by: Adrienne Rodney

It has been said many times that it is better to create your own job than to find one. If you are unsure how to begin, there is a worldwide community that can help you.

In 2011 we attended Startup Weekend three times. Held in just about every metropolitan city in the US and across the globe, Startup Weekend is for entrepreneurs, programmers, designers and other creative types to take an idea and turn it into a business in two-and-a-half days.

Startup Weekend is important because it teaches novices and professionals how to think, act and work like entrepreneurs. Many of the startups turn into actual businesses, with the teams working together far beyond that original weekend.

With free legal advice, free mentors and of course, free food, Startup Weekend gives you a chance to put your passion into practice. So if you think you have a good idea, don’t keep it a secret. Participate in a Startup Weekend and watch your ideas flourish.

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After everyone’s positive response to our Jobsville story, Brooke took the idea all the way to Mountain View, CA for the Mega Startup Weekend, where Brooke and his team worked on making Jobsville a reality.

We recently interviewed Frank Denbow, lead organizer for Startup Weekend NYC and a major force behind Mega Startup Weekend. Check out Startup Weekend in action and hear what he has to say about the events by watching the video above.

HOW AMERICA CAN LEVEL-UP SKILLS AND LAND GOOD JOBS.

Article and Video Interview by Brooke Allen

I’ve often wondered what can be done to make it fun to learn new skills and hunt for a job. Surely if FarmVille can make farming fun, and Call of Duty can make war fun, isn’t it possible for the people who produce those games to apply what they know to making the process of finding and qualifying for a job just a little bit more effective and enjoyable?

As it turns out, the answer is: ABSOLUTELY.

Recently I discussed this very question with Gabe Zichermann, an expert in “gamification,” author of Game Based Marketing, and creator of the Gamification Blog.

Gabe explained that the job search is usually a long process that has many moving parts including the concept of career mastery. He says this is the kind of thing that is well suited to modern multi-player social games.

In order to take someone through the “player’s journey,” game designers break complex processes into their component pieces and by providing guidance and rewards along the way. As missions are completed and skills are “leveled-up,” the player can look back later to see that they have accomplished something amazing – and had fun along the way.

After hearing his fascinating advice on how you can make your own job search more fun for you and for those who are helping you, I asked Gabe if this idea has ever been commercialized.

After all, Zynga has figured out how to get 1% of the world’s population to play Farmville, growing crops that nobody can eat. You join for free through Facebook and begin building your farm. Then you invite friends to start neighboring farms, and you interact daily, by visiting each other and complete specialized tasks in order to receive rewards and “farm coins” which you can use to buy gifts for your friends.

Gabe has famously highlighted Farmville’s social aspect by calling it “poke with cows.”

Wouldn’t it be great if Zynga created a “JobsVille” as “poke with resumes” – a place where you and your friends can help each other level-up your real-world connections and skills, land good jobs, and put real food on the table? What’s in it for Zynga? After all, if Zynga goes public, they will have shareholders to feed. As Gabe suggested in the interview, if people help you with editing a resume, making an introduction, or practicing an interview, it is entirely appropriate you reward them, perhaps with a real (or virtual) gifts bought through the game platform.

Better yet, why not help a charity in the name of the person who helped you?

Zynga has already thought of this; they handle the distribution of charitable contributions from their users through their non-profit Zynga.org.

Gabe told me he has not heard of a single person who has made a massively multi-player on-line social game out of the job hunt, but that it is ripe for development.

Story by: Adrienne Rodney, Interview by: Brooke Allen

Robin Dunbar, British anthropologist and evolutionary psychologist at Oxford, says you can have at most 150 sensible, reciprocated relationships. This is known as the Dunbar Number, and it is discussed in his book, How Many Friends Does One Person Need?: Dunbar’s Number and Other Evolutionary Quirks.

Our most important relationships are with our intimate friends and family – the people we love, rely on and support when times are tough. But most of the people we know make up the outer layers of our social network – our coworkers, neighbors and friends of friends, and these outer layer relationships are more vital than we think. “They’re the people who help you out when things are down by finding you jobs or letting you know there’s a job going where they work,” Dunbar says. “That’s a source of information for you.”

Yet our social well-being depends on the strength of our most intimate relationships. “Those who have a bigger social network have, on average, less intimacy with each of the members,” Dunbar says. “If your inner core relationships are going to be important to you…you do best by focusing your attention on those closest to you.”

Dunbar spoke with Brooke Allen about his research on relationships and the roles they play in our lives. You can learn more about Dunbar’s number and the layers of relationships by listening to Brooke and Robin’s conversation below.

And read the transcript to the conversationhere.

Book review by Frank McGrath

At one time or another, everyone has gone to a networking function, returned with a stack of business cards, and said “well, now what?”  That literal and figurative inert pile of cards is evidence of an evening of pleasant conversations – and not action. Talking to folks is an act of prospecting, a key part of networking. But the other key component is closing – a shared commitment to progress. Successful closing is the difference between networking and going to a cocktail party.

Closing is ultimately a sales function- getting people to do something: introduce you, vouch for you, interview you. Fortunately, sales is one of the oldest human activities. It is important, so smart people have thought about it. Sales success is easily quantifiable, so approaches can be evaluated.

Anecdotally, there are few careers that have risen in public esteem since the ‘70s than the salesman. The hamartia of Willy Loman and the jokey stories of the “traveling salesman” are worn.  A lot of that is due to Tom Hopkins and a book he wrote in 1980 called “How To Master The Art of Selling”. Hopkins was a key catalyst to “professionalize” selling – the movement away from pressure and aggression to consultative, non-adversarial approaches. The power of this book is perhaps demonstrated by the fact that it is still in print. There are tons of copies on e-Bay, 403 copies via Amazon’s secondary sellers and many in the NYC library system (with a waitlist here in Brooklyn). How many other books from thirty years ago can say that?

Parts of the book are dated and hokey. But there is still real knowledge in the chapters on closing like a professional, advancing your agenda. With millions of copies, it is also designed for beginners. Closing is a lot like skiing; you can learn enough to be competent at the very first lesson.

Frankly, it is also an informative, smack yourself on the forehead, fun read: so that is how my living room furniture, engagement ring, swimming pool, etc. got here! I got closed by that guy at Macy’s! Is it ethical to close a toddler about bedtimes? Don’t go through life without knowing about the “assumptive close,” a “say no” question or “a bridge”.

Ten years ago, I was tentative about asking for an intercession, help or business. But fear usually stems from ignorance – what do I do here? Hopkins outlines a couple dozen safe, polite, professional ways to ask for what you want – just pick a few that seem comfortable.

Some are probably dubious. I will point out that billions are spent training sales forces, and millions make a living at closing, differentiating themselves in the process. Either there is some intelligence to it or there are a lot folks who are dupes. No one disagrees that there is a robust science to communication. This is merely one of its real useful disciplines. So take a chance and read thirty minutes of Tom Hopkins at the library.

People at networking events long to be closed. They want to help. Be polite and don’t be grasping, but do them the favor of not only knowing what you want but also engaging your targets in a manner that helps them help you.

by: Kitti Brady

Recently I was asked to share some thoughts on what I’ve learned about job hunting so far, so I put pen to paper and came up with a list of the four most important tools any job-hunter should have in their kit.

Okay, maybe this is all stuff you already know.  Maybe you’ve already read articles that told you this stuff because Lord knows there have been hundreds.  However, it bares repeating, because every day there is someone new just starting their job hunt – someone who recently was laid off, or who just graduated from school and hasn’t had any training on the idea of how to go from student to employee beyond ‘okay, time to get a job.’  Not to mention, just because you’ve been job hunting for a while doesn’t mean you can’t refresh your knowledge of what you’ve been told before.

(1) Business Cards:

One of the most important, and yet simplest, things you can do for your job search is have a business card for yourself.  It’s a fast and easy way to get your name and contact information into someone’s hand no matter where you are – a networking event, a bar, a friend’s house, or on the bus or subway.  You never know when or where you’re going to encounter someone, and you want to be able to give them a way to remember you and contact you in a matter of seconds – no digging for a pen and notebook.

Your business card should have your basics: full name (both legal and how people know you commonly, if different), phone number, email and LinkedIn profile.  If you have a professional website you can add that, and if you use Twitter for professional promotion you can put that on too.  Beware, however, of putting non-professional information on, as this is your professional face in a sound bite.

You also want to include a blurb that says who you are in just a few words.  This may take some tweaking; I’ve recently decided I should change my blurb to be more aggressive about what I want; right now it’s just my promotional skills, and I  think I might do better saying what I’m looking for instead.  I’ll let you know how that works out.

Make sure your business card is PROFESSIONAL looking.  Yes, you can buy stock cards at Staples and make them on your home computer, but if you can’t make it look like the card a corporation would make, you might want to consider spending a few bucks.  VistaPrint (http://www.VistaPrint.com) offers a collection of very nice looking professional cards, 250 for just the cost of shipping, and you can customize to fit your needs.  For a little more money, they offer hundreds of really snazzy designs.  It’s an investment in your career.

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(2) The Elevator Pitch:

Another thing you need to do is have a prepared idea of who you are that you can state in 30 seconds or less – not just you as a person, but also what kind of job you’re looking for and why you’re good for it.  This is called the ‘Elevator Pitch’ and while it sounds stupid, it’s vital.  Just last night I had a friend asking me about my job search, as she had run into an old friend and thought he might be able to help me out.  She sat on the other side of the phone quizzing me about this and that, because she needed an easy way to remember what I was looking for.  I could give her my ‘Elevator Pitch’ and because I’d worked on it and practiced it, I knew it was a concise version that covered the bases.  Hopefully it will make it easier for her to sell me to her friend.

Remember that your pitch should not be recited word-for-word like a script.  You need to practice saying it so that you can make it natural and conversational, getting all your vital information out without sounding like a recording.  The Elevator Pitch is not only for providing your stats, but providing insight into YOU, in a friendly and casual way.  Imagine how you would want to sound if you were trying to convince someone to go on a date with you: you don’t want to sound practiced, because that’s a turn-off.  You want to sound confident and friendly, inviting that person to want to learn more about you.  Practice saying your pitch to your friends or significant other, and let them give you feed back.  Make sure you get feedback from more than one person, since we all have our preferences in how people appeal to us.  Most importantly, don’t take the feedback personally, but DO take it to heart.

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(3) Social Media:

The big argument in today’s market is the importance of the social media system to help promote yourself.  You can find hundreds of articles online which discuss the topic of how, how much, and why.  Last summer I took a couple of online webinars from a company called Social Media Marketing; these online seminars discussed the basic ideas of social networking sites and how businesses should be using those sites to promote themselves. Now, you may not be a business, but these same ideas can be applied to your own personal networking game plan, and I think it is a good idea to view promoting yourself for a job as a business would promote itself for profit.

Of course, the company offering these webinars does so with the goal of getting businesses to pay for a series of classes, but the initial webinar is free (and it’s easy to ignore the sales pitch). You can gain some great ideas for free in just over an hour of your time on your home computer.  It’s worth the hour, and you may find yourself very enlightened. They not only talk about the major sites – Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn – but a number of lesser-known and/or industry specific sites that might be of interest to you.  (http://www.socialmediamagic.com/schedule.html)

GetHired BootCamp is another company (or, possibly the same one under a different name) which offers another webinar, “Keys to a Successful Job Search”. I have not yet taken this webinar, so I can’t advise just yet on its usefulness, but I’ve read some positive feedback about them.  Again, if you can gleen even one gem of information or advice, it’s worth the time, right?  (http://gethiredbootcamp.com/schedule.html)

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(4) Networking:

Networking is not just something you do online or at professional events; it’s something you’re doing all the time – with friends, family, coworkers, classmates, and strangers.  The problem is that a lot of people leave out sections of their lives when they think about networking.  They forget to tell family and friends in a clear way what it is they’re looking for in a job, or maybe don’t think about talking to them about it at all.  On the other hand, when approaching business contacts, classmates and acquaintances, they forget that these people may not know them as well as they think.

Step one is, of course, building your LinkedIn profile and contacts, but often people will send out a request to connect without changing the auto-message that LinkedIn provides.  Don’t assume the person you’re contacting will remember you.  Even if they remember your name, they may not remember where they met you, or what you talked about.  ALWAYS change your message to personalize it – “Hi, it was great to meet you last week at XYZ, and I really enjoyed discussing Company ABC with you.” Remind them you had that specific class together with that specific teacher, or you both know Suzie Jones, whatever.  The important thing is to give them something that  first of all says “I am not just spam-requesting a link to you” (I get about a dozen junk requests a week from people I am positive I have never met) and secondly that you have some sort of personal connection – if you’ve honestly never met, mention that John Smith recommended that you contact them, or something along those lines.  If you’re requesting to connect with someone from a discussion board, tell them that you share interest in whatever particular discussion caught your eye, and what they said on the board that made you want to connect with them.

What matters is that you make it personal.  Not only does it make you more memorable, but it shows you actually CARE about connecting to them, rather than just being one of those people who requests connections from total strangers for the sake of saying you have 500+ connections.  Remember, connections mean nothing if they don’t know who you are.

Lastly, don’t hesitate to try to establish connections with people whom you don’t know that well.  As long as you can say “hey, I remember you from Here” it’s worth the effort of asking.  Also, don’t immediately write off connections with people who don’t live in the region or city where you are job hunting.  You never know who they know.  My brother is good friends with the tech community in Madison, WI, so when I hear that someone I know is looking for a job in tech in that area, I am  happy to send my brother an email of introduction.  My brother may not be able to do anything at all for my friend, but then again, he just might.  I recently met a guy from Florida who went to school in PA with a guy who now lives in NYC and has been kind enough to forward my resume to that friend.  Whether anything comes of it or not, it’s one more thing that COULD make the difference.  Every one is worth trying, every THING is worth trying.

Conclusion:

I repeat, nothing I’ve said here is new.  However, I can say from experience that it makes sense, and I’ve seen it work.  I’ve been able to apply for jobs which I would never have even heard of if I hadn’t made the effort to connect with this or that person, or if I hadn’t had a business card on me while standing in the elevator at school.  I received a potential job opportunity sent to me by someone who works as a professional musician, whom I NEVER thought of as a useful business contact, and if she hadn’t approached me I NEVER would have thought to approach her.

Don’t discount anyone or any avenue of exploration, and be ready to pounce on them when they arise.  You’re looking for a job, and there is nothing that should be put aside without being tried.  What works for someone else may not work for you, but you won’t know until you try it.

And They’re Coming to Teach You Things You Need to Know
By: Victoria Goldenberg

Could No Shortage of Work (NSoW) have existed 20 years ago? The costs in time, money and labor to gather and direct members and run a publication might not have justified the modest and seemingly unrealistic ends of encouraging people to work for free. But now that the Internet is widely accessible, setting up the NSoW Web site was relatively inexpensive and easy. More important, communities commonly assemble around Web sites without anyone organizing them. The formerly difficult task of finding people and directing them to collaborate on meaningful work now happens organically, as those who share NSoW’s philosophy participate in the community on their own.

NSoW exemplifies the behavioral shift New York University professor Clay Shirky analyzes in his engaging book Here Comes Everybody (2008, Penguin Books). He describes a compelling variety of cases, from charming Livejournal and Meetup groups to flash mob protests against the government in Belarus, to illustrate how ordinary people are taking the reins and using new tools, such as cell phones and blogs, to organize themselves.

Mr. Shirky stresses that technology itself hasn’t changed the world, but the ways people adopted it have. He cites people who took photos of Coney Island’s annual Mermaid Parade and posted them to the photo-sharing site Flickr under one name, so people could view all the pictures in one place. Prior to 2005, parade attendees hadn’t pooled their photos, but they’ve changed their behavior because of access to a service that makes it simple. At the same time, the photo-takers organized the pictures themselves, without supervision from Flickr or the parade’s sponsors. By coming together, the photographers created a new, valuable resource for the public.

What’s most appealing about Here Comes Everybody is that it resists exaggerating the Internet’s democratizing power and takes a realistic, contextual approach. Mr. Shirky acknowledges that new media and behaviors do not render older institutions useless, (such as newspapers and commercial developers of operating systems), but they do decrease their relative influence. I especially liked the chapter “Everyone is a Media Outlet,” which compared the effects of mass amateurization of journalism to the popularizing of the printing press, noting how it ends professional publications’ monopoly on the news just as the printing press ended scribes’ monopoly on publishing.

I spoke with Mr. Shirky by phone to discuss how No Shortage of Work can challenge people’s assumptions and encourage working for free, rather than not working at all.

“Whenever the digital sharecropper hypothesis comes up—why are all these people working without pay?—the answer is: That’s the wrong question. The idea of working for free assumes there’s this normal case in which you only do something if you get paid, and then there’s this pathological case in which you do things because you like them. That is a legacy of neoclassical economics that assume we’re all self-interested and isolated, rational, maximizing actors. One of the observations I’ve made recently is that one reason these behaviors are so surprising to us is because our previous explanations for human behavior were so lousy. We all do things for free all the time and we don’t even experience them as being for free.

“I think the surprise has been that we’ve believed that intrinsic motivation—things we do because we like them—is inherently limited to the private sphere, basically hearth and home.

“The intrinsic motivation can take place in the public sphere now. We just needed a medium to make that possible. The value of people working, full stop, is basically the value of making yourself happy. It’s a value that’s indivisible to other things.”

He also discussed whether communal learning might decrease the higher education system’s relative importance in the job market:

“Given that the premium of college education offers on the job market is now being leveled out, we’re clearly going to see a rise of lower-cost attempts to deliver the value of a college education.

“We may be in one of those times where people say, ‘demanding a four-year college degree for the training I need for this job doesn’t make sense anymore’. There have certainly been enough observations about the economic disadvantage of four-year education that people are willing to consider it, but it’s not going to be a general social change. Probably some industry will shift away from demanding a four-year degree pro forma to figuring out when it matters and when just having the skills training is enough.”

Shirky described how he learned skills such as computer programming from online communities and how this valuable method of learning can be invisible:

“I think it’s telling about the social piece that we don’t have any middle word between ‘I went to an accredited institution and got formal learning’ and ‘I am self-taught’ to reflect the way a lot of people learn these things which is, ‘I joined a community that knows and cares about the subject I care about, and I learned it there.’

“The language doesn’t yet give us a way to reflect on being communally taught as opposed to institutionally taught.”

No Shortage of Work is a venue for communal education. By participating in it you can learn from the pros, outside of a formal setting, and work to build vital job skills—or just for the joy of it.

We are meeting again. Click HERE for details.

It is about making connections.

By: Frank McGrath

Networking is tricky if you are chasing an unspecific, yet oddly limited, goal: I need a job. I need a job now. I need immediate, directed help that I hope to get from indirect sources. This sort of networker is a supplicant, having little beyond selfish wants and requests, thus making everyone wary. No wonder the success rate for such networking is low.

This is a hard game to win. Broaden your goals so they are more about your life than just job seeking.

Make a list of interests. For example, my current list includes:

• Horse racing
• Trading macro strategies
• Good Manhattan restaurants
• Pro hockey
• Buying a second home in New Orleans
• A dream business on Moorea in French Polynesia as a post-Wall Street career.

Now that is a varied opportunity set, and successful networking in any of those interests brings the chance of something fun and worthwhile, and yes, maybe even paid work. Networking is not just about finding a job; it’s about improving your life without sanctimony.

Good networking allows people to match passions and goals .

Here’s an experiment: Write a paragraph to the owner of a restaurant about something you were inspired to duplicate at home. Compliment the place, specify when you’ll make your next visit, and ask to share with them your effort. I can almost guarantee you will be successful. Going forward, always let the owner know when you’re coming – who doesn’t make time for an involved, repeat customer? Suddenly, you have a darned interesting contact glad to see you.

Another tactic: Find your target’s interests and compare them to your own. A few years ago I wrote a chatty note to the head of a hedge fund about his farm in Kentucky, asking him how he picked his stock and admiring the results of some of the horses he ran that summer. It worked. People kill to get on this guy’s calendar, yet now he shoots me an e-mail twice a month to ask if I want to go out to Belmont to see a horse run or to give me a bet he likes. He has thousands of people to talk to about market jobs, but precious few with whom to kill a lazy spring Wednesday at the Belmont clubhouse on short notice. I’m not a supplicant. I am a nice person he cares to talk to.

Sure, these sorts of networking plans do not always work, but the rate for successful repeat interactions over common interests is surprisingly high, particularly when you aren’t asking for work or funding (no matter how cleverly). You are writing a fan letter, not a solicitation. It is far easier to discuss shared enthusiasms than job hunting, and by doing so you’ll have a broader target base and richer experiences. Even better, your contacts will self-select; the easily engaged will respond, the distracted will not. The resulting contacts can be richer than you imagine: a mentor or a friend who can give you new insight and experience, rather than a just a job.

a book review by Paul Share

In The Whuffie Factor, author Tara Hunt tells the fascinating story of how, in recent years, entrepreneurs and companies of all sizes have used social networking to succeed in business. Hunt notes that traditional advertising is experiencing diminishing returns, as people learn to block out messages from a bombardment of media. Which brings us to the concept and use of “whuffie”.

Whuffie is a term coined by Cory Doctorow, a popular blogger, in a science fiction novel. He uses the term to describe social capital (or good will) in a future time when money is replaced as a medium of exchange by whuffie.   Hunt tells the story of businesses that have used social networking tools and Web 2.0 approaches to build a community of users, nurture whuffie with this community, and use this whuffie to thrive. She uses the telling of their stories to illustrate the various principles and “how-to’s”  that a person or business should follow in order to build social communities, interact with these social communities in a manner that builds whuffie, and ultimately benefit from the relationships and good-will generated.

But Hunt’s book is more than an engaging account of how businesses have successfully used these tools, and it is more than a how-to guide.  The Whuffie Factor also addresses a number of philosophical threads that are drifting through the cybersphere. Hunt writes that in order to be successful in building up Whuffie with a community, a member has to adopt a certain mindset. You can’t go into the community thinking of how you are going to benefit. Rather, you have to go in thinking of how you can benefit the community.

The success stories that Ms. Hunt recounts often demonstrate the “what goes around, comes around” school of karmic sociology. Many of these success stories are companies whose very mission statement involves doing good. Two examples are Stonyfield Farm, whose basic mission statement is to create environmentally friendly products, and Craigslist, which started as a free service and which to this day chooses not to charge for most types of listings. But even with businesses where a higher purpose is not built into the mission statement, Ms. Hunt shows how a key element in their success is a commitment to building and listening to a customer community, and using what they learn to improve their customers’ experience with their products and services. By serving their customers, companies create whuffie which, which as Ms. Hunt details, these businesses have used to improve customer loyalty and their sales.

I had the opportunity to speak with Hunt and asked her whether individuals looking for work can learn from the story told in her book.

She replied:

“Absolutely. When it comes to social capital, individuals are the key element, whether acting for a company or for themselves. It is always individuals who have the passions and human interests and emotions that can turn a series of digital connections into a community.”

“The world is changing before our eyes. Of the 500 companies included in the original Fortune 500 list published in 1955, only 71 (less than 15%) remained on this list on the 50^th anniversary in 2005.We work at a job and get comfortable and proficient at it, but then the job changes or goes away.  Jobs that we trained for 5, 10 and 15 years ago are disappearing or changing dramatically. Journalism is an example. People want news but more and more they are getting it digitally. People will pay for a pound of newspaper but resist paying when the news is in digital form.  So more and more journalists are losing their jobs with hard-copy publications and are scrambling to make a living in this new age.”

“For an individual to become adaptable in order to, survive and even benefit from this tidal wave of change it necessary to put yourself out there.  Word of mouth, has always been the most powerful form of marketing, for individuals as well as companies. In this age of digital communities, its reach is growing and it is getting even more powerful. Only by reaching out and engaging with many communities, can you keep on top of what is happening and build personal Whuffie that will help you find new work in this new age.”

As explained in Ms. Hunt’s book, by participating in groups like No-Shortage of Work, with a “pay it forward” mindset, one engages in communities in a manner that is personally rewarding and tends to be rewarding in terms of one’s career.

IS A BIG HIT

Seventy No Shortage of Work subscribers converged on the offices of New Work City on Wednesday, April 7, 2010, for what can only be described as our best networking party yet.

Unlike our prior party there was no music, which was a welcome relief; our crowd was loud enough. By 8:00 p.m. it got so crowded that some people moved into the hall for one-on-one discussions. New Work City is moving soon to a bigger space, and we are all hoping we will be invited to hold a party there soon.

(Note: The next party will be on May 10 – look for an announcement on this site.)

Humor was provided by someone identifying himself as Kotow Shergar, an editor at Humongous Shortage of Work. Mr. Shergar handed out a flier recommending attendees go home, and if they chose to stay they avoid talking to strangers and be very suspicious of offers to help. Ironically, Mr Shergar stayed until the very end, and his handout made the claim that he wrote for the Onion and was offering to help people with their writing.

Elissa Desani, of Glass Ceiling Films, collected stories and suggestions from attendees. She even caught on tape a heated argument between Kotow Shergar and Brooke Allen, regarding the reasonableness of people helping people without money changing hands.

Below are more photos from the meeting:

NSoW Volunteers meet for dinner before the party.

NSoW Party attendees brought their own beer, wine, soft drinks, and munchies.

Left to Right: Kotow Shurgar and Brooke Allen argue while NSoW subscriber, David Brett, looks on in disbelief.

Attendees wore color coded tags identifying them as willing to be mentors, looking for work, or looking for help.

There was more than enough to drink and eat.

Elissa Desani of Glass Ceiling Films

Tony Bacigalupo, Founder of New Work City.

About Our Hosts: NEW WORK CITY

New Work City is a co-working site where membership gets you access to their workspace, their mailing list, an excellent community of NYC independents, and much more.

To learn more, go to: nwcny.com