Stories indexed with the term ‘Workantile Exchange’

Every Sunday in March, the Workantile Exchange – a coworking space at 118 S. Main St. in Ann Arbor – is hosting a series of workshops for FoolMoon, a new event that’s happening in conjunction with this year’s FestiFools street parade. While FestiFools will feature oversized puppets parading down Main Street on Sunday, April 3 from 4-5 p.m., FoolMoon will take place on the evening of Friday, April 1. Starting at 8:30 p.m., processions of paraders carrying hand-made illuminated sculptures will emerge from four different locations in Ann Arbor and converge downtown at Washington & Main for musical and shadow puppet shows – and who knows what else?

The WorkEx workshops run from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. – they are free, and are open to all. If you’d like some help in creating your lantern, here’s a video that gives some guidance. Alternatively, FoolMoon Luminary Sculpture Kits are being sold at several local stores. The kits cost $20, contain all the materials needed to make a koi-shaped lantern, and are available at these Ann Arbor businesses: Downtown Home and Garden, Peaceable Kingdom, Acme Mercantile, Ace Barnes Hardware, B-Green, Yourist Studio Gallery, Found, and Trillium Realty.

On Sunday, March 6, local photographer Myra Klarman captured the action at the WorkEx. See anyone you know? [Full Story]

On Wednesday night at the Workantile Exchange – a membership-funded coworking space on Main Street, between Washington and Huron – local video producer and urban researcher Kirk Westphal premiered his two newest films.

The first film, “The Great Street Toolkit,” focuses on urban planning. The second, “The Council-Manager Form of Local Government,” is an introduction to how the council-manager system is different from a strong mayor system. The city of Ann Arbor uses a modified version of the council-manager form.

As Westphal himself noted lightheartedly, it was the “true wonks” in the audience who stayed for the second film – on council-manager government.

And it turns out that most of the 30 people in the audience were true wonks.

But linked indirectly to the evening in multiple ways was one person who was not in the audience at all –  local developer and downtown property owner, Ed Shaffran. [Full Story]

What kind of “helpful” customer rearranges whole shelves of technology books at Borders – because the downtown Ann Arbor bookstore has them organized in a less-than-optimal way? Trek Glowacki.

For that sort of book rearranging, Glowacki is supported by the credential of a master’s in library science from the University of Michigan’s School of Information. Plus, the “self-described information problem solver” spends a lot of time at Border’s. It wasn’t some kind of drive-by book reorganization.

Given that Glowacki is inclined to reconfigure the space he inhabits – even if it’s a public space – it’s not surprising that he and his colleague, Jesse Sielaff, wound up using the Workantile Exchange as the venue for a course they taught recently.

That venue is a new coworking space at 118 S. Main Street in downtown Ann Arbor – a space furnished mostly with chairs and tables on wheels. It’s intended to be easily configured by the members of the Workantile Exchange to suit the specific needs of a particular project on a particular day.

The 3,000 square foot Workantile is partitioned into a very public area towards the front (just behind the new Mighty Good Coffee storefront), private areas for phone calls, plus a conference room towards the back.

But it was Workantile’s 800 square foot Training Loft that Glowacki and Sielaff used to teach their 5-week Ruby on Rails course. That course concluded on Thursday – the same day that Ann Arbor public schools wound up their year.

What’s Ruby on Rails? [Hint: It's not a Wizard of Oz mass transit system.] And how does teaching classes fit into Workantile’s culture of coworking? [Full Story]