Hi guys,
I live in Martinique (French West Indies) in the caribbean. I arrived here 3 years ago (from Paris) and people didn’t know anything about “coworking”…today, everything has changed.
My needs when I arrived was to meet people, not being alone like an hermit because it was detrimental to my momentum (build my startup).
I realized that many local people needed this also so I’ve launched the Jelly…to build the community, start the ecosystem.
The www.martiniqueworkatjelly.com is a monthly coworking session in my house, I invite (free wifi, coffee, etc.) every single enterprising/entrepreneur people to come to work, to discuss, to exchange and to challenge their projects, idea, startups, companies. After 2 years, the community is impressive (15~20 attendees each month, 300+ subscribers for the monthly email invitations, 40% retention rate).
88% of the martinicans entreprises are sole entrepreneur businesses so they quickly understood the aim of coworking…as soon as they came to see what it was.
I mean you can talk a lot about it (and hope it will sound to their brain)…but you could invite them to see what you do or go to show them by organizing meetups. This way they will live “the thing” from inside.
I think you’ll be inspired by reading the posts written by Alex : http://dangerouslyawesome.com/
Let’s share about our experiences
ps : have a look to copass.org
Steve
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On Sunday, November 16, 2014 2:52:09 AM UTC-4, NODO Cowork wrote:
Hello,
We opened the first coworking space in Merida Yucatán. 3 months later another one came up and a few week later another came up (merida is a small city). The coworking movement in here is absolutly new. They have never heard of “coworking” or “networking” so we are kind of evangelizing in the desert. It is difficult, is a challenge but I love it. I think that the city has a “momentum” of coworking and enterpreneur movement. So I thought to unite with other other two spaces and communicate about COWORKING and importantce in the community. I am afraid that they don´t know what a coworking space is. I know they have never worked on one before, and it is difficult to understand coworking if you have never tried it or experienced it for a while.
What would be your advices in this point? How can we collaborate? I don´t even know if we actually have the same vision… I am not even sure if I should talk a lot (as I always do) or just sit down and listen.
Anybody has come into a situation like this before?
Thank you all
TAM