Open Coworking: It's time to talk about it!

Community
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Re: [Coworking] Re: Coworking Week 2015 Update
Thanks Jeanine for sharing the info, anyone who wants to contribute, or needs help raising awareness in your market, please drop us an email directly, we will also have another conference call tomorrow.

Kind regards

Toby

···

On 7/9/15, 10:52 AM, “Jeannine” [email protected] wrote:

Hi, Jewel!

Citizen Space has taken the lead on organizing Cworking Week again this year, they do a great job too!

To connect as a sponsor you send an email to [email protected].

Events and celebrations at coworking spaces are registered with the website by contacting [email protected] .

Cheers,

Jeannine

On Thursday, July 9, 2015 at 7:23:14 PM UTC+2, Jewel Mlnarik wrote:

Thanks Jeannine, Toby and Ramon for the great lead and round up of information to help us engage with Coworking Week 2015.

We’d recently begun chatting at Workfrom.co http://Workfrom.co about how we can best participate and would love any feedback here. As a website and community for remote workers, we commonly facilitate coworking, whether that’s at a dedicated coworking space or out “in the wild” at a cafe, park or elsewhere. We also showcase the places people cowork and the people who work in those spaces. We’d love to help promote the week, events, people and in that sense be a media sponsor. In looking at the sponsors page, I couldn’t find information on who to contact and thought that someone here would know?

Cheers,

Jewel Mlnarik

Founder, Workfrom.co

Workfrom Anywhere. Explore Everywhere.

@workfromco http://twitter.com/workfromco | @juellez http://twitter.com/juellez

On Thursday, July 9, 2015 at 4:59:17 AM UTC-7, Ramon Suarez wrote:

Thanks a lot Jeannine for such a thorough and we’ll crafted email and for once again taking the lead . Thanks also to all the rest for your thoughtful contributions.

For the discussion about the coworking week I would like to suggest a new and separate discussion, so that things don’t get mixed up.

You can count on me to work and on the support of Betacowork and the European Coworking Assembly.

I would suggest a task for the first year that we can discuss in the coming coworking conferences too: write our definition of coworking and use it in Wikipedia articles and everywhere. We already had a few discussion about this in the Google Group and it lead to the one we are using for the Coworking Week Belgium and the European Coworking Assembly: http://coworkingbelgium.be/2014/05/22/belgium-coworking-spaces-map/ (link to original group discussion in text). Not all Collaborative and shared working spaces are coworking spaces. If we dilute the core and the target too much we will be irrelevant, and we want to have impact.

Regarding the target, I think that for most of the properties we are talking about space operators. Coworkers can benefit of the wiki and spalecially the visa, but mixing everybody in the Google group only ads noise, making it harder to contribute, help and have meaningful conversations. If people absolutely want to have coworkers discussing, it should be in a different group that could be also created and managed by Open Coworking, but I think this is too much work for little value. I think that for them it is much more interesting finding out about the coworking visa: creating personal links around the world will do much more than any online experience (as we all have experienced in the conferences, and as a former AFS participant I reckon).

An idea for the visa would be to add a voluntary longer exchange, that could be as easy to signal as adding an asterisk by the name). I was thinking about one week.

When it comes to mentoring we do a lot in the conferences and through the connections we make there. On top of it there’s Andy’s seminars and podcast, the Coworking Handbook, many people doing consulting, and other ressources. I don’t think personalized free tutoring is needed, but I would love to participate in some scheduled open hangouts.

It is important to have a legal structure with motivated and hard working people in the board to move forward and to manage some visit financial operations, such as renewing the domain name registration and taking he members fees.

Those that want to be part of the organization should pay an annual fee. Ressources can still be open, but the more committed and those that walk the walk should decide.

The cooperative idea sounds good specially if it is a non profit. You are the lawyer, I trust you know well this :slight_smile: What is important to me is that the people taking the lead are not personnally liable, as it would be the case without any kind of organization. Limited liability please :slight_smile: If a new entity is created, the old one should transfer assets to the new one.

It is important that he ownership of he domains, group, and the wiki is transfered to whatever legal entity we use. I’ve seen too many cases where not knowing who had to renew the domains and inaction have ended up in losing them. They are too valuable to loose them.

To participate you don’t need membership, but some things have to be limited to the members, who have a higher engagement and commitment. And basic commitment equals annual fee :slight_smile:

Cheers,

Ramon Suarez

Founder Betacowork.com

Author CoworkingHandbook.com

President CoworkingAssembly.eu

Founder CoworkingBelgium.be

And coworking apasionado :slight_smile:

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Hi, Toby,

No problem.

Can I get in on the conference call? I think if I can get the info we have some folks in Open Coworking who can handle the global part of getting the word out and so on.

Don’t you think?

Cheers,

Jeannine

···

On Thursday, July 9, 2015 at 10:51:54 PM UTC+2, Citizen Space wrote:

Thanks Jeanine for sharing the info, anyone who wants to contribute, or needs help raising awareness in your market, please drop us an email directly, we will also have another conference call tomorrow.

Kind regards

Toby

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Re: [Coworking] Re: Coworking Week 2015 Update
Sounds great Jeanine. I will get the invite emailed out ASAP.

Toby-

···

On 7/9/15, 1:54 PM, “Jeannine” [email protected] wrote:

Hi, Toby,

No problem.

Can I get in on the conference call? I think if I can get the info we have some folks in Open Coworking who can handle the global part of getting the word out and so on.

Don’t you think?

Cheers,

Jeannine

On Thursday, July 9, 2015 at 10:51:54 PM UTC+2, Citizen Space wrote:

Thanks Jeanine for sharing the info, anyone who wants to contribute, or needs help raising awareness in your market, please drop us an email directly, we will also have another conference call tomorrow.

Kind regards

Toby

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Hi Jeannnine,

I thought the project jovoto are running with CoBoat would be of intereest to this group.

It’s a brilliant opportunity for anyone with a great project idea to spend 100 days on the amazing coboat.

All they have to do is submit their idea before the deadline over here.

I have a press release i can forward you if you’d like to share it with your contacts.

Any questions don’t hesitate to get in touch!

Thanks

Orlaith

···

On Tuesday, June 30, 2015 at 10:30:07 AM UTC+2, Jeannine wrote:

Open Coworking is a movement. It is the community of coworking spaces all over the world, working in many different languages. WHat we all share is that we have all committed to the same core values: Collaboration, Openness, Community, Accessibility, and Sustainability

We maintain this Google Group. We also maintain:

We work with the Network hub on the Global Coworking Visa Map.

Open Coworking has grown up as the need arose, and was only formally organized a couple of years ago. In 2012, Jacob Sayles took it on and created a nonprofit organization to manage all of the above. At that time we were very excited that we had reached a huge milestone: 1,000 coworking spaces worldwide!

There are now….more than that. Ahem.

So recently, he handed the reins of Open Coworking over to me. And it is time to talk about where we want to go with it. Organizations tend to naturally emerge around a community’s needs and while I am in a great position to get feedback about those needs, a number of people find it to be high time we talked about what we want to do. And where we want to go.

Is it time to get formal with Open Coworking?

This is an all-volunteer movement. And as some of you know, we have been working on a reorganization of the WIki Team for about a half year. We have grown in that time to a team of 65 volunteers worldwide. As a larger, worldwide coworking community, we seem to spontaneously have this conversation every 5 years or so. But a majority of the people now involved in coworking were I think not here for the last one. So it’s time to open up the discussion again I think.

Here is where we are:

We have me, I am still in for organizing Open Coworking, in Oosterhout, the Netherlands.

We have Oren Salomon in Texas USA, busy with establishing a curated Open Coworking community directory based on a map.

There’s our social media, run by Beth Buczynski in Colorado, USA.

There are the Wiki Associates and Regional Partners, listed on the Wiki.

There’s the Global Coworking blog, run by Melissa Geissinger, who is also giving us a much needed facelift (see below for screenshots)

There are a number of other projects and idea which we have been approached to take part in or contribute to.

The projects I hear most about people wanting are:

  1. a mentoring program, space-to-space; 2) a mentoring program, network to network, for coworking communities setting up local networks;
  1. an overhaul of the Coworking Visa;
  1. a marketplace, coworker to coworker.
  1. a best practices “kit” for spaces at different points in the growth curve: starting out, mature and growing, and even end stage. There is also much interest in a best practices “kit” or discussion group for what we can rural coworking, that is, models for coworking in locations other than large cities and also for coworking in specific sectors: retail, hospitality.

I signed on to maintain the Wiki and serve the community where I could and that is what I intend to keep doing.

Here is what I want from you

I want to know what you think. I want to know what you would like to see from Open Coworking. I want you to take part in this conversation.

I also want you to help us get the word out that the conversation is taking place. With your social media, within your communities and within your cities, as soon as the discussion goes up I would like for you to share the word.

We can continue to keep on as we are keeping on: the organization as it is now is sufficient to maintain the Blog, the Wiki, and this group.

It is not sufficient if what the community wants is for Open Coworking to more actively organize and advocate and communicate with the outside world.

Coworking without Borders, the Coworking Visa, and the new Coworking Map have none of them gotten the kind of support they deserve, simply because we lack the reliable resources to support them. The spam problem on the Wiki has been largely cleared up (hurray!) but it is in many areas out of date and needs to be reorganized.

The organization itself should not be a problem;

We are in a unique position as a community to add to the development of Coworking. The real question before the house is this:

  1. Do we want a Global Open Coworking Organization?
  1. What would you like to see it do?
  1. How can we best do this?

I welcome and value your thoughts.

Cheers,

Jeannine