Jelly: crazy name for a fine idea | Ben Proctor

Jelly: crazy name for a fine idea

The upstairs room at Shropshire Jelly, during a cake break

So yesterday I spent all day sitting at a table typing away on my laptop computer. No surprises there.

What was unusual was that I was surrounded by the chatter of 20-odd other workers all typing away on their respective laptop computers. I was at the second Shropshire “Jelly” co-working event organised by @janminihane who should be lauded for her efforts.

It’s a simple idea, which originates in the USA, get a bunch of homeworkers and put them all together in a room for a day. Not to network, not to train, just to do their normal work.

I wasn’t sure how it was going to pan out. In fact I had an e-mail conversation with a colleague (who ended up not going to this one) along the lines of “Well they say it’s not networking but presumably we will have to talk to each other or we might as well stay at home”.

And we did talk to each other. It was a lot like being in an office. We talked about what we were working on, we talked about whether Flash would survive the dual assault of HTML 5 and Apple (not all of us talked about that to be fair), we talked about twitter (a lot). We talked about how nice it is in Coalport and how lovely the weather is and we talked a bit about our businesses.

The atmosphere was really collaborative and friendly. No-one was trying to flog stuff, Enterprise HQ was a great venue and the cafetieres were of unusual size.

I did make some useful contacts but mostly I had a really great day, I got loads of work done and I came out feeling really positive and motivated.

There will be another Jelly next month. The past two have sold out very promptly so Jan has said the next one will go on Eventbrite at 0900 on the 1st June. You have been warned.

See you at the next one.

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