[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AY24QfGrCf0]
NPR’s Marketplace aired a short piece on Jelly and coworking on Monday, along with the above video.
I’ve always liked the synergy and compatibility between Jelly as a gateway to full fledged coworking, and that this story blends the two initiatives speaks to fact that on ramps like Jellies and Juntos (in Philly) are great ways to coalesce the ingredients to coworking communities.
Berkeley Coworker Sean O’Steen pointed out a great article about Seattle’s Office Nomads space over CNNMoney/FORTUNE Small Business, including a great quote:
[Office Nomads founder Susan Evans] has found that the benefits of coworking go well beyond getting people out of their cars. “It’s about having a work community and being around people who are also interested and inspired.”
There have been a number of really good posts about coworking that should be mentioned here, even though they’ve all been adding to the Ma.gnolia Coworking Group.
For some entrepreneurs, the idea of managing their own offices just doesn’t make sense. Sometimes, they’re consultants sick of working from the dining-room table or buying endless cups of coffee in a cafe. Sometimes they’re bigger startups or satellite offices that just don’t want to deal with buying furniture, setting up fax machines and hiring someone to man the front desk.
So another set of entrepreneurs has sprung up to meet these needs by providing shared office space. A diverse bunch, ranging from multi-state corporations with “plug and play” environments to small companies offering one large workspace, these businesses are growing in both San Francisco and the Peninsula.
The always-on, perpetual freelance culture of Web 2.0 has spawned its own “coworking” spaces, but are these new techno-optimists building sustainable communities?
“The majority of the people that use this space are making a living doing what they love,” said Alex Hillman, 24, who helped launch Independents Hall, a co-working space in Philadelphia, earlier this month. “This is a happy medium where you maintain your independence, but you get a little of that office backchannel.”
A solution is on the way for local freelance workers, startup-business owners and even students who need a place to call “office” without shelling out hefty rental fees.
If you’ve got a quote or other good press for coworking, definitely share it with Ma.gnolia group and tag it with coworking!
[podtech content=http://media1.podtech.net/media/2007/06/PID_011747/Podtech_RyanIsHungry_CoWorking.flv&postURL=http://www.podtech.net/home/3454/co-working-independent-workers-unite &totalTime=392000&breadcrumb=540a73bf84e742e09e6063c7dd021a17]
Jay Dedman and Ryan Hodson are founding coworking community members who have been instrumental in spreading the word, turning the Hat Factory into a vlogger haven and generally being model coworkers.
They recently produced a video with interview snippets from me, Tara and Brad. It’s a great example of how we’re serving ourselves and becoming the media — and of course it helps to have such talented folks diffused throughout the community.
I’d encourage others in coworking spaces, getting started or simply interested in the idea to record their own videos and share them with the community. I totally agree with Jay that the power of video [is] to make all our ideas come more real
. Hopefully videos like this will inspire others to tell their stories and get involved with the larger story of independents coming together to serve themselves.
There’s been some recent activity on the Coworking mailing list seeking support towards the establishment of a coworking space (or spaces) in LA.
Heather has invited folks interested in the coworking concept to attend the 12th Geek Dinner coming up on April 24th at Shakey’s Pizza in Hollywood to discuss ways forward.
Harold Johnson has suggested talking to UnUrban, a smallish cafe that could use a boost in patronage while Heather has proposed Little Radio, the ongoing host of BarCampLA.
If anyone’s interested, do make an effort to attend the Geek Dinner or get in touch with Heather.
Gerrit Visser blogs about A paradigm for Coworking:
There’s a chapter in the recently published Handbook of Experiential Learning about something called “Junkyard Sports.” The chapter, written by Bernie DeKoven, shows how creative play experiences like Junkyard Sports, can become powerful learning tools for the business world.
Bernie’s Junkyard Sports were originally developed for schools and youth programs. According to Bernie, a Junkyard Sport is any sport that’s played with the “wrong” equipment. He explains that in such events, the “sport becomes a vehicle for the creation of community, where the shared opportunity to play takes precedence over the game itself.”
In many ways, this is a paradigm for effective coworking. People who are seeking out new coworking environments are finding each other in “unofficial” spaces – warehouses, bakeries, lofts, studios, apartments. The people they find in these environments are not all working for the same company or even the same goals. The technological infrastructure is cobbled together from components that were never designed to work together – IM, chat, wikis, blogs, desktop-sharing, shared whiteboards, mindmapping software, calendering software. They share skills when they can, discovering that the diversity of interests, professions, personalities is the source of new insights, new ways to make work better, new opportunities to learn, to work, to play.
more on Junkyard Sports and CoWorking
This is a really interesting way to conceptualize coworking and the value of such spaces… since, after all, it’s not about the spaces themselves, but more about the community and collaborative opportunities that they afford the coworkers.
Patrick’s getting coworking going in Montreal and is stymied by that old branding foe: What to name the space?
Alright so this past week has been very productive coworking space wise, a couple of meetings, new people showing interest in membership, full membership (often called anchors) and even investing so it’s looking very promising.
While traveling and visiting spaces I made the decision to push a lot harder for this thing and it’s already showing results. Sweet. One thing that I keep wanting to find and people keep asking me for is a name.
He’s got some great ideas already and there’s more gems in the comments, but I’m sure he’d appreciate more.
Any ideas for Patrick?
Looks like coworking is really taking off in Europe what with the many Open Coffee Clubs and now a new Coworking Ireland blog:
The goal of Coworking.ie is to promote coworking in ireland, to provide a community space for coworkers to team up and to serve as a guide to people who are looking to go out on their own.
The project is community driven and completely non profit. Everyone is encourages to contribute to the project in whatever way they can.
There’s an old adage that claims to make money, you’ve got to spend money. While this can prove true over time, it’s not something that most independents are at liberty to consider — living project to project and figuring out how to make ends meet in between.
With the advent of affordable personal computing and connectivity, it’s interesting to consider the economics of being an independent web worker.
On the one hand, as Ben Edwards points out, working out of cafes isn’t as cheap as it might seem:
It is very nice to have low overhead costs and use the three things we need: Internet access, electricity, and a table – all for the cost of a few lattes and maybe a bran muffin.
…
However, like many things in life, the little jagged parts – issues that at first seemed pretty minor, begin to rub you the wrong way (or the same way but in the same spot repeatedly) until finally you can’t take it any more. In actuality, coffee shops are not free as each of the three of us has consistently spent between $25 and $50 per week on coffee, tea, and snacks. That adds up ($300-$600/month). Then we have to always cart all of our stuff in and out each day. We can’t bring too many books in our our good headphones. Bringing outside food is also, either awkward (rude to the establishment) or impractical (no refrigerator or microwave) so there are additional costs for lunch (both monetary and time-wise).
(emphasis added)
And this is the problem that has fueled the rise of the modern coworking community.
However, as Tara Hunt of Citizen Space noted in a post yesterday, running a space isn’t necessarily cheap either.
And so the choice of whether to be a bedroom, Bedouin or coworking worker can’t simply come down to dollars and cents. Instead you’ve got to look beyond hard costs to the soft amenities that Ben refers to. The benefits of having people and community an arms-length away, the ability to store your equipment safely (and not carry it wherever your go), to offer a professional atmosphere for your clients and partners, to collaborate with your peers and to simply not work alone, to hold events as you like… are just a few of the basic things that make running a coworking space worthwhile.
Ultimately, if you’re going to be spending money on a place to work, why not think about it from the standpoint of making an investment in your community and in cultivating the conditions in which you want to work? I mean, that’s what being an independent is all about: creating your own conditions for success and consciously creating the circumstances in which you thrive. Doing so in the context of community does make it somewhat easier and at minimum, makes it more fun and more socially rewarding.
Dan Fost of the SF Chronicle has been following coworking for some time and today has a cover story on the neo-nomads stalking out free wifi and power in San Francisco.
While the article gives a good overview of the culture of independents working out of cafes that lead to coworking, he conspicuously makes no mention of the many efforts to create physical spaces and efforts cropping up to proactively support this lifestyle.
In fact, in a slideshow called Urban Nomads, the first slide specifically leads off with text that reads:
A new breed of worker is flourishing. With laptops in hand, these tech savvy workers shirk the confines of cubicles to roam San Francisco coffee houses. Instead of renting office space, they pay for coffee and scones. They call themselves Bedouin workers and say they are changing the nature of the workplace.
(emphasis mine)
While this might be anecdotally true of Kevin and Jonathan, it ignores the progress our community is making in setting up sustainable, community-driven productivity spaces. It also seems to suggest that this behavior is specific to San Francisco, when in reality, this trend of independent working is happening around the world in equal measure.
Judging by the attendance at the coworking meetup at BarCampAustin yesterday, I’d say that it’s important that the story told is one that acknowledges the work of an international community that is working to meet its own needs by creating, building and renting spaces for modern independent workers. It’s not so much that the cafe environment isn’t a good one for us (I’m writing this from Halcyon in Austin), it’s just that there’s more to the story than Dan is reporting on. And, as someone who’s visited Citizen Space and The Hat Factory, I hope that in a later article, he’ll address the work that we’ve begun to move even beyond the cafe environs to creating work spaces of our own design and desire.
