Hello helo,
yesterday was a real action day for Hub Jyväskylä and Hub Tampere! Hub Tampere opens next Monday, cool! For that the founder Jonathan Robinson was visiting the spot, and so did we.
Since the morning we had a good speed @ Monkey Business office in Vaajakoski. We’ve had the space for a month and the official housewarming party will be at 26th of Feb. We had our Mondays are for Monkeys dialogue session and then a coach mate Niina Leinonen came to plan the next works with Janne. They went to do it in the sauna upstairs of our nest, because we had just got into the decoration mood and it was rather noisy downstairs. Suddenly we just realized that it’s time to run, otherwise we would lost the chance to meet the people in Tampere! Janne still wanted to go home and change his nice jeans on, and we accepted the delay. (Janne has nice style in jeans)
At 17.55 we arrived to Tampere to the meeting that had started at 17 and was supposed to end at 18. We just popped in and observed a circle of 25 people: students, teachers, WebTV program producer, business coaches and local development centre leaders and reporters. Jukka Siltanen and Elina Ruuskanen, the hosts, welcomed us warmly and invited us for dinner with the core team and Jonathan. Nice and useful talk followed, and we had decided to follow a question-based approach.
We asked ”How can we help you and the Hub, Jonathan?” and the talk started about the Hub community and using the full potential of it. Jonathan told that generally in the Hub they have succeeded to commit the hosts, but not the users for developing the community. We asked could we help in that, for example by organizing a Bar Camp for the Hub users globally – that should be explosive!
We also asked is it common in the Hub to have experienced hosts from the existing Hubs to go in the new opening Hubs to help creating the culture and community. It’s not that common, Jonathan said, but would be good to organize. Hub Tampere was already interested.
As Team Academy alumnis having visited plenty of existing Hubs we feel that the sense of community and interaction between the Hubs globally coudl be stronger. Hubs are more professional workspaces than Team Academy for sure, and the users we’ve been talking with normally say that they just need the space and come to use it. In Hub Jyväskylä we are thinking that the space is just a side product – community is the core business. That’s because we believe that the community building brings more business than a building itself. Also the small town case is that getting workspace for cheap is not a problem for anyone, so when creating a Hub we have to think of different ways to highlight the contents of it. Last time in a Hub meeting we did the Blue Ocean Strategy for Hub JKL – maybe it was not objective, but the core idea is worth thinking further. We’ve got to think what features we eliminate, reduce, raise and create grid in Hub Jyväskylä. Desire we share with Hub Tampere is that we’d be able to create a new kind of community Hub model that could be applied well in cities with less than 200 000 inhabitants. Hub movement in Finland now gives a perfect base for experimenting that.
Keeping it yellow,
Henna Monkey
