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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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.

This is a friend’s co-working space

By Jane M. Von Bergen

Let’s consider the problem of Alex Hillman, 23, Web entrepreneur, quasi-college student, and architect of the local version of an international trend known as co-working.

“Three months working at my house, I was talking to the cat, and I don’t even have a cat,” Hillman said, describing what had happened after he quit his job as a Web designer in December. “I was going crazy without the socializing.”

No, he didn’t buy a cat.

Instead, he got together with a group of work-at-home entrepreneurs, found some hip space in Old City, and set up desks so he and others like him could work-at-work.
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