Web Worker Daily

In an effort to better understand the inner workings of a coworking business, I spoke with Eva Schweber, co-owner of CubeSpace in Portland, Ore. Schweber is CubeSpace’s Chief Cat Herder, policy wonk and fount of obscure nonprofit information. She brings more than 15 years of collaborative facilitation and organizational management experience to her numerous paid and volunteer gigs. Her professional experience runs the gamut from managing an artisan goat dairy (she was a state-certified pasteurizer) to facilitating a strategic planning effort by an international environmental consortium. Her esoteric background has trained her well for running a coworking community.

In her spare time, Schweber serves on the Mayor’s Economic Recovery Cabinet and chairs the Small Business Development Workgroup of the City of Portland’s Small Business Advisory Council. She also sits on the City Club of Portland’s Research Board and in June 2007 was appointed by Governor Ted Kulongowski to serve on Oregon’s Commission for Voluntary Action and Service. Her blog is her attempt to reconcile her ever-growing interest in small business with her wonkish tendencies.

WWD: Why did you decide to open a coworking space in Portland?

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The triplets are due any moment now, and that means so is your mother-in-law. Or your precious baby girl has just graduated from college and has no more of a clue than she did the day she started, so she wants to come home for “a while.” Or maybe you’re moving back in with mom and dad yourself…

You can kiss your home office good-bye (hopefully temporarily). So now what?

There may be co-working spaces near you, but they’re not quite as ubiquitous as Starbucks yet… You can dig (and dig and dig) through craigslist and hope it’s your lucky day and that your dream workspace will appear in the first 10 listings (because looking at any more than that is mind numbing and hazardous to your health) and that the people with the perfect space for rent that miraculously appears in listing number seven actually respond to you when you do contact them. (I have a very low tolerance for classifieds sites, can you tell?)

You can go to Regus, the slick, corporate rent-a-workspace/meeting room/virtual office people, and deal with “a representative” who will probably try to sell you a plan or a package or something. (That’s just the impression I get from looking at their site and knowing how American businesses operate… I could be wrong.)

Or… You can check out ShareYourOffice.com, a new project with a whole lot of potential. It’s a free service for people who need office space, or those who have extra space they’d like to fill with a warm, rent-paying body.

Wait! Before you say, “Not interested” and stop reading, think of this: it’s a French startup. Parisian. Which means most of the office spaces (at the moment) are in Paris. Ever dreamed of living and working in France?

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Back when broadband Internet access was made available to homes in the late 1990’s, teleworking took off.  In businesses, employees were allowed to work from home part time (in some cases, full time) and many home based businesses took off, allowing small time entrepreneurs to have a low-cost launching point for their great idea.

Then, reality set in.  Working from your home can be isolating and can result in feeling cut off from the working world.  Co-working is a new trend, as recently reported by CNN and others, which involves teleworkers gathering within the same physical space in order to have some social time while working on their tasks.  There are businesses such as CubeSpace and Citizen Space that make co-working easy by offering space for co-workers to gather, however what is a web worker to do if they don’t have this type of option close by?

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