Afternoon y’all from lovely lakeside Portumna. Apologies, I have been M.I.A., just coming out of an intense period of work with the European Election Campaign. Now that the dust has settled, I have more bandwidth to continue the great work of the Grow Remote movement.
It is great to see our chapter grow to 32 members and that already the remote working community is self-organising and having informal meetups. I am a big fan of the agile approach! Evert contacted me about arranging an informal Open Coffee House type meeting up and I can add these events here. He suggested once a month which I think is realistic as everyone is fairly busy with work/play projects. I am more a fan of meeting for coffee in the mornings and never meet after 6pm as I turn into a Vampress then ;-) And the word COMMITTEE is a bad word. Let me know your thoughts.
Anne and I have been working on holding a more formal event in the space over Ca to Ca which is finally opened. The goal is to bring remote employers, remote workers together to take about remote work, how to get started, how to have a portfolio career and so on. We want to approach it from Beginner to Seasoned Remote Worker. We have also got permission to have an event in the Castle from the OPW which was an achievement in itself. I think an event in the castle could be combined with a garden “fete” with live music and so on, without going all Blue Sky on it!
Anne and I have also been working with a Digital Agency around creating a tourism app for not only Portumna, but all of the large towns in East Galway. We are hoping to get Leader Funding for the app, and have submitted a formal application to Leader. The app is already live in other towns of our size - check out Fermoy, Cobh or even Galway’s Westend. They use an open source mapping system called Mapbox - I am sure the developers here are familiar with it. Watch this space for updates.
I would encourage everyone to follow the Grow Remote Movement here:
https://www.facebook.com/growremote/
https://twitter.com/GrowRemoteIrl
https://growremote.ie/
And the newly designed website with crowd-sourced document/directory. There is also a SLACK channel, and if you wish to be invited, just send me a message.
We have also created an ebook called Going Remote which is very comprehensive A-Z on the steps for a novice to information for more experienced remote workers.
I intentionally called our group Wild Geese as opposed to Portumna to try and capture the lakeside towns and villages. Helena runs the Loughrea chapter and Renate runs the Ballinasloe chapter. It is worth joining these two in particular as each will have different events and posts. Renate is an experienced in the whole world of remote working having steered Wayfair to 100% remote.
We have also created an ebook called Going Remote which is very comprehensive A-Z on the steps for a novice to information for more experienced remote workers and also open source and growing. Message me with your email if you would like a copy.
Feel free to message me if you have any questions.
Elodie