Working from Kinassery : My never ending love story with open community spaces
Kinassery is an ideal, non existent place where everything happens at your wish. It’s more like an Utopia. I fell in love with the concept of kinassery couple of years back. In my kinassery, the Most beautiful space is a library with never ending tall racks. All good people would come here and collaborate building creative things. I used to work from a space which gave me a similar kind of vibe. The ground floor of Startup village at Kochi. Startup village is the country’s first PPP model TBI.
Ground floor of startup village
Startup village 10K infrastructure was actually a water tank which got converted to a building. In the four storied building entire top floor was dedicated to the community activities. Ground floor meanwhile was more like a co-working space, with high speed internet, AC and bean bags. The only difference was, it was free. Absolutely. You didn’t have to pay anything to access this space or its facilities. It was open 24 hrs a day, 7 days a week and anybody could just walk in and work. This space took collaboration and community activities to its peak. When the startup village was taken over by Kerala startup mission a year ago, the space got closed down. It’s now converted to a FAB Lab. I hold a very personal connection to this space, hence this story.
Space
The space was more like a co-working space. There were tables, chairs, nice wall stickers and AC to cool you off. You could sit where ever you wanted to, you could do whatever you felt like. Nobody was there to judge you. You could work at night and have a nap in the morning. All seemed normal.
I and my friends used to Literally live there. During weekends we backpacked to SV., stayed there for two day working on stuff that interested us. We were not alone, I knew a lot of people who used to live in SV for months long.
Anybody can Walk in
There were no securities, there were no access cards. The door was kept open for all, all the time. We used to leave our laptops and other valuables there, because nothing would get stolen from there.
24x7
The space was open 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. It was a place we belonged to. When it used to become boring at hostel, we would come here at midnight and start working.
Bean bags
I saw bean bags for the first time from there. It was nice to work sitting in a bean bag. I used to carry a small blanket in my bag, so that I could sleep comfortably if I wanted to.
Internet
Internet is a rare resource in India, at-least back then. People always relate internet with consumables like electricity or pipe water — “when you use more, you have to pay more” logic. Unlike electricity or water you don’t have to pay for each block of data you consume if you are using a leased line connection. It will mostly be a fixed bandwidth connection which you can use without any limits. All organisations use lease lines these days.
My university CUSAT had a great internet connectivity, thanks to national knowledge network. NKN provides 1 GB/s connection with the help of BSNL. Unfortunately our professors also were firm believers of this consumable model of internet. Internet was kept very safe and protected inside our labs. In my 4 years at college , the only time I got to use internet freely was when I was doing my main project in 8th semester. While all the IITs and NITs provided decent internet to hostel rooms, we had to beg private players like asianet to get a even a basic connection.
Startup village had a pretty decent internet connection during that time. Each registered user would get a dedicated 2 Mbps connection. It had a login system for guests also. All the guest will share a 10 Mbps connection. Zac created accounts for me and suhair. So we both and other friends used to have access to good speed internet while we were there at SV.
Community space
Idea to startup
I never met a person who had no new ideas. Almost everyone would have new ideas worth building , but they never had a support to realize those dreams. When Startup village made the startup spring in kerala, thousands of youngsters dreamed of building their own companies. They started to think innovative ideas & the next big things. Unfortunately most of them didn’t know what to do next. Most of them came to startup village without much clue. Some of them thought they could sell their idea to SV and take money back to home.
People used to walk into the community space at the ground floor assuming it’s the office. Then they would meet somebody sitting there who probably would be googling what to do with their life. The conversation would start and the newcomer would get a sense of what a startup was and what the role of startup village was. He would understand what a startup was and how he could develop his idea. I believe My friends and I learned the very early lessons of startups and business just be sitting there and having random discussions in evenings. The office was in the first floor, and community space in ground floor. Hence most of the clueless folks would get first an intro and only then proceed to the office . This greatly reduced the workload in the office.
Community gathering
When startup village was functioning, there would be one community gathering every month. Everyone interested in startups would come there on a Saturday evening. The gathering was created primarily to keep everyone updated about the growth made in each startups that month. There would be small session, pitches and updates. This used to happen at the ground floor. I made my first public talk about my app in a community gathering like this.
Meeting awesome people
I met almost all the good people I know in technology and startup space from here. Including my mentor Sijo Kuruvilla and my tech guru Zacharias Manuel
Un conference
Learning is a constant process. I attended many programs here, Listened to entrepreneurs, makers and innovators. I learned most of the things about startups from here. In early stages of development When you get stuck in a piece of code, the first thing you would want to do is to ask somebody. The best part about the ground floor was, you would find somebody who is really good at it. Sit with them, learn why it happened and you are sorted. One day I learned to re install blackberry 10 OS like this from Rohil dev, founder of fin.
This place hold a lot of memories. A lot of first time things happened from here.
- I met the first millionaire from here.
- Dawned upon me that Millionaires were also human beings just like you and me. Its possible to build a million dollar business from Kerala.
- I made my first public speech about my startup from here.
- I met first investor from here.
I met ritesh malik, founder of inno8 one of the few YC companies from India. He is one of the humblest man i ever met.
- We made our first app from here
- We won our first hackathon from here
- I did my first tech session also from here. It was about blackberry native development.
Mini SV ground floors ;)
This space always triggered my passion of free spaces and internet access. When we got a chance we made it happen at every possible place.
It was Dr Abdulla, Director of CITTIC ,another believer in the internet magic who whole heartedly extended support to Kickstart a Mini Maker space. TinkerHub collaborated with CITTIC to run a open community maker space inside the cusat campus, we made arrangements so that everyone sitting there could access internet seamlessly. Currently we are working with IEDCs in colleges to makes similar Makerspaces everywhere.
It’s time to upgrade our Libraries
Kerala has got a huge network of Libraries which is essentially a community space. Libraries contributed a lot to the so called Kerala model. All the indexes like HDI highly depend on these libraries. It’s time to upgrade our libraries to digital collaborative spaces. What we are essentially looking forward is to have digital collaborative spaces like the SV ground floor in every village in Kerala.
Read this chayakkada article about the tea shops as a community spaces in movies .
Some random photos from my BB Z10
