They have a great space on the ground floor of Donkey Wheel House just over the road from Southern Cross Station, and is primed to become a good community base in the CBD. Kinfolk is a new social enterprise that is designed to run profitably, then direct those profits to a number of local and international projects that you can find described on the wall – based on where people vote for their beans to go towards.

Jarrod Briffa is one of the co-founders and a fellow RMIT Entrepreneurship Alumni, so it is great to see what he has been busy working on for the past year. Here is a video of Jarrod and the team describing their vision for the space.

Get along and have a coffee sometime!

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Having spent the last few months living in Fitzroy I have certainly scoped it out and thought I should share some of the highlights. The hyperlocal web market in Australia is still very young – but every Fitzroy local should definitely be subscribed to Fitzroyalty (I suggest doing it with FeedMyInbox to get a managable daily email update) to keep in touch with the best local reporting.

Another good avenue to explore what is happening is a tailored Twitter search on the area – again using FeedMyInbox is a good way to subscribe to daily updates.

Where are the hotspots? Here we go:

Min Lokal

Two communal dining tables and a menu that reflects their sister cafe, New York Tomato. The specials are usually awesome, and the sandwiches make a good lunch. The coffee here is the best in Fitzroy, by a huge margin. It’s on George St so you lose the masses of tourists from Smith St and Brunswick St – since I was living 2 minutes away this place quickly became My Local.

Browse Min Lokal on Yabble – Share your review of Min Lokal on Yabble

Newtown S.C.

Another very intimate space that is great to catch up with people, the Newtown social club lives up to its name with a very regular set of customers. I have only been here for breakfasts but they were all amazing – from the muesli and fresh fruit to the special baked eggs. The coffee is outstanding and the aromas are amazing.

Browse Newtown S.C. on Yabble - Share your review of Newtown S.C. on Yabble

Little Creatures

The Dining Hall is a sight to behold. The open kitchen up the back delivers a good array of snacks or more thorough meals depending on the hour, and the bar that lines the left side of the hall has as much beer as you need to quench your thirst. If you’re new to Little Creatures ask for the “pony round” where you get a pony of each of the 6 drinks they brew – it’s a good way to get started and then you can order something larger of the winner. Great place for a warm afternoon session, and it gets really busy at night.

Browse Little Creatures Dining Hall on Yabble - Share your review of Little Creatures Dining Hall on Yabble

Lamb on Brunswick Street

There’s quite a selection of souvlaki shops on Brunswick St but this one comes out on top. $2.50 pizza slices are great, and they’re by far the most welcoming slices that you’ll see in the windows. The souvlaki’s are great too – traditional but awesome. This is where you go for your lamb after a few beers down the street!

Browse Lamb on Brunswick St on Yabble - Share your review of Lamb on Brunswick St on Yabble

Houndstooth

Long communal tables as standard in Fitzroy. Houndstooth has a great simple menu on the wall – you pay for one, two or three meals and then select from the chalkboard. The Kangaroo fillet was excellent with a rather unique beetroot side. The tiramisu dessert is also a spectacular way to end the meal. It’s a warm atmosphere with a good selection of beer, a good place to meet with friends during the week.

Browse Houndstooth on Yabble - Share your review of Houndstooth on Yabble

Retro Cafe

The bright yellow restaurant and bar down the end of the Brunswick St strip, Retro is good for a fast but decent meal. They often have a $13 beer and pizza deal which is obviously a winner.

Browse Retro Cafe on Yabble - Share your review of Retro Cafe on Yabble

Dr Folicles

No appointments, beer on arrival, loud vinyl and a $27.50 cut. Do yourself a favour and see the good Doctor when the hair gets out of control!

Browse Dr Follicles on Yabble - Share your review of Dr Folicles on Yabble

Gus at Haul

If you continue down the road into North Fitzroy be sure to stop in and say hi to @GusTheBoxer. He guards the haul shop, where you can find some awesome MacBook Pro laptop sleeves – I picked up a Coca Cola cover for my new 13″ and it’s awesome. The products are all made of recycled billboards, number plates, and other cool materials. Gus will help you find something awesome.

Browse haul on Yabble - Share your review of haul on Yabble

Please share your thoughts on each place and if I have missed anything in the area let me know!

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Melbourne’s Magnation also comes to mind as a nice place to work for a little while with a coffee on Third Floor – while making use of their free wifi and saying hi to them as @mag_nation on Twitter of course. If I’m at a community event without established wifi I often share my 3g as “Yabble.com.au” – sharing the web love and most likely getting substantial branding returns from it. Brand sponsored wifi can be a very powerful medium for a remarkably reasonable cost.

When you can assume the space has this web infrastructure as standard, many quite interesting things become possible. I just sat down at Crema and they have Cafescreen wifi and also the plasma display that shows ads and news and things. The two sponsors I saw were The Age, Myer and ANZ. When you login to the hotspot, named “ANZ_Sponsored_Wifi_By_Cafescreen”, you see a splash login page that has The Age headlines – a practical nice touch – and as soon as you accept the T&C you get redirected to ANZ’s new brand webpage. ANZ are doing an amazing job of integrating their offline billboards with these virtual ones, and enough for me to notice it (proximity + repetition = win!)

I am excited by the potential for these connected displays though – they are hyperlocal billboards just waiting to show local information! The Crema display cycled through a TramTracker screen for the local tram stop, and is an obvious space to show the venue’s Foursquare leaderboard (and Mayor!)

If you run a business in a location that has a reasonable amount of traffic you should really consider providing some of this Invisible Infrastructure for your patrons.

Ask NodeCity if you need a hand setting it up!

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3. Bifi = bicycle + free wifi

It’s a simple idea: bicycle + free wifi = bifi!

The colourful bicycle was supplied by Mr Indysocks Steve Hopkins, the free wifi is supplied by Sam Sabey through one of Andy Gelme’s ‘Things’, in the spirit of the Nodecity mesh, and it will park outside Yabble’s cafes! I love it when an idea comes to fruition! You can follow bifi’s movement using the #bifi hashtag on twitter. Keep an eye out for bifi on the streets of Melbourne.

If you would like to request a place for bifi to park leave a comment below :)

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After seeing traces of his presence scattered throughout the web, I met Donal at Trampoline earlier this year. What I love is that he’s not just talking about the adhocracy, he’s actually doing it by providing decentralised mesh network infrastructure through his not-for-profit IT company, Nodecity.

Nodecity builds these mesh networks using hardware from a small Silicon Valley-based company called Meraki. After a small flurry of activity in Australia after Mark Pesce’s magnificent lecture on Mob Rules (text / video) I haven’t heard much about them, but perhaps it is time for another serious push?

This video explains how the Meraki mesh network self-organises and the potential access enables:

What’s happened so far? Both the Trampoline Melbourne and Future Summit 2009 events had fantastic free wireless coverage. This enabled some really powerful connections to flourish, such as realtime backchannels and the broader distribution of messages far beyond the physical location of the venues.

When Pete Williams and Donal met there it was only a few days before the people living in the temporary village in Flowerdale after being displaced by bushfires had blanketed wifi coverage from a single rebrokered internet connection. The speed of deployment is incredible.

There are so many amazing implications of this sort of technology, especially when you consider that the nodes can be solar powered. Remote areas can be tied together, suburban streets can share a single external connection, objects can be connected as nodes, cost of access is dramatically reduced, and of course you get more redundancy through the mesh structure itself.

If you could build an internet infrastructure somewhere, where would you build it?

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What have you got? What does it mean? How often do you change?

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I gave up printing before I gave up newspapers – the last time I printed something was an assignment at RMIT University because they wouldn’t accept a digital version alone. That aside it has been years. 

What is the most effective way to reduce the number of trees we cut down each year? Better alternatives. My phone has access to the latest information on the web, and it is easier to submit an assignment online than print it out and travel to Uni to hand it in.

We don’t need to use paper this much – pair my iPhone with my Surface/TV and I’ll be satisfied. 

We should only need one generation to largely remove our habit of sharing information on dead forrests.

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What do I want from the social web in 2009? The same thing I wanted yesterday!

More making, more sharing, more value. Less web commentary, more real stories.  

Last week Steve was telling me about his most recent Rentoid story. A guy from California was on a surfing holiday to Australia and was traveling down to Bells Beach, which is just down the road from us.

This guy found Steve’s surfboard listed on the Rentoid website and he rented it for $100 for the 3 days he was going to be there, along with a $100 bond. This surfer was absolutely thrilled because he couldn’t bring his own board with him on this leg of the trip and he didn’t want to rent the typical crappy learners foam board that you would find at the shops near the beach. 

With every transaction you get to meet the person you are dealing with when you hand over the item, so this guy also got the heads up on all of the good local surfing spots from a local surfer and Steve now has a friend in California he can go surfing with next year. 

The Rentoid website played a major part in fulfilling one of this guy’s lifetime dreams!

Craigslist is another great example – it is undoubtedly ugly and deceptively simple, but it is very usable and useworthy. Craig was being served by a girl in a local coffee shop who, when she found out who Craig was, said “You make my whole life work. I got my first apartment, this job, last job, my first sublet, and my boyfriend from craigslist!” 

As humans we are social beings, and we relate to each other through stories. They give us reasons to believe and spread ideas. You don’t need an expensive website with all the bells and whistles to create value, it just needs to be Usable and Useworthy. This is the reason many simple websites work so well. 

Simple web platforms make amazing things happen. 

We need to give people a platform to create : 

More making, more sharing, more value. Less web commentary, more real stories. 

If you have a good story, please share it in the comments below. 

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