest are not only shared and rational, but being lived out by real people every day. During my week I completed research for events and projects being run by the Workshop, met and spoke with awesome people (literally, awe inducing people) and got to tag along to super cool meetings and events. Before I went in the door on the Monday, I already knew I was going to have an incredible time, yet even with these already high expectations, Electron Workshop managed to surprise me, it was so much better than what I thought was possible.

The first thing that surprised me was the generosity and integrity of the people I met. Depictions of entrepreneurs as egocentric and self-centered are the norm and I’ve always found this to be the part of startup culture that most troubles me, so I was really happy when I found that the people I met at the Workshop where not really like this at all. While coworking carries a liberal vibe and individual freedom is a core value, personal integrity and sharing is just as important. In hindsight, it should have been obvious that generosity and integrity are core values of coworkers, many people who have opted to join a coworking environment have left or are avoiding “corporate culture” where people have a second agenda and organizational politics are at play. Because the people in a coworking environment have nothing to gain from hurting or manipulating each other, but everything to gain from creating a collaborative and friendly workplace, relationships are organic, honest and real, never forced.

Early on during the week, I was advised that one of the best questions I could ask when talking to people is, “what is success?” I immediately asked this question to the person who had offered me that advice. The reply I got was pure gold. “Success is finding a balance between intrinsic desires and extrinsic demands.” This comfortable balance is something that each individual must find for themselves. Some of us are more driven by our greater visions and other individualistic motivations, while some of us play the popularity contest and live life based on advice from others. Wherever you decide you can comfortably sit on the scale ranging from “fully intrinsic” to “fully extrinsic” is a legitimate place. The most important part is understanding that the battle of finding this place is a lifelong battle, a battle that is dynamic, ever evolving and never won. In this sense, success is an emotion that is felt in moments of ceasefire.

I’ve always understood businesses to be the vehicle towards a vision. Businesses are a solution to a market’s problem. Therefore I was surprised that a number of projects operating out of Electron Workshop were non-business. An important lesson I’ve learnt from this is that a business is only one of many vehicles to a vision. Other vehicles include, but are not limited to, art projects, social projects, events, workshops, non-profit enterprise, religious projects and awareness campaigns. In our capitalist world, operating a for-profit business seems to be the default vehicle, but sometimes other vehicles are much more appropriate. As an aspiring entrepreneur, the realization that there are so many more solutions to problems other than business and monetization, shook me to the core. It is interesting to consider that entrepreneurs as a community may have trapped ourselves into thinking that business is the only solution platform we have, I don’t think it is. We must think outside the square and look to the dozens of options other than business, (such as the ones listed above,) that are available to us when considering how best to execute the many ideas and realize the many visions that we have.

My week at Electron Workshop really was the most life affirming experience I’ve ever taken part in. I’d like to thank everyone who spoke to me, for giving up their valuable time and energy and sharing their invaluable ideas and philosophies. Everyone I spoke to was inspiring and has given me enough food for thought to keep me full for many months to come. I look forward to the day when I can be in their position, helping to pass on the values and wealth of knowledge to the next generation of entrepreneurs, coworkers and ass kickers.

We’d like to extend a warm welcome to Hollaback! Melbourne, who have recently moved into the space to focus on ending street harassment. Hollaback! is creating a crowd-sourced initiative to end street harassment by calling out the harassers on their behaviour. Learn more at http://melbourne.ihollaback.org/

Upcoming meetups / events 

Thurs Feb 20th – Better Careers Collective – a new meetup focusing on how to channel your potential into new career directions, or your current career path, putting you in the driver seat and on your way to a brighter future. Details on their Meetup.com page.

Sat Feb 22nd – Social Coding with GIT & OpenTechSchool – enter the world of social coding with Git and GitHub! In this course we’ll introduce you to Git, a popular tool for storing and sharing the source code to your programs (or even other files.) It’s a tool that keeps a copy of your files, but not just one copy. It keeps track of every version of every file in a repository. Details on their official Meetup.com page.

Thurs Feb 27th – ExpressionEngine Australia – dedicated to the ExpressionEngine CMS platform – more information is available on their official Meetup.com page.

Sat March 8th – Valhalla Social Cinema presents their epic 24hr sci-fi movie marathon again in 2014 – presented in 2K and back with an almighty vengeance. Boasting some of the best, new sci-fi alongside old favourites not seen on big screens in decades. Sci-fi marathon fans spoke; we listened. The Terminator? Check. Australian sci-fi? Got that too. In all, it’s sixty years of eclectic science-fiction. TICKETS SELLING FAST! GET SOME.

Keep up to date on all events on our calendar.

-Nick

We spent months developing a prospectus, carefully crafting our pitch, researching the market and speaking with industry stakeholders and prospective foundation customers in the hundred-million-plus turnover range. We took the audacious path of ‘give us money to build this great idea.. you won’t own it, you will go through the pain of implementing it, but we will cut you a great deal and we will all benefit’ We mailed our final offer/prospectus/pitch to the Managing Directors of four companies we had been courting/stalking and followed up for an ‘are you in or are you out’ discussion accompanied with a bespoke licensing agreement that came from a real software IP lawyer, not a google search result. We had a deadline to sign-on of end of September. We thought it was all very clever.

We waited patiently, pen in hand with index finger gently pointed at the dotted line. We waited for quite a while. October.. November. Nothing. Surprised?

Unperturbed, we pushed on, planned the execution, lined up the ruler on the left hand margin, created to-do lists, built infrastructure code, provisioned cloud particles… then santa came early with the penultimate poo-sandwich for the Christmas party lunch. A company of three – just like us, two developers and one construction industry guy dropped their product on the market late December. We found out because the most-likely-first-client director forwarded us a marketing shotgun email with a question mark in it.

They built the EXACT product we were about to smash six to twelve months or more of our lives into BEFORE we could even start on our end game – and they nailed it. They even had exactly the same style of promo website as us with the SAME banner image. It even had a long scrolling page with a nice little iPhone in a fixed position just like ours. It was like stepping across to the fifth dimension.

Cue the thought bubble that goes something like this: I’m going home to get very drunk. Hang on… They did us an enormous favour. We were about to create a product, to create a product. Huh? Scratch that. New agenda: Take a risk. Build the big idea now. And so we are, and in doing so, we’ve gone through what in start-up parlance is known as a ‘pivot’. There is virtually an entire vocabulary of terms in the start-up lexicon but that’s a whole post in itself.

So it was a Christmas Present from Hell, but in the end, the box it came in had a silver lining. Hook turn off Flinders’ and into Spring.

-Hamish & Frank (www.melbournemade.com.au)

When? 4:30pm.

Looking forward to this one!

Dusk Till Dawn time

Don’t miss out on the next one! ~Valahalla Social Cinema

The Political Economy of Health Special Interest Group (PEH SIG) of the Public Health Association of Australia presents a two-day pre-conference workshop – The Global Health Crisis: Understanding the Causes – Exploring Solutions – at the Electron Workshop on Saturday 14 & Sunday 15 September.

Learn about the political economy of health, nationally and globally.

Both days: Political Economy of Health SIG members/students: $120; others $140
Single day: PEH SIG members and students: $60; others $70
(fees include morning tea, lunch and afternoon tea)

Workshop information: http://www.phaa.net.au/42nd_Annual_Conf_SIGWorkshops.php

To book : https://weteachme.com/electronworkshop/pha-political-economy-of-health-sig

For those of you who missed out last time, OpenTechSchool will be re-running another workshop of Introduction to Programming, using the Python programming language to give a gentle introduction to the basics of computer programming. Whether you’ve got dreams of building a software empire or you are just a little curious about what all those programmers get up to we’ll give you a taste of how things work, Python-style. OpenTechSchool workshops are at-your-own-pace, with lots of coaches who are professional programmers themselves to give encouragement and guide you over the common pitfalls that many face when just starting out.

More info: https://weteachme.com/electronworkshop/opentechschool

Valhalla Social Cinema