Quick update from Cowo Milano, Italy.

Hi everybody! As summer steps in, coworkers seem to step out, here in Milano…

In fact, even if we are full booked at the moment (5 desks), we haven’t had much attendance in the office these past weeks, and I wonder if the season has something to do with it.

Furthermore, August is a month rather “slow” here in Italy (most companies/offices/stores close at least two weeks), so these days we are checking who’ll be around and who won’t for the rest of the summer.

To our pleasure, we have received a one-day visit from a blog-friend and are expecting someone from the US too (are you anywhere near here, Susan?).

Besides attendance and visits, we have improved the cowo site (blog, that is) with a list of coworking spaces in Europe and the rest of the world – thanks also to the excellent list provided in the cw wiki – along with few more “coworking resources” such as links to cw videos from Youtube and the wiki, cw photos from Flickr, cw blogs from Technorati… we are open to suggestions and of course ready to include your site, if you like. (Just leave a comment or write to me- max(at)monkeybusinessmilano.it).

Last but not least, we are doing a networking effort with a linkedin group we called “friends of cowo-coworking” which counts, at the moment, 43 members from many countries.

The feeling we have is that coworking is taking its course, and we try to go along with it – developing it but also understanding it… it’s good to see people settling down in your place and feeling good about it, we consider ourselves lucky to have such little community, what we mean to do right now is to keep providing such a service and aventually find ways of imrpoving it, but without any rush.

I’d like to get into deeper considerations about cw, but I don’t feel ready yet, cowo is only 3 mos. old…

So, thank you for reading this, and ciao from Milano!

Back in July, I received a ping from Patrick Tanguay from Station-C coworking in Montreal suggesting that we should band together and submit a panel for SXSW Interactive 08 (the conference at which we had met, in fact).

 

Over the course of the next week, we shared ideas and, with input from Chris and Tara of Citizen Space, about how we might approach this topic to be a bit more general to appeal to the entire audience. We came up with a title and synopsis!

Coworking and the evolution of the independent worker:
A few years ago everyone wanted to work from home. Now we realize, working alone sucks. What new resources and communities, both online and off, are enabling workers to really step up their game. Coworking spaces are opening everywhere and playing a central part in this new way of doing business.

After submitting the panel and having it voted on, weeks passed. Months passed. Panels began being picked and posted for the conference. Our expectations were set appropriately (we’d be first time SXSWi presenters), and we weren’t shocked to not hear back.

As the last few weeks have been filled with lots of twitter-chatter and question-asking about our SXSW plans, I decided to email the event director, Hugh Forrest, to see if he had any news since we never really got an official “no” on our panel.

As it turns out…we weren’t out of the running! I found out this morning that we’ve been slated to join the list of Core Conversations, a new format to SXSW that reads a bit more like an unconference (see BlogPhiladelphia). This format, rather than a panel, is more of an opportunity to converse and share experiences and knowledge about our journeys in the “indy” workforce.

I’m SUPER excited about this, as it will give us a platform to unite the coworking community as it converges on the city of Austin from all over the world. Last year we had a really fun coworking meetup at Barcamp Austin, this year, we get an official session and location, as well as a spot in the program, to hold it!

I’d like to work with a handful of key people to help make sure that the 1 hour session we have is loaded with interesting and valuable information, so for those of you attending who have something in particular you want to share, drop us a line.

I’ll be posting more as I hear more about the time and date. We’ll also have to organize a coworking lunch or brunch or something like that. I know there are currently ~8 people from IndyHall who will be attending the conference, and many more from Philadelphia I’m sure. If you’re going to be attending and interested in coworking (or Philadelphia and our social/creative scene on any level), drop a line in the comments and we’ll be sure to look you up once we’re in Austin!

Cowork Central is now Open

Cowork Central Logo

Now it’s official. I’m really proud to announce that the first and only latin-american coworking space is now open. We also launched our brand new website with photos’n stuff.

Thanks for the support and friendly advice to the guys at the coworking group and everyone who supported the project so far.

So if you travel to Buenos Aires, don’t forget to visit us 🙂

Fernando Maclen
Cowork Central | Buenos Aires , Argentina.

Coworking around the world, via Noel(noneck)

Back in May, Noel Hidalgo shot some footage of Jelly in NYC (recently featured in Wired along with our Philadelphia verison).

[blip.tv ?posts_id=231491&dest=-1]

Now while on his ’round the world journey which he’s blogging at LuckOfSeven.com , he’s continuing that tradition of interviewing people about their coworking and web working experiences. He just posted a new video which featured Travis Todd and David Troy, both of whom he randomly ran into while visiting in Berlin.

[blip.tv ?posts_id=317558&dest=-1]

In Philadelphia, we’ve resolved to start recording more video of our events, so look out for similar kinds of footage of our efforts as well!