Co-Working Infrastructure

From P2P Foundation

= independent workers band together to share social as well as physical and technological infrastructure, turning workspace into a Commons.

1 Description
2 Interview excerpt
3 Discussion
4 More Information

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Description

Marc Dangeard at http://research.iftf.net/node/715 :

"The concept of establishing coworking space started in San Francisco (Teh Hat Factory), with a few developers/consultants getting together to share some working space with basic infrastructure (chairs, tables, wireless connection). The idea has since then taken hold in many cities around the world, and the group is getting organized around a wiki (http://coworking.pbwiki.com) to identify locations, define roles, standard infrastructure, pricing, reciprocity privileges from one space to the other and even getting into discussions around healthcare.

Coworking space is especially attractive to nomadic workers, and the success of the idea all around the world, to the point where the group starts getting organized and establishing standards is an indication that this new way of working may be here to stay. Along with co-working comes the concept of independent consultants or small groups of individuals working together on projects, in something that looks like collaborative entrepreneurship. Maybe the ideal structure for tomorrow's companies." (http://research.iftf.net/node/715)

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Interview excerpt

From an interview by Worldchanging at http://www.worldchanging.com/archives/007001.html

" What is coworking, and how can you make it green?

CM: The idea of coworking is actually a very old idea. It is simply a matter of getting people together, maybe of similar character and working in the same place. You can work for a big company, you can work for a small company, you can work for yourself. You can even be a student, or anybody who frequents cafes, or you can work from home.

The broad general idea is to no longer work all alone and so that you can be in a much more productive environment around other people. The idea was actually sort of a prototype that a friend of ours, Brad Newburg, had done in The Mission. Essentially, one day a week people would get together and they would work together. I met Brad, and I had previously worked on a project called CivicSpace, which was actually a Drupal site for organizing people.

One of the things that always struck me as being missing from that project were physical spaces where people to get together in. I mean if you are creating this organizing software for any purpose, people need a place to actually meet up, and talk and to connect and to have those face-to-face and one-on-one interactions. So I had always wanted CivicSpace to have that component.

So when I met Brad, a little while after I had left CivicSpace, it seemed like, "Hey here is someone who has already sort of had this idea and has gotten a very small example of this started. With this idea we can actually take this bigger and we can start creating our own space."

So last spring we started a space called -- at the time it was called Teh Space, but then it was renamed, after we left it, to the Hat Factory, that is still running. It's another coworking space in San Francisco. The idea of that space was to make it a much more egalitarian sort of "Kumbaya" place where everyone chipped in for the rent and made it work.

We realized that after four months of running it that you needed a little more structure and you need a little more, I guess, rules, or people to guide the existence of the space, who are really bought in the idea of making the coworking space happen, and then there are those who are clients of the space, or who come in, and are part of the community of the space, but aren't as interested in the day-to-day management of running a space, and that only makes sense.

So anyway, that's kind of where coworking came from. Since then, we've tried to really open source our practices and our processes and the things that make it work openly on a website and a wiki. As a result of that, and as a result of sort of evangelizing the idea, we've seen 50 or 60 different spaces around the world start to crop up where interested independents are seeing this model and are really excited about no longer working from home by themselves, but are actually meeting with other people and saying, "Hey, just two or three or four of us, let's get together and work regularly, even out of a cafe, and then eventually let's move into a regular space that we ourselves run and manage that is the workspace of our dreams." (http://www.worldchanging.com/archives/007001.html)

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Discussion

Christophe Aguiton and Dominique Cardon:

“Coworking is another concept emerging from the same circle of people as the BarCamp. While BarCamps are temporary spaces for contacts and encounters, coworking is an attempt to set up permanent places for the same purpose. In the coworking community blog, the definition is simple:

"Coworking is a movement to create a community of cafe-like collaboration spaces for developers, writers and independents".

Coworking places are usually flats or houses rented by a small group of people and open to people who need a place for few hours or few days to work with others. The renter or the person most involved in the management or the location is known as the "anchor" and the temporary users pay a small amount by day. The dream of most Coworking anchors is to open a cafe that could give easier access to a lot of people and simplify the relations between coworkers.

In several discussions with people in charge of coworking spaces, the concept of "third place" appeared clearly, very often mixed-up with a nostalgic reference to Mittel Europa and Vienna's Kaffehauskultur where writers and intellectuals were supposed to pass their days working and meeting their colleagues. The "third place" is something which is neither a desk in a company nor the domicile of the person: it is a kind of public place you can join when you want, with the guarantee of finding some social life and the chance of a useful exchange. Like the BarCamp, coworking is ideally setup for casual encounters, another tool in the box design to find the weak ties necessary for the weak cooperation indispensable to built Web 2.0 services and applications.”

Source: The strength of Weak Cooperation. Christophe Aguiton and Dominique Cardon. Communication & Strategies, No. 65, 1st Quarter 2007.

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