I always find that a change of scenery does me good, but considering that I was working in a room with 10 other people, sitting around a conference table, and occasionally getting stuck into conversation, I was surprised at the amount of work I got through (and that’s despite the speed of the Wi-Fi connection getting a little slow with 10 people working away).

If you’re feeling a bit isolated at home (or perhaps you just want to brainstorm some ideas) and would like to try out the coworking experience, but perhaps aren’t quite ready to commit to membership of a coworking space, attending a Jelly would be a good first step.

The first Jelly was started in New York back in 2006 by roommates Amit Gupta and Luke Crawford, who originally wanted to recreate some of the benefits of working from an office (without having to work from an office): brainstorming, sharing and camaraderie. So they started inviting people over to work from their house occasionally, and thus Jelly was born. It’s an idea that has spread worldwide.

The Jelly I attended was organized by CoWorkingWest and held in the nice office space of The Office, Bristol, UK, but Jellies are held in over 100 cities all over the world. (Some of them are even held weekly.) If there isn’t one near you, you can always start your own — you just need to pick a venue and get some people involved. They are often held in people’s houses, but also take place in other locations, like coffee shops and offices. As long as there is space for everyone, power and Wi-Fi, you can have a Jelly.

Have you tried working at Jelly?

I’ve been fascinated by businesses popping up around major metropolitan areas that create a shared workspace for independent workers. Imran Ali wrote about the trend of co-working spaces back in April, and I’ll be exploring the trend further as I look to set up a co-working space in my town.

Office Nomads in the Seattle area, for example, is a co-working space where workers can leave their homes to work in a shared environment. The company provides:

• Spacious desks
• High-speed internet access, both wifi and ethernet
• Conference rooms
• A kitchen
• Unlimited network printing and faxing
• Couches and lounging area
• The requisite water cooler

They are also dog-friendly.

They target everyone from web designers, writers, consultants and anyone else who has portable work. Pricing ranges from $25 per day for drop-ins to a Regular membership at $375 per month or a Resident membership at $475 per month plus a deposit for a more permanent space.

Imran mentioned a co-working space in his piece called Jelly which is more like a co-working event. The concept is that you can start your own Jelly by opening up your home to other indy workers in your town. You need to provide seating and wireless internet either at your home, a wired cafe or someone’s place of business.

The Jelly wiki now has a page explaining how to hold your own Jelly event. Current Jellies take place around the globe, from Australia, Africa, and Israel to Mexico, China, Canada and the Philippines to random cities across the United States.

For ongoing information about the co-working trend as well as a list of co-working spaces, check out the Coworking Community Blog and keep your eye on WWD as I explore setting up my own Jelly in Anchorage, Alaska.

Details and photos to come.

Have you worked in a co-working space? In your mind, what are the pros and cons?

• Coworking is becoming unhooked from physical places as developments such as Jelly – a monthly 24-hour workathon – enable coworking communities to spring up wherever they’re needed; indeed encouraging gracious hosts to offer their facilities for one-off coworking days.

• Messenger bag gods Timbuk2 were recently persuaded to create some coworking desks that outside workers could use, helping to stimulate the company’s creativity

• Coworkers in Manchester – lacking a dedicated physical space – have been mashing up OpenCoffee networking events with an afternoon of coworking in a borrowed space, such as local company or coffee house. Interestingly, this particular community has somewhat of an agenda in furthering the city’s role as a hub for the digital industries, thought collaborating on startup and technology ideas.

• Still in the UK – Just across the Pennine Mountains in Leeds, that city’s coworking community is running free, ‘open coworking‘ days to attract people into signing up for their plans and encouraging local university students to use the facilities to launch startups as part of a push to create more entrepreneurs in the region.

It’s interesting to see coworking snowballing as a phenomenon, but like many trends originating in dotcom culture, what’ll be most interesting is how these shifts begin to affect larger companies and more traditional employers.

As enterprises belatedly adopted social media and communication as part of their IT infrastructures, how will human resources and more rigid line management begin to accomodate coworkers in their corporate culture?