Fernando – The Global Coworking Blog

How is coworking doing in Argentina?

It’s been a long time since my last post on the blog, so for those of you who don’t know we started Cowork Central back in November 2007, we were the first coworking space in Latin America and it is located in downtown Buenos Aires. Much has happened since our opening almost a year and a half ago and we wanted to share some of those thoughts and plans for the future with you.

Many spaces were created in Latin America during this time in the cities of: Sao Paulo (Brazil) and Montevideo (Uruguay), and as I can see from the Wiki right now, a lot more are being planned. This leads me to believe that the coworking movement is actually fitting very well into a very different culture as the northern countries (US, Canada, Europe) have.

Although during this time we had the pleasure of being interviewed by very important national and international press (NYTimes, The Globe and Mail, Clarín, El Cronista, La Razón, etc.) we had a somewhat difficult time trying to attract and evangelize local geeks to the coworking idea. Because of this, most of our members are international visitors that are staying for just a couple of months and then move on. On one hand this is actually pretty cool since it adds a lot of cultural value to the space and it’s members but on the other hand it’s not that good in the long term creation of the community. Reaching local individuals has been one of our most challenging tasks.

A couple of months ago I had the pleasure to visit some coworking spaces in the US (New York, San Francisco and Austin), had the chance to talk to the founders and members of such spaces and I came back with several ideas to implement here in the end of the world.

For the time being we are setting up our very first Jelly event. Again, this would be the first of it’s kind in Latin America. This event is scheduled for June 16th and our idea is that if this goes well, we might start hosting more Jelly’s to attracting more people to the coworking community.

Of course, if you happen to visit Buenos Aires, don’t forget to drop by, remember we are participating on the “coworking visa” project.

They’re Working on Their Own, Just Side by Side

Yesterday, an article about coworking was published in printed version of The New York Times (written by Dan Fost).

Coworking sites are up and running from Argentina to Australia and many places in between, although a wiki site on coworking shows that most are in the United States. While some have grown-up-sounding names, most seem connected somewhere between the communalism of the 1960s and the whimsy of the dot-com days of the ’90s, like the Hive Cooperative in Denver, Office Nomads in Seattle, Nutopia Workspace in Lower Manhattan and Independents Hall in Philadelphia.

Click here to read the full article.

Cowork Central is now Open

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 in Argentina

CoWork Central It’s been an amazing month since I started calling myself a “Space Catalyst”.
I’m proud to announce the creation of a coworking space in Argentina, right in Buenos Aires city.

I’ve been very happy about the response in my local community. With all the freelancers I talked to, they are all telling me that they’ll love a coworking space in the area and they cannot wait until it’s open. Many of those are designers and programmers.

With these positive comments I started working on a brand, registering domains, doing some real state research and since yesterday I started an online survey for all those argentine freelancers (following the steps of Tara’s survey and the business plan from CubeSpace that was really helpful), with the help of some freelance friends that are helping me in areas involving: press, marketing, design advice, and diffusion mainly.

Although the survey is 100% Spanish, if you’ll like to take a look just point your browser to: http://www.cotrabajo.com.ar

So far, the survey is getting very positive results. The data collected will let us know several issues about the local freelance market, not only coworking-related stuff.

Also, we thought it would be a very positive thing to give something in return for the time spent in answering the questions. First, the participants can enter into a small contest to win several t-shirts with a design customized by each one of them, and second, to all those blogs that are linking to the survey’s homepage, we’re going to add all the links pointing back to them in order to send some traffic back.

I’ll keep up on the results of the survey and with the progress of the space, that I’m keen it will be the first of many in Latin America.