Lifecycle: Ground Floor Collaboration
Lifecycle: Culmination
BRW. 10 April 2008
Page 60
TWO INNOVATORS DEVELOP A SELF-SUSTAINING WEB COMMUNITY.
Michelle Gilmore and Christie Coleman, Ground Floor Collaboration
Position: Founders
Milestones:
2006: Ground Floor Gallery opens in Sydney
2007: Development begins for Ground Floor Collaboration site
2007: Ground Floor Collaboration goes live
If your employer resists new ideas, start your own show. That’s what gallery owners Christie Coleman, left, and Michelle Gilmore did when they opened Sydney’s Ground Floor Gallery in 2006.
Their floor space was tiny, and they had to call on friends to help renovate it. But six weeks after signing the lease, they had rounded up 12 local fashion, jewellery and object designers to show and retail their work.
They were soon inundated with designers, and it quickly became clear that what exhibitors wanted as much as show space was advice on how to run their businesses.
It echoed industrial designer Gilmore’s own frustration. “Early on, I found I was always coming to Christie and asking her for business advice because I’d never learnt that at university,” she says. “I knew how to be a designer, but I had no idea how to write a business plan. Most designers need help to understand business and get some experience.”
Gilmore’s idea for coping with the influx was simple: go online with business support for designers. So Ground Floor Gallery became Ground Floor Collaboration, launching in December 2007. Its first stage was a free online service for creative talents to profile themselves and their skills and for prospective employers to source talent for full−time employment and project work.
“One of our core goals is commercialising talent,” Coleman, a former operations executive, says. “We are definitely not afraid of money. We actually like it. There’s all this creative talent in Australia, and there are a lot of people providing grants but not a lot of people talking about how to make money.”
“In the industrial age there were factories for production and roads to take goods to market,” she says. “So, how do you take creative goods to market? That’s what Ground Floor Collaboration is. We’ve had so much success putting people in contact, we’re growing exponentially.”
Jobs and profiles are being created in all Australian states, as well as Japan, Spain and South America, and the site accommodates public relations and marketing positions as well as graphic, web, software and fashion design.
Gilmore and Coleman estimate that job−searching and networking will ultimately represent only 25 per cent of the site’s capabilities, and they are preparing for the second stage of the Collaboration project.
It will come in June this year when a cluster of “community” open−source projects goes live. Also planned is the introduction of aggregating software that would allow decentralised freelance designers to work simultaneously on projects, with the fee distribution based on contributions.
The two anticipate that within six months they will act only as technical facilitators for the site, with the new infrastructure creating a community of talent to replace them as business mentors. “We won’t compromise the ideals of the site,” Gilmore says. “But it’s time for us to step back once we’ve built the tools.”
SARAH NEILL
