Though the demise of Portland, Ore.’s Cubespace coworking community represents a sad development in the nascent history of coworking, the region’s vibrant Silicon Forest will give rise to other coworking options in due course.
In the meantime, there are ongoing successes elsewhere, notably in Italy, with Rome, Milan and Genoa playing host to no less than eight coworking communities.
Last week, I got the chance to speak with Massimo Carraro, one of the leading Italian evangelists for coworking and a phenomenal source of experience and expertise in bootstrapping multiple coworking communities. Read the rest of this entry »
CubeSpace, a coworking space and community based in Portland, Ore., that we’ve featured previously (see Dawn’s interview with co-owner Eva Schweber) has announced that it is to shut its doors this Friday, June 12, following negotiations with US Bank, its landlord.
It is a great shame to see an established and well-liked coworking community being forced to close. As Imran noted in his post “Can Coworking Spaces Be Profitable?“, coworking spaces often run on paper-thin margins, sometimes only just breaking even, or relying on being subsidized by a sponsor. Despite increasing demand for coworking space, the tough economic climate means that many of these communities will need to discover innovative ways to generate revenue in order to survive.
As the first generation of coworking spaces, such as IndyHall, Old Broadcasting House and others, enter maturity while new locations and communities start up, it’s useful to reflect on some measures and metrics of success.
Marc Harrison at the Urban Workspaces blog — seeking to establish a local coworking space and community — recently published some thoughts on measuring the success for his proposed space. Marc’s goals are very personal, though universally applicable to anyone looking to bootstrap a coworking community for themselves.
Here are Marc’s key indicators of success: Read the rest of this entry »
With the global economy still moribund, tools and services that help you find leads and extract more value from your existing business contacts can only be welcome.
LinkedIn has become the online resume repository of choice and helps curate an individual’s professional network, but how to actually make use of those relationships isn’t clear. Currently, LinkedIn simply delivers an email or an RSS feed summarizing what your contacts have been doing.
Enter SocialMinder, an interesting service that’s just entered a closed alpha-testing phase. SocialMinder claims to:
- Analyze your email archive, mapping email contacts to your LinkedIn network.
- Identify those contacts searching for new business opportunities and neglected contacts that need attention.
- Provide recent business news from each identified contact to use as a discussion point. Read the rest of this entry »
On April 25th, the Paris-based organization Travailleurs du Web will be holding TDWCamp, a barcamp for web workers here in Paris. Why not organize one in your city?
If you don’t know what a barcamp (or unconference) is, don’t feel bad. The name certainly doesn’t provide any clues if you don’t know the history. Barcamps are like structured brainstorming sessions with crowd-sourced agendas and organic, bottom-up organization. It’s a great format for generating ideas, energy and momentum that can be used by any special interest group, professional or otherwise. I’ll explain.
Somebody decides to have a barcamp. Anyone interested in the subject of the barcamp can sign up. Some participants offer to talk to the group about a topic in which they have expertise. Others indicate what topics they’re interested in hearing about/discussing. Read the rest of this entry »
We’ve been running a series of posts on the topic of coworking — the growing movement of independent café-like collaboration spaces for freelance professionals — over the past few weeks. Coworking is an increasingly popular option for the independent web worker because working in proximity with other creative professionals brings many advantages: networking opportunities, synergies and cross-pollination of ideas. It also increases social interaction, reducing the sense of isolation felt by many web workers.
Here’s a summary of the great posts in this series. Read the rest of this entry »
I first met Linda Broughton — head of NTI Leeds, part of Leeds Met University — in May 2007, at a meeting on the use of open-source software in the public sector where I planted the seed of an idea to develop a coworking community in Leeds in Northern England.
Within a few months, Linda had launched the “met:space” coworking community at Old Broadcasting House, which has now become the hub for most of the city’s web and new media community (also see my previous interview with OBH resident, James Ward).
I spoke with Linda about the development of OBH and her thoughts on coworking.
Imran: Tell us a little about the background of OBH. What were the motivations for coworking in Leeds?
Linda: It started out as an idea space for our graduates to move on to. We recognized that many of the students’ final year projects had the potential to become commercial businesses, so we wanted to develop a space that could support them in the early days. Read the rest of this entry »
Inspired by my co-bloggers here at WWD, I’ve been thinking about the ins and outs of coworking in very rural locations. While I do travel more and more often, my home base is Tok, Alaska, the first pitstop along the Alaska Highway once you cross the Canadian border.
Darrell’s post “Coworking à Deux” was particularly relevant because, as of this posting, I’ve only identified one other web worker in my community, and she only does it part-time. While her day job is teaching at the local school, she blogs for half-a-dozen education blogs after hours. As far as I can tell, the two of us are the only two Twitterers in Tok. I know many residents are on MySpace and some on Facebook, but web working isn’t part of their day job. Read the rest of this entry »
Web Work 101: How To Escape The Cubicle
