Massimo Carraro – Page 2 – The Global Coworking Blog

Freelancers of the world: make your voice heard, support the Freelancer Movement campaign!

A movement of freelancers is building up in Europe: Freelancer Movement. They are currently organizing a major communications campaign to build support for the Freelancers manifesto and present it to candidates to the European elections in May. The campaign will be entirely funded through crowdfunding. Here you can find all the necessary information and give your personal contribution … Continua la lettura di Freelancers of the world: make your voice heard, support the Freelancer Movement campaign! →

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A movement of freelancers is building up in Europe: Freelancer Movement.

They are currently organizing a major communications campaign to build support for the Freelancers manifesto and present it to candidates to the European elections in May.

The campaign will be entirely funded through crowdfunding.

Here you can find all the necessary information and give your personal contribution to the initiative.

Freelancers from all over Europe, as well as a host of local and national associations – including Acta for Italy – are taking part in the campaign.

Together we want to get politicians to start listening to our concerns.

Alone we are invisible. Together we are powerful: make your voice heard, support the campaign!

(Cowo is a supporting partner to the initiative).

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The true story of coworking, according to the guy that started it. And the inaccuracies of Wikipedia on Coworking.

People in the coworking community know and love the “myth of the founding fathers”, a bunch of coders in California who created the first coworking space around 2005. If you go to coworking conference, you’re likely to hear names like Brad Neuberg, Tara Hunt and Chris Messina. And, of course, a reference to the Wikipedia … Continua la lettura di The true story of coworking, according to the guy that started it. And the inaccuracies of Wikipedia on Coworking. →

L’articolo The true story of coworking, according to the guy that started it. And the inaccuracies of Wikipedia on Coworking. sembra essere il primo su Coworking Project by Cowo®.

People in the coworking community know and love the “myth of the founding fathers”, a bunch of coders in California who created the first coworking space around 2005.

If you go to coworking conference, you’re likely to hear names like Brad Neuberg, Tara Hunt and Chris Messina.

And, of course, a reference to the Wikipedia page on “coworking”.

A few days ago, though, the person who invented coworking, declared that he had found several inaccuracies on that page.

First of all, Brad writes, he is the one who invented coworking.

Then Tara Hunt e Chris Messina came along to help him, and they worked as a team to share knowledge about coworking, by creating a Coworking Wiki and Coworking Google Group. They also filmed the presentation video that you can find below (with over 10 thousand views on YouTube).

Brad also said that Bernie De Koven has nothing to do with coworking, apart from owning the coworking.com domain for some time.

The first coworking space was The Spiral Muse (and not The Hat Factory): Brad used to open it twice a week, thanks to the financial support of his father. The space remained open for about a year.

So, now that our founding father Brad Neuburg set the record straight… we need someone to fix the Wikipedia Coworking page accordingly, don’t we!

L’articolo The true story of coworking, according to the guy that started it. And the inaccuracies of Wikipedia on Coworking. sembra essere il primo su Coworking Project by Cowo®.

On coworking sustainability, urban workstyles and business model.

I’d like to share these views on coworking, with this presentation to be held in Florence, Italy, on Oct. 15th @Festival della Creatività.

Cowo® is the network of 21 spaces (and counting!) that is spreading around in the country since February 2009.

In particular, what I’d like to discuss is the “business sustainable” model we are trying to leverage, keeping break-even point to zero by exploiting existing spaces.

In other words, we are working on the consideration that opening cw spaces inside existing offices and keeping it very basic is a 100% revenue activity.

Thank you in advance for your attention and comments!

[slideshare id=2197582&doc=cowocarraro-091012081736-phpapp02]

Cowo, the new coworking network of Italy, lands on major fashion magazine’s cover.

Many good news from the coworking front in Italy.

First of all, after a year of Cowo (that’s the name/logo we adopted for our space@monkeybusiness) we decided to give start to an idea we’d had in mind for some time.

I’m talking about a network project addressed to all the people actually in the position to open up their space to the coworking community. This includes architects, creative agencies, media offices, small companies, real estate agencies… to these people we proposed “to make a little money with that couple of desks lying in the back of your office under a layer of dust”.

And it’s working.

Our project, called Coworking Project, has been published on the Internet for about two months now, and it already led to the opening of 4 more spaces, which is definitely a success for the budget involved (zero euros, plus an awful amount of hours on my side).

That means Cowo spaces are now five, four in Milano and one in Rome, plus one more (it’s already in, but not published on the website yet), in Genoa. So that makes six spaces.

We are really excited about this contribution to the coworking movement, and also enjoy the experiment of creating a community not only between coworkers, but among coworking space owners, too.

Media coverage on this has been impressive, at least for our standards.

No. 1 Italian newspaper “Corriere della Sera” has included CoworkingProject in a recent magazine article about the 45 anti-crisis ideas (leading our blog visits to an astonishing +600 in one day); Tv news of Lombardy Region has dedicated a two-minute coverage to our project; and last, this week we’ve had the incredible experience of seeing the word “coworking” on the cover of superpopular fashion magazine “D di Repubblica”, printed and distributed nationwide in +700,000 copies. Unbelievable!

A nice, in-depth article of six pages is to be found inside the magazine. (For whoever is interested in reading the article – it’s in Italian, but it does have beautiful, stylish photos – here you can find links and a downloadable pdf.

I enclose the cover and one of the inside pages (where you can see our logo and, well, my face) to prove that… miracles can happen.

[Oh, I almost forgot to mention that we also created a social network for nomad workers on Ning, called NomadWork. Everybody interested in nomadic workstyles is invited to join. People from Italy, France, Switzerland and Usa already have. It’s basically a bilingual place, English-Italian, this way we try to keep the conversation open].

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What does coworking do for me. A video interview from Italy.

After a few months of activity @ cowo milano, I finally managed to do something I’ve been trying to do for a long time: a video interview with a coworker, having him say what it’s like.

As I imagined, there’s nothing like the real thing… Davide tells the story in a way that couldn’be done better.

I don’t post the video because it’s in Italian (if you want to see it it’s here) but I do post the English transcription:

Question – Hi Davide! First of all, what’s your job?

Answer – Hi. I design sailing boats, racing ones.

Q. – Great. What’s your organization?

A. – We are a small company with two offices, one here in Milano, since April, and the other one in Amsterdam, where my partner is.

Q. – How does coworking work for you?

A. – It gives me the chance to have a very flexible work situation, fully serviced.
A place where I can work quietly. always connected to the web and also connected to other people.

Q. – In this respect, how did it feel for you to work side by side with professionals with a different background?

A. – Very interesting. Up to now I’ve always worked with other engineers, and it always ended up talking about the same stuff, which can get boring.
In a coworking situation one gets the chance to interact with people totally different. It’s fun to share your office with a novel writer, or an internet pro… different worlds, very interesting.

Q. – Is such a company making your working days more interesting, or would you rather sit in your own, private office?

A. – No, I’m very happy, actually. I think that for a small start-up it’s a good opportunity to have a coworking space, a less flexible situation would not have been good for me.
Coworking gave me the flexibility I need, also the freedom to renew my staying month by month, adapting to my needs, eventually involving other people in the company, in the cowo premises.
Such a flexibility isn’t easy to find, other than coworking.

Q. – As to interaction with your business partner, in Amsterdam?

A. – We work with Skype, always in touch, with earphones, triyng not to disturb other people here.

Q. – We haven’t mentioned your company’s name…

A. – It’s ST Yachts, in the internet: styachtdotcom.

Thanks a lot Davide!

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!

It happens in Milano.

44 days afrter opening, Cowo Milano sees some interesting facts happening.

1- Mostly small groups seem to be interested in our coworking initiative. First a group of architects, then a group of 4 designers, then again 3 professionals… it made us think. Having 5 desks to offer, would we rather go for a rather nice monthly income, settled for a long time (all of them needed a place for the long run) and practically abandon the coworking idea, or refuse these offers to stick to a more open way, allowing only single or mini-teams of professionals, and leaving the coworking door open? Well, we chose the latter, both because we want to give a try to coworking (otherwise we wouldn’t be here) and also because we don’t feel like hosting groups that are larger than ours (we are 3).

2 – Coworking is raising interest in the italian media. On radio and national press (D di Repubblica recently published an article about cw, I’m trying to find it to post it). A couple of journalist have called to get info and get in touch for future interviews.

3 – Coworkers are finding us. Actually we have two regulars (a yacht designer and a new media consultant) and a third one should arrive in the next few days. All of them are interested in staying for a medium-range period and maybe longer.

4 – I really wanted a video to show what the Cowo is like, so ? pikced up the videocamera and did it. Here it is. Ciao from the Cowo!

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DKkX-p2pXrY&hl=en]

Introducing Cowo Milano (Italy).

Hi everybody, just wanted to introduce our brand new little coworking project, here in Milano: Cowo@ monkeybusiness.

First of all I’d like to say that the work thas been done and shared on this blog and related wiki has been fundamental for us, so… thanks guys!

We’ve been officially opened for 10 days now, and we have no coworkers in house yet. This may sound like bad news but actually we’ve started completely out of the blue, so it’s kind of expected to have a warm-up period, I guess.

Our space is a 140 sqm loft on two levels (pictures here) located in the eastern part of the city, towards Linate airport.

The neighborhood is being totally gentrified, being – in the past 20 years – an industrial district. Used to be blue collar environment, now it’s becoming student-artistic-media kind of thing. But still, for now at least, we enjoy the good sides of city borders, i. e. parking with no charge, not-as-much traffic congestions and… my house is at walking distance!

In these first days of Cowo, my wife + partner Laura and myself are mostly concerned with understanding the market need of a coworking place in Milano (as far as we know, we’re the only ones – speaking of cw, desks to rent you can find many), something that we’ll discover in the near future.

The people who showed interest, up to now, have been very different, ranging from the freelance art director to the sailing boat designer, from a group of architects to pr professionals and code writers.

They all seemed fine people and we enjoyed meeting them.

We did notice that our place seem to rise interest in small groups, which brings up the price issue.

Of course a three-people group have a different evaluation of the single desk price, and that’s something we didn’t think of. We are also considering offering a free drop-in 1 day option, which I feel is a nice approach that we already practice with the people we know (so why not extend it as a standard Cowo feature? Thanks Riccardo for your suggestion!)

What else? Oh, what we do for a living! We’re a creative consultancy for advertising, called Monkey Business, the three of us include a copywriting dude (me) with two supertalented art directors, that make look great whatever crap comes out from my mac. Check out our smiling logo and you’ll see what I mean!

Last but not least, we have enjoyed a good blogosphere attention thanks to the announcements made by the Italian Art Directors Club blog and the much-followed creative free-lance blog, BolleBlu.

So, next time you’re in town, please come and visit us: cowo @monkeybusiness via ventura 3 milano 20134 max@monkeybusinessmilano.it… we’ll share pizza e birra to begin with!