Telecommuters and the self-employed avoid isolation by renting shared workspaces.

By Chris Gaylord
The Christian Science Monitor
Published: March 3, 2008 edition

CAMBRIDGE, MASS. - When Mike Jones signed on to be marketing director at an e-book publisher, one of the advertised perks was the chance to work at home full time. Two years later, he loves the job, but hated the location.

“I was totally cut off from the world,” Mr. Jones says. “I was only working four or five hours a day because I’d keep looking for things to do just so I could get out of the apartment.”

After months of searching for alternatives, Jones found Office Nomad, a shared workplace in Seattle that sells itself as “individuality without isolation.” The studio plugs into a new and flourishing philosophy called “coworking.”
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By DAN FOST
New York Times
Published: February 20, 2008

CONTEMPLATING his career path a couple of years ago, a young computer programmer named Brad Neuberg faced a modern predicament. “It seemed I could either have a job, which would give me structure and community,” he said, “or I could be freelance and have freedom and independence. Why couldn’t I have both?”

As someone used to hacking out solutions, Mr. Neuberg took action. He created a word — coworking, eliminating the hyphen — and rented space in a building, starting a movement.

While coworking has evolved since Mr. Neuberg’s epiphany in 2005, dozens of places around the country and increasingly around the world now offer such arrangements, where someone sets up an office and rents out desks, creating a community of people who have different jobs but who want to share ideas.

“It’s nourishing on a fundamental level,” said John Vlahides, the executive editor of 71miles.com, a travel site covering Northern California, who rents a desk for $175 a month at one of Mr. Neuberg’s original sites, the Hat Factory. “And if you’re not nourished, how can you be creative?”
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Ilana DeBareSan
Francisco Chronicle Staff Writer
Published: Tuesday, February 19, 2008

Working at home was too lonely for Summer Powell, a 35-year-old freelance graphic designer who had recently moved to San Francisco. She tried working in cafes but found it too distracting. So Powell called a friend and together they joined a communal drop-in office space called Sandbox Suites - an example of a new and growing work arrangement called co-working.

“This seems more like in between home and office,” Powell said, sitting with her laptop in a carrel last week in the airy main room of Sandbox Suites, while several other freelancers typed quietly nearby and two Web entrepreneurs conferred over lunches and laptops at a big table on a second-floor landing. “It gives me a scrappy startup feeling in a good way.”

Laptop nomads - that growing tribe of folks who can be found typing away at any cafe with wireless Internet access - are starting to put down roots. And some, like Powell, are doing it through co-working, a 21st century twist on the old idea of the shared artists’ studio.

In co-working, a group of freelancers or other solo entrepreneurs share one big office space with perks that they might not get at home, such as conference rooms, espresso machines and opportunities for socializing.

Co-working sites usually give members the option of renting a desk that becomes their own reserved space. But most also provide a drop-in option, where people can stop by and work in an unreserved common area for a lower fee - or sometimes even for free.

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nytimes.com
By RALPH GARDNER Jr.
Published: January 3, 2008

BEFORE they were married in September, Nicci Young and Richard Wiese first had to split up. The problem was not romantic, but spatial: Ms. Young Wiese, who organizes community development safaris to Africa, and Mr. Wiese, a writer and explorer, found that their Upper East Side one-bedroom was not big enough for the two of them after both decided to work from home.

“He kept talking to me about his work, which is very interesting, but it was really taking time out of my workday,” Ms. Young Wiese said. “And when I was alone there was a sense of loneliness and procrastination.”

Mr. Wiese, who is writing a how-to book about exploration for teenagers, acknowledged the problem. “Nicci tends to be a lot more intense,” he said. “Especially with lighter work, I can be watching a ballgame. If I saw a funny e-mail coming through I’d want to share it. I’d get these glances from her, like, ‘I’m working!’”
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Tired of the home office? Shared office spaces, for rent by the day or the month, are popping up all over.
By Matthew Amster-Burton
December 26 2007: 11:24 AM EST  ___ reprinted from CNN Money

SEATTLE (FORTUNE Small Business) — As a sole proprietor who works primarily online, every day I face a painful decision: work from home or go to a coffeehouse?

Working from home is awesome. No boss hanging over your shoulder. No need to shower. No human contact. No incentive to stay on task.
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Wausauians gain online/offline collaboration space
By Emily Thierfelder
reprinted with permission from VolumeOne.org

With today’s increasing pressure on personal and professional success, the benefits of networking – that crazy concept of socializing to exchange ideas and advice with others – are obvious. In the past year, two unique Wausau-based enterprises have been created to promote these benefits: CitizenWausau.com, a web site devoted to encouraging community conversation, and CitizenDesk, an office that provides work space for independent professionals. Both enterprises are based on the concept of “coworking,” a social process similar to networking that unites people who are interested in benefiting from teamwork-driven synergy.

“We all have goals, and we can all help each other achieve our goals.” With this as his mantra, Marcus Nelson, owner of the web-design company Superstarch, created CitizenWausau.com and CitizenDesk to provide hard-working individuals with co-working opportunities.

By redefining the traditional workplace into a more community-oriented space, co-working centers enable people to “establish a regular workspace, facilitate collaboration among the regulars, and enjoy the necessities that serious business professionals need,” says Neil Takemoto, the founding director of CoolTown Beta Communities, a company committed to developing these centers. For instance, if a freelance writer needs design advice and a freelance designer needs writing advice, they can work together in the same coworking center to collaborate on their individual projects. In the cases of CitizenWausau.com and CitizenDesk,
then, users are given opportunities to network both online and in person with like-minded individuals.
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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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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 >>

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.

Here’s a great article about the new co-working space in Berkeley, CA.   Three very strong points stand out to me:

1. If you are looking to try coworking, I would strongly recommend a “try before you buy” approach.
2. Make sure you are a good fit with the community.
3. Above all, be ready to contribute to the community 

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