Our First Review

…that I’m aware of, anyway.

Still, I’m pretty proud.  Johnny is part of the team at Indy Hall.

The Coworking Manifesto—With Pictures

Thanks and I agree, all the way around.

Todd

Big Changes Coming: IndyHall Raises the Bar Again

The Eagle Has Landed

Howdy Folks!

After many months, we are glad to announce that we have a book!  It is Monday night, February 16, and the book is now for sale at Lulu.com!

In going the Lulu route, we have the opportunity to continually grow and improve the book over time.  We plan on periodically folding in new information, ideas, and updates from the awesome world of coworking, and will be releasing subsequent editions when it feels right.

This points to a couple of important communications details regarding how we proceed from here.  First, notice the entry headings on the right side of the site.  Each of these is connected to a book entry, where we are beginning to provide source materials, comments, and further readings.  The main reason for opening each book entry on the site is to invite feedback, suggestions, commentaries, stories and interaction.  The idea is to make the book just a starting point for the ongoing conversation that’s happening online.  Self publishing provides an exciting platform for books to become living, breathing, open documents, very different from the one-off prints of traditional publishing where a book is eternally static from the day it is “printed” and “released.”

Another detail pertains to the different forms in which the book will be available.  The first edition will be a black and white version of the book, which runs at $18.  If there’s interest, we’re looking into offering a downloadable eBook for about $10 and/or a color version of the book for around $45.  The color copies look awesome, but they are also much more expensive to produce, and thus the ouch! price.  We are assuming that many will prefer the black and white edition, but we will make the other types available if you are interested.

That’s it for now, and we look forward to talking with you “in the book” in the coming months-

Drew, Todd, and Tony

Three Years of the Coworking Google Group

Three years ago today, Brad Neuberg sent a test message to the Coworking Google Group to make sure it was set up right.

1,631 members and 5,205 messages later, the Coworking Google Group has become a central gathering place for a global movement that’s changing more and more lives by the day.

We have a book!

The first test copy of the book arrived at New Work City today!

And it’s beautiful! Already getting feedback from folks and already learned of a few things that need to be adjusted to accomodate Lulu’s printing process, but we’re well on our way!

If you’re in NYC, feel free to drop by NWC to check it out and let us know what you think!

Scaling Coworking

It’s been fascinating to watch the coworking concept evolve over time. When I first learned about coworking, there were only a handful of coworking spaces in existence, and few of those had been open for very long.

Now, as coworking approaches its fourth year, we have dozens of spaces in dozens of cities- and many of them are succeeding. Some spaces have waiting lists. A handful are now actively exploring something as yet unprecedented in the coworking era: expansion.

Cubes & Crayons, the wildly successful Menlo Park space which combines coworking space with daycare services, is building its second location and has publicly stated its intent to expand to cities across the country.

Just today, Alex Hillman of sold-out Indy Hall announced a meeting for people interested in building a media-focused coworking space in Philadelphia. 

Here at New Work City, after riding a wave of interest following our opening, several people have already asked whether we intend to expand.

Here’s where coworking takes another step. Once-fledgling businesses, built on a budding need for community workspace, are now successful, established businesses, and the need for them has only continued to grow.

More than just a space

To date, we’ve described entities like Cubes and Crayons as “coworking spaces”, but this phrase is no longer accurate. They’re coworking companies, and they can have more than one location. 

Point of fact, the phrase “coworking space” was never an accurate way to describe one of these entities. A good coworking space is, first and foremost, a coworking community. And a community is not tied to a specific space.

Now, those communities are foraying into uncharted territory: what happens when a coworking community hits the point where it could have two spaces to call home?

Alex’s exploration into an industry-specific coworking space also advances coworking’s evolution. Coworking started out with an extremely open attitude: if you can show up at the space and do your work with whatever you carried in with you, you can cowork.

But now, as the coworking populace grows, the growth gives way to the more specific needs of particular sub-groups. Independent media folks, for instance, may need equipment and sound-proofed rooms. 

As the year comes to a close, we get a chance to reflect on 2008 and look forward to 2009. 2008 saw the continued growth and spreading of coworking to cities across the globe. 2009 will see that spread continue, but will also witness the rise of larger, more mature coworking companies.

Coworking Trends in 2009

• Continued growth of number and size of spaces around the world
• Emergence of more mature, more successful, multiple-location coworking companies
• Beginnings of coworking spaces focused on specific specialties

This growth will be fueled by a growing population of laid-off former employees who will increasingly be turning to independent and virtual work. 

It goes without saying that coworking is an awesome concept. Its success to date has been fascinating to witness, and in 2009 we’ll see how it looks when it scales and matures.

Hey Manager Guy!

1.       Not all of your employees do very much when they are ‘at work.’

2.       You probably employee many more people than you need to.

3.       You can innovate with fewer people if you have the right people.

4.       If most of your employees still come ‘into’ work on a regular basis, you are needlessly wasting (probably lots of) money on real estate.

5.       Your ‘face time’ will be much more effective and productive if your work spaces are open and designed for collaboration and real-time communication.

6.       Your company culture- as you are seeing it- is a fiction.

7.       White collar workers spend over $350M per day on gas and tolls commuting to work.

8.       The Gross Corporate Footprint (i.e. the daily commute) is a massive blight on the environment (to the tune of 1.67 billion tons of carbon dioxide daily, not to mention the daily CO2 belch from half empty office buildings.

9.        Benefits for ‘full-time’ employees are costly and unnecessary.

10.   Flexibility/Autonomy/Respect/Trust and work-life balance are a sustainable substitute for the security offered up by ‘full-time’ status and expensive benefits.

Good luck with that…

Workspace Matters

Today (and perhaps tomorrow) Tony and Todd will be at New Work City sifting through pictures and laying out the design of the book.  We don’t have enough high res pictures, really, so we are having to resort to the friends and family plan.  We want to go heavy on the pictures for a simple yet important reason.

Workspace Matters

While we all know that the cultural vibe around coworking is radically different than the hiearchical vibe that one encounters in most companies, there is a visual element that is crucially important as well.  The physical space in which a person works…matters.  Space and culture are inseparable.  If you are isolated in a cubicle with no contact with other people, then, well, you are working alone.  If, on the other hand, you want to or need to actually communicate with other hominids (for collaboration or just simple human contact) then working in a truly open space will make that more possible.

Built environments are never neutral.  Work spaces reflect assumptions about human needs and human behaviors.  You can tell a lot about a company or organization by just looking at the workspaces they provide their employees.  For example:

  Most coworking spaces, as we show in the book, are pretty much the opposite.  For example:

Time and again, each coworking space we discover counters the cube-farm with an open-space environment where people can get their work done AND interact with other hominids at the same time…

Imagine that.

Today’s Coworking Chatter on Twitter

I don’t know who many of these people are.  For a while I tried to follow everyone/anyone who mentioned “coworking” in a tweet.  I’ve long since given up.

Todd Sundsted

Ding

House 2.0 is on the fourth floor of a five-story apartment building in midtown Manhattan.

Despite its small size, the building has an elevator. A tiny, slow elevator that breaks down often (most notably, on the weekend I moved in).

On rare occasions, I find myself sharing the elevator with the resident of another floor. Today, while running late to work and leaving around 9am, I ran into a new resident in the elevator, whom I had never met before.

Here’s how our conversation went:

Me: Hey.

Him: Hi.

Me: Late for work?

Him: Oh, no… I work from home.

Me: Really? What do you do?

Him: I’m a photographer.

Me: Oh, cool… I used to work from home too, but it started to drive me crazy.

Him: Tell me about it.

Me: Yeah, so I started a coworking space. Are you familiar with coworking?

Him: Yeah, it’s when a bunch of people get together and share a space, right?

Ding.

We arrived at the ground floor and the door opened, but the dinging sound didn’t come from the elevator.

The ding was in my head. It was the sound of coworking making it.

In the tiny elevator of this tiny building, I met a stranger, and he was not only familiar with coworking, he described it to me in one sentence.

Ding ding ding ding.