Brad Reed - Reprinted from Network World
Tuesday, October 23, 2007 12:00 PM PDT
Jon Pierce’s teleworking office can’t get much more casual.

Operating out of the third floor of a Cambridge, Mass., triple-decker apartment building, Pierce and several of his peers come to work dressed in jeans and spend their days pecking away diligently at their keyboards. They play music sans headphones to help pass the time, with the new Radiohead album garnering significant airplay in recent days. For leisure, they’ve set up an electric guitar on a nearby chair that can be played during break time, and there are piles of Reese’s cups and jellybeans spread across the kitchen counter to satisfy their quick hunger fixes.

While they may look like college roommates studying for a final exam, they’re actually part of a growing trend in teleworking. After they spent years teleworking either at home or at the local coffee shop, Pierce and his colleagues banded together with others to form the Beta House, a co-working community for Web entrepreneurs. Co-working communities, which combine the relaxed, informal atmosphere of working at home with the sociability and cost-sharing of an office, have emerged as alternatives for telecommuters who miss having person-to-person interaction during work.
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Last week we hosted a Launch Party for Citizen Wausau at Citizen Desk. We had a great time and the event really got people talking - in fact, we were asked several times if it could become a monthy event - or at least one that happens more frequently. This got me thinking.

Why not create other opportunities to take this online community offline?

I imagine being able to host groups, clubs or individuals for organized (or unorganized) meet-ups. There was this non-profit meet-up I used to attend in San Francisco called Net Squared, where they partnered non-profs with technology. Pretty cool stuff.

A couple of weeks ago I attended a larger scale meet-up called Barcamp in Milwaukee. This was an “un-conference” where anyone could participate or present. It was an amazing chance to network with other geeks in the state, reconnect with old Wausau acquaintances and make many more new ones!

Back in the RockWater days we used to have LAN parties for online gaming and that sort of thing - it was a great time!

That said, we have this space at Citizen Desk that could be perfect for these sorts of activities.
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Don Clark of the Wall Street Journal has published a great piece today explaining why more and more tech titans, including Cisco, Hewlett-Packard and now Intel, are beginning to mimic an organizational principle more common to Web 2.0 startups: They’re ditching their office cubicles!

In place of the old-school, upholstered grey boxes, Intel will apparently be implementing far more open, social office layouts that “include tables where several users can plop down with laptop computers, multiworker desks, and lounge-like settings with armchairs.”

Why? Well… as Don reports, through testing these new, more community-friendly work environments, old school managers have finally come to accept that “Dilbert-style cubicles have many shortcomings.”   READ ON >>

“Wausau is a great place, a growing place, but with growth come the challenges of balancing lots of opinions and ideas, conflict and resolution, and all the rest. We hope to be a place where everyone can wrestle with these things openly – in a civil exchange.”

Introducing, Citizen Wausau

The always-on, perpetual freelance culture of Web 2.0 has spawned its own “coworking” spaces, but are these new techno-optimists building sustainable communities? Another enjoyable article on Co-Working.

It’s an interesting idea: temporary Marxism for a temp economy. No worker’s paradise; just some cool folks to hang out with, a place to get stuff done, a chance at autonomy. Utopianism isn’t quite what it used to be.