Co-working – Looking for the Ultimate Solution

Pic via Chris Radcliff

The Problem

After listening to podcasts and reading the paper at a cafe in Newcastle’s hippest cafe strip (there are only 4, so the odds of being the hippest are pretty good), I realised how unproductive the time would’ve been if I was actually trying to do work. I didn’t have a laptop with me and I wasn’t working at the time, but if I had been trying to work the passers by, bustle of the cafe, grubby table and lack of wifi would’ve really made it tough.

The Background

Surely there’s a better alternative to working out of a cafe. The options known to me at the time were cafes, home offices and the conventional workplace. Thinking about a suitable alternative, I had visions of community workspaces that were essentially extensions of cafes with a few critical additions. A couple of months on, and I realise this community space has been thought of before and even has a semi-official name… co-working, a term seemingly coined by Brad Neuberg with a concept being driven by the Coworking Wiki.

Toronto, Boston, NYC and of course San Francisco are the cities with the most co-working initiative, and notably Chris Messina of Flock fame is one of the key players behind the San Francisco effort.

The Goal

When I start dreaming about the ideal co-working space, this is what I see… A natural extension of a cafe, the ideal co-working space has the usual offering of coffee, meals, snacks and other food and beverages. In addition, the co-working space has a large communal area with wired and unwired internet access, for use with personal laptops or provided desktops. There are group work areas and more private individual workspaces.

There are quiet phone booths for making important calls and bookable meeting rooms for business meetings or creative sessions. There is an ambience of creativity, professionalism, community and ambition. Business contacts can be established with fellow co-workers in the common room. Entrepreneurs, international travel writers, business owners and CEOs all in the same space, making connections, working creatively with as much or as little contact with one another as they desire.

The Ideas

Some smart guys have already penned reasons and ideas for co-working spaces. Greg Olsen has discussed some great advantages of going bedouin;

By focusing almost exclusively on service-based infrastructure options, a business could operate as a sort of neo-Bedouin clan – with workers as a roaming nomadic tribe carrying laptops & cell phones and able to set up shop wherever there is an Internet connection, chairs, tables, and sources of caffeine.

Niall Kennedy’s Elements of an Ideal Cafe describes some key features essential for any co-working space, with an interesting note on including some commerce options;

The cafe would be the hub of activity for emerging businesses and geeks. The cafe could offer select services such as home broadband signups, EVDO, cell phones, computers, music, and accessories. Coffee houses in London were the birthplace of auction houses Sotheby’s and Christie’s in spaces attached to the cafe.

Niall’s background on Sotheby’s and Christie’s is particularly inspiring and to me signals the need for a new type of hub, if for no other reason to spawn the next commercial venture opportunity. When like-minded individuals meet and work together amazing outcomes are usually the result.

Gregor J. Rothfuss expands on the commerce theme further in The Coffee House, Office of the Future;

Cafe Odeon in my hometown Zurich saw Mata Hari dancing, Lenin and Trotsky plotting and the DaDa art movement was born there. Lloyd’s coffee house in London spawned Lloyd’s of London, the first insurance company in the world.

Moving on from commerce, Gregor J. Rothfuss then provides further justification for a co-working facility. I love this quote, he wraps it up perfectly;

wasting 2h a day in traffic to finally arrive at a crappy office plex is on the way out. rising oil prices, the desire of companies to put their capital to better use than sinking it into cubicles and the increasing virtualization of work all lead to an ever growing percentage of workers who can work from anywhere, anytime. if this cuts down on meetings, the bane of productivity, even better. i for one would not mind to hang out with my friends while we all work for our respective entities (or collaborate on the fly, just like those old geezers at lloyd’s did)

The Perfect Solution

Yet to be found, but the efforts of the individuals and groups identified are sure to create some cranking co-working spaces. The Office Online has found the answer for authors and the Innovation Commons is doing a fine job of developing an international network and creating a suitable space for Vancouver’s entrepreneurs.

As for a solution satisfying the majority of Australians, I’m not exactly sure yet. I might set about putting something together one of these days…