Pecha Kucha night at the Roosevelt a huge success!

It was a complete race to the finish of course; I was literally cleaning the construction dust off the toilets while Bryan was hanging the bathroom doors & Kaos is riggin up LED lights. Our architect & Pecha Kucha host Ken Cowart has the best poker face ever!

The event had well over 100 people in attendance; all open minded creatively thinking people. Ken opened with a video from the founders in Tokyo welcoming the Tampa chapter to this world wide network. When Bryan spoke welcoming the crowd & he told them the event was entire off grid & being powered by vegetable oil the crowd erupted in cheers.

In every aspect this was a perfect opening event for us at the Roosevelt. The presentations were very intersting & new connections were made. Example - a local teacher at Plant High school said she wanted to bring her class down to get interacting with Project 3.0. So she was introduced to our intern for the Earthship - Ethan. Ethan attends a small "experiential" high school up in Ohio and he is camping on the Earthship site til March 27th on an 8 week internship. Other internships he's had include a stint in stand up comedy at the Improv; his next one is going rock climbing. He is a remarkably well rounded young man at 18 years old. You learn through life experience. Imagine that.

We also proudly welcome two new sponsors to Project 3.0:

Uponor

Castle Plumbing

More info on new corporate partners and business details in the next one.

Roosevelt Grand Opening in sight!

Once again - sorry about the long radio silence; everybody is running around doing 20 different tasks. It is my intent to update this blog daily as things get situated.

Our current focus is on having the Roosevelt completely open and functional by the third week in February. We already have our first event scheduled for February 20th - Pecha Kucha Tampa Bay. Pecha Kucha is a global network of architects and real estate design professionals. Each presenter gets 20 slides to showcase their project and each slide automatically moves every 20 seconds. This keeps it short, dynamic & interesting.

More info: www.pecha-kucha.org/

Our current focus is on attracting like-minded tenants to sublease the space from us. A leasing proposal can be downloaded here:

Roosevelt Leasing Proposal

Structure

Sorry 'bout the long radio silence; we've been dealing with a range of pressing issues that are immediately in front of us. Bryan & I are doing all the physical work ourselves - which is clearly inefficient. for example; we have over 1,000 volunteers registred for the earthship project. The focus now is shifting towards organization and mobilization of all the assets - like our volunteer base - into a structured whole.

I will be concentrating this upcoming week on structuring that foundation. We have everything covered as far as the phyical real estate development components are concerned. We are dealing with individuals & companies from around the world and have some very interesting stuff lined up for this project; some of it completely experimental. That in itself is a serious task. In addition to that we are filming an ongoing documentary and trying to launch a detination website to carry that content. On top of that we are involved in several other projects that are much larger that are currently in the planning stages - meaning lots of additional work now for income way down the road.

The irony in launching an open source project is that it feels very counter-intuitive to let go. But the reality is that we have to. We simple can't do everything. Bryan needs to focus on communicating with and funneling information from these cutting edge technologies from around the world into this project. I need to focus on structuring the business relationships & promotional aspects around these deals. Everything else we need to pull in participating entities thatr share in the royalties/revenues generated through that partticipation with complete financial transparency. This, after all, is the original concept.

An example of this - approach a university film school depatrtment to assist with the documentary. It certainly is an interesting enough topic for a group of grad students to put on their resume/thesis. a lot of views = sponsorship dollars, which we would share with the participating partner and openly disclose those numbers on our website. The emerging & evolving collaboration is the real story.

We also need to approach the colleges of business, engineering & architecture at USF with similar presentations. Anyone reading this that feels they can contribute or have a suggestion - feel free to jump in.

It's time let go and release it.

Down to the wire

Yesterday was a very hectic day scrambling to get ready for the BBQ. Bryan & Rudy took apart the temporary walls from a previous art show, recycled the 2 X 4's and framed up the bathrooms & hung the sheetrock.

The biggest curveball was the Friendly Plumber - the company that for weeks has agreed to provide 2 commodes and the labor to install them. Long story short - they left us hanging at the last minute.

One of our contacts in the entertainment game stopped by; a friend of Steve (Francois with Tek-Nique Entertainment) named Britt. At the height of frustration this guy shows up and I just threw out "hey man you know any plumbers!?". As it turns out one of his best friends is a plumber - a guy named Joe! A call was made on the spot....Mad props to Joe the plumber for saving the day. This guy came over on New Years eve and made sure we had at least a working toilet hooked up for the BBQ today.

The ironic twist is that this guy used to work for the Friendly Plumber. Turns out Joe doesn't even have business cards so Isaiah (with Boundless Creativity - our graphics guy on the team) is full throttle on getting Joe the Plumber a company identity. Everything is unfolding the way it's supposed to. Bonds created under this type of pressure and circumstances will be unbreakable. We have a plumber on the team now.

Joe the REAL plumber saves the day on New Year's eve!!

Thanks again Joe for saving our ass.

Our interns Jason & Russell have officially been promoted to full team members. They came back in from Georgia and brought the band with them - O' Youth and Beauty.

Check 'em out:

www.myspace.com/oyouthandbeauty

Russell & Jason have been doing a great job printing business cards, flyers, bringing in the band among many other things. The iniative these guys are showing is fabulous. If this sounds like something you'd like to be apart of - come join us. Dreams come Through baby.

Cya @ the BBQ!