These are all questions I have no answer to regarding the month of April for Dojo Collective. All I can do is give you the current events.

Right now Dojo is focusing on developing our revenue streams in order to get to our goal of a full opening in January 2011. We have settled on a model that relies on a Design Gallery/Museum; Library; and Computer Laboratory. With that in mind, we are actively engaged in two projects as of today.

The first project is a drive to collect design related books, textbooks, and magazines for the library. If you would like to donate to this cause, please contact Dave or Mark @dojocollective.com.

The second, is a project on Kickstarter.com to raise funds for computers and software licenses. The computer lab will be used for educational mentoring and also made available to the public during the day; for access to the most current versions of some of the best professional design software. Kickstarter is a funding site where people donate to creative projects (average donation is $25) for specific short-term and low budget needs. In order to post a project to this site, an organization must apply and come up with a creative campaign for promotion. Dojo is currently working with associates to come up with that campaign. We’ll let you know when we’re up and running so you can tell your friends.

We hope that you will get involved in some way to assist with these endeavors or some of the other things we have going on such as Make Shift, Rapid Rebrand, and Phoenix Design Week.

Dojo is excited to be getting started on the planning for Phoenix Design Week 2010, scheduled for October. The primary structure is being put in place right now and the calls for volunteers will be coming any day now, so keep your eyes open.

We have been continuing our regular programming schedule but will be changing some things up over the next few weeks. We will not be hosting a First Friday at Fractal this month or next. We will keep you informed if we resume this event. Until then, please support Grand Avenue and all the Bragg’s Pie Factory family; including Fractal, who will be hosting concerts and shows. We are also consolidating our Make Shift nights to occur only on the 3rd Thursday of the month beginning in May. Please make note of these changes on your calendar and we hope that they are not inconvenient.

Many people have been asking what Fractal is up to and how they can help. At this point, Dojo Collective is merely one of the organizations that has been invited by CommunitasPhx to use the facilities at Fractal. We offer assistance to that organization when asked, and suggest contacting CommunitasPhx for more information on what offerings and opportunities exist through Fractal.

We are thankful for the opportunity to pilot our programs in a location that is large enough to handle groups of all sizes; however, Dojo is not housed at Fractal at this time. Our offices are currently located at Lavine Machine on Grant and 7th St. and are not open to the public. We are in the process of searching locations that are large enough for our programs and also affordable enough for a small non-profit such as ourselves. We appreciate all the assistance that has been offered and is currently being offered to us by the community; and would gladly accept any leads or advice you may have in this regard.

Thanks again,
-Bully

Early in the month we hosted the monthly sprawl exhibit of iPhone sized photography. While there wasn’t a lot of foot traffic on First Friday due to the loss of our main exhibitor, it was an inspiring exhibit for us. The number of submissions from outside the normal design community was really encouraging.

We also began hosting our Make Shift nights on the first and third Thursday of the month and met some new folks who are eager to get involved in the community. It is nice to just have a night with no format where we can get together as creatives and just be. Please join us in April!

PhxThink held a mini event here on the second Thursday and had a rousing discussion. Contact Tyler Hurst (@tdhurst) for information on this conversation series.

The Galapagos Improv troupe from the Torch Theatre performed on the 2nd, 3rd and 4th Friday of the month. If you haven’t come out yet, you should try it. Have dinner at Sapna on the corner and come spend an hour of your evening laughing.

On March 20th, we hosted a Think Tank comprised of some of the forward thinking design and community minds in Phoenix to determine a course of action to develop Phoenix as a city that will be known for great design. This event will produce an 18 month plan to bring us to October 13th of next year when AIGA will be bringing their national convention to Phoenix (this is a huge deal).

Bully and Mark continue to meet with community leaders to spread the Dojo message and to try and secure space for our continuing efforts. We love fractal and are thankful to Zack Newsome for providing us with a home during this pilot phase; but our ultimate goal is still in tact. Many thanks go to Dan Semenchuk, Kimber Lanning, and Jim McPherson for their support and connectivity!

On March 25th, Dojo was a presenting sponsor for the Phoenix installment of Twestival; a charitable event that is held in multiple cities and marketed through Twitter. We donated a Rapid Rebrand package and some tickets to the April 27th Pecha Kucha Night event to be held at fractal. We hope you were able to attend the event at Martini Ranch in Scottsdale; but if not, please try to attend the next one. These are great events to help local and national causes through donation.

Finally, we are ramping up for our month ending Rapid Rebrand initiative to help a non-profit improve their community and internet presence. In fact, I have a meeting to get to right now on that very subject. Keep us in your bookmarks and check in periodically for updates!

Thanks for your continuing support,

Bully and Mark

Make Shift has no format
Make Shift is for creativity and collaboration
Make Shift can be what you want it to be
Make Shift encourages you to bring anything you are working on and work on it in an open environment
Make Shift is a great chance to meet other creatives and find out what they really love to do
Make Shift is a good place to find out about Dojo Collective, Sprawl and other creative organizations
Make Shift can be the place you find out about, and work on, the latest PHXDC project for the month
Make Shift is where Dojo Collective launches our community initiatives and partnership projects

Bully and Mark are working on a project at Make Shift that needs your help. With the help of Andrew Coppola, we are trying to find designers willing to bring in an example of their work and let us photograph them holding it. We will take these images and use them for a fun web app that makes the user sort through slices of the images to figure out which designer’s head matches with which work; so that we can get to know eachother’s work better. It’s just a silly game (with a goal).

So come and hangout with us on one of these nights. It won’t hurt and it might even help you get involved in something new to help you show what you can *really* do.

Bully

We will be expanding our offerings in March to include the open house night Make Shift. This will be a semi-monthly evening on the first and third Thursday of the month and will be used for after hours creativity and collaboration. Come in with your projects and ideas and let’s make them happen. The environment will be very informal and relaxed. We have the wifi, coffee maker, a huge workspace, and like-minded people; you bring the fun.

Additionally, we have been hosting Galapagos from the Torch Theatre on Friday nights. Please come by and check them out. It’s a lot of fun. They will perform every Friday in March except for First Friday.

As always, please let us know if you have something you would like to do in the fractal space or a project you would like to initiate. Don’t wait for us to provide something you want to participate in; bring it on!

Bully and Mark

Use your iphone (or camera) to photograph Phoenix textures, colors, design or typography. You can also make an original design at 480px x 320px. We’ll be creating a collage of all the entries we receive at fractal for March’s ArtDetour on March 6th. You may submit as many entries as you like!

Send file or link to file by 03/02/10 to info@phxdw.com
480px x 320px
Any format (psd, ai, pdf, jpg, whatever)
or MMS to (615) 274-9530

During Art Detour we hope to cover one entire wall with the collage of submissions. This will require a large number of photos, so please contribute! Every contributor will be acknowledged in print along with the display.

I want to start by thanking everyone for the support and encouragement that we have received since moving into Fractal in late November. This is the first in a series of updates that I will try to do on a monthly basis to let you know what’s been going on and what’s in the works here at Dojo.

Over the past month we kicked off the professional development side of the house with Design Made Better’s print-to-web classes taught by April Holle. I’ve been hiding on the office-side of the wall and it seems to be going well. Everyone keeps coming back and each week there’s a new face. These classes will be running through the end of March and there is still time to get in for a one off or the second half of the series.

We also have initiated a project through Sprawl in cooperation with fractal called Rapid Rebrand. On the 30th of the month, we got a small pilot team together to help brand and connect Rusty Spoke community bike shop (another fractal tenant); giving them a website and setting up some social media sites for them.

I went over and sat in a Commpose meeting to share with them about Rapid Rebrand. It was highly encouraging to get such a good response from the copywriting community. Everyone we talk to about this in Phoenix seems to be excited for the opportunity to give back to the city that supports them.

We hosted an executive planning committee meeting for the 2010 edition of Phoenix Design Week on the 20th and we are all looking forward to getting that ball rolling again. We hope that our discussion of lessons learned will lead to a more organized madness for this year!

Mark has also been working with a task force to bring Pecha Kucha Night to Phoenix in the Spring through Sprawl. This event is similar to the format of TED and Ignite but with a more focused approach toward design and calls to action.

We will continue to throw out monthly Sprawl projects to the phxdc folks and show the results during our First Friday exhibits. This month was the New Year’s Resolution poster project. Come see the results on February 5th.

We also get the privilege of being the curators for the art on display in the space each month. Many thanks go to Morgan McNally who actually does the connecting for Dojo to the artist community.

So now on to the things we want to do:

Please help us keep connecting to the nonprofit community to continue our Rapid Rebrand project. We want this to be meaningful and valuable to both the nonprofits and the Dojo creative ninjas. To that end, please refer those nonprofits that you know (or assume) need the help and can’t afford to work with a professional agency. We do this as a speedy process; but 6 hours of free work should be put to good purpose!

We will be starting a community service project in the near future that will focus on getting the word out about community issues that affect Central Phoenix through design work. We would like to partner with schools, neighborhood associations, and local businesses to find what those issues are. We will probably be kicking off with bike safety and continuing with promotion of shopping local. Send us your ideas and volunteer by completing our volunteer form or emailing dave@dojocollective.com.

As the school year comes to a close, we will hit the road to visit some of our local high schools to let them know about our programming and goals. It looks like, while we are in fractal, we will try to bring the young adults in through promotion of our offerings but without formal connections with the schools. If you have a friend or family member that might be interested in pursuing a career in graphic/web design, let them know that we will be having workshops and projects over the summer. There is a form they can fill out right here to express interest.

So there you have January in a nutshell. I hope that February’s message will contain even more exciting news, but I must say things are moving along so much faster than I was ready for and we may have to slow down a bit and take it all in.

Thanks again for your support of Dojo Collective.

Bully

Dojo Collective would like to expand our coworking offerings here at fractal. This new space was unanticipated and we needed to get our bearings; but Dojo has always planned to make whatever space we occupy available for weekday coworking in order to keep creative people coming in and seeing where they can be useful to the community. Of course that was supposed to be in January 2011, when I quit my job and did this thing full time. However, since Mark and I both have full time jobs right now in January 2010, we are slightly stuck with regard to availability.

I have the ability to telecommute out of fractal up to 3 days of the week, but I am at the mercy of meeting schedules and the needs of my paying gig. I love my day job (despite appearances to the contrary lately) and need to give my full time and attention to the interests of the State from 8-5 Monday through Friday. Because of this, I have been opening coworking up to the public on a rare and inconsistent basis.

Help me change that.

I am open to suggestions from all who are willing to offer them.

Please remember that this space is not equipped to act as a professional office. We have the basics (chairs, tables, power, wifi, printer, restroom) and we don’t have the ability to regulate the temperature in the winter (we have a couple space heaters but this is AZ!). We have not invited paying anchor companies in because of our needs for flexibility and keeping an open footprint. We don’t charge money for you to avail yourself of our resources; both because we don’t have many, and because we don’t want to run into trouble due to expectations of ‘paying customers’.

We are not a coworking business; we are a collection of nonprofits with some extra space during the day.

So what are your thoughts on how we can expand our coworking?
How can we make this a place you would want to visit periodically outside of our scheduled programming (keep in mind that we are poor)?

Thanks for your help!

Bully

* Cooperation
* Collaboration
* Education
* Community
* Socially Responsible Design

Come join us in our mission to make Phoenix more creative.