Coworking Ireland

It’s with great pleasure and nostalgia that I announce the winding down of TL01, Dublin’s first co-working space. I set up TL01 last June to provide a space for like minded individuals to work together under the coworking philosophy that I discovered first hand in San Francisco.

The last nine months have been some of the most productive, inspiring months of my life. Eamon Leonard and Eoghan McCabe took on the coworking philosophy and wore it proudly. Last February, Eoghan and I decided to go into business together. We share similar ambition, goals and ideals in business and in what we do and our skills complemented that wonderfully. Last week, we announced and formally launched Contrast, the two of us partnered with Belfast coworking champion David Rice and skilled usability expert Des Traynor. Read More…

Dublin co-working is now officially go.

Whatever about the buzz of getting this place off the ground, I’ve been heart broken these past few months, paying a visit every week or so to check if Eircom hadn’t already set up the broadband in this little co-working space in Dublin.

Well, I popped my head in at lunch time today and the DSL link light indicated that there was an active connection on the line.

The momentum has been snail’s pace, but we’re now set to go and hopefully I’ll be spending many a happy hour coding, jibing or perhaps just hanging out over the next nine or ten months.

All the desks in this room are taken, but if anyone’s looking for a space, there’s another room for co-working being set up down stairs, and there are bigger plans afoot. Now’s the time!

I’m back three and a half weeks from San Francisco and I’m now in a position to put out a call to anyone interested in joining a co-working space right in the heart of Dublin City Centre.

In a nutshell, If you’re an internet-y creative type / freelancer and interested in joining a co-working space just off O’Connell street at an introductory price of €200 plus vat per month, get in touch.

From the BarCamp discussion, I met Mary Rose Lyons from Brightspark Consulting who put me on to Emmet, the landlord in Space 28. I know the place well as I used to rehearse in, and actually made a demo in Loop Studios in the basement.

The vibe in the place is sweet – we’re talking suits out, creativity in. It’s gritty, to be sure – the lane way behind SuperMacs often smells of pee and the Lott itself is a back lane behind restaurants and shops. The interior of the building is all bare floors and walls. It’s not your corporate suite, nor your serviced office arrangement for business types.

Emmet is all about opportunity, fairness and grass roots. The place was initially set up with a word-of-mouth trust system. Price points are arranged so as not to be exclusive. It’s all about helping people get off the ground. Oh, and the whole building is supplied by green energy.

We’re looking to get the place up and running as soon as possible on a trial basis. Emmet suggested to begin with five residents at €200 plus VAT per month. I couldn’t be happier with the price.

I’m thinking we’ll go with the CitizenSpace model, but perhaps without the lite option initially anyway. A few permanent residents with the added bonus that drop-ins will be more than welcome to come in for a few hours and get some work done in a creative atmosphere, or make connections and build networks.

So what’s included?

Well, most fundamentally it’s a permanent office space, with co-workers … somewhere to work alongside like minded people. I guess we’re looking for internet-y types, freelancers, designers, software engineers, bloggers, small teams, lonely hearts etc.

Practically, it’s a desk, an internet connection and a key with 24 hour access 365 days a year at an affordable rate.

It’s all in the about-to-happen stage right now, but the space is there. I took some photos – it’s just been left by a band who were using it as a rehearsal space, so needs a bit of tidying up, but they give a good sense of the size of the place. I’ve also a Google MyMap to the location.

Interested?

Drop me an e-mail ( paul at rslw.com ) or leave a comment here. I’m going to arrange a viewing for sometime next week.

So I stopped into Citzen Space in San Francisco yesterday and I’m coming to the end of my second official day co-working, right where it all began. Chris Messina and Tara Hunt are the remaining occupiers of the office, but the place has been teeming the past two days.

I arrived in and after about 2 minutes of awkwardness I was at a desk, plugged in and good to go. I was more awkward that nobody actually acknowledged my presence – as though they were used to people walking in – and they are!

And so it’s pretty much exactly as you would expect. A couple of regulars, a couple of bedouins and an atmosphere that encourages collaboration and playtime, as well as serious business. Read More…

Olivier put out the suggestion on Saturday as we left BarCamp Dublin that next year everyone should get together and build a web app. For the next ten minutes, I thought of a million and one ideas, stemming from things like a Hack-a-thon style coding competition, to a single application where everyone contributes ten lines of code (or contributes a tiny app in whatever language they choose…) … then all the way through the reasons why such a venture might fall to pieces. But it sure was an exciting ten minutes inside my head.

The big question I’m left with is: why should this be limited to BarCamp? Imagine a place where this kind of energy, this kind of collaboration potential is at your fingertips every day. The realist in me says: Imagine a place where no work ever gets done. I guess that’s a natural danger of the open source world, but time and again we see open source thriving, despite the odds. Hell, I’m blogging on open source right now.

Anyway, I’ve been following this co-working movement this past month or so and seeing all the action distributed among the south and south-west. I want a piece of the pie up here in Dublin. I called a discussion about it at BarCamp and there were 16 of us, despite taking up the last slot at 5pm when everyone was tired and everyone else had already left.

The jist of the discussion went something thus: There’re lots of us working at home, or in small office spaces alone. Money’s coming in, but we’re not minted. Jobs come and go – sometimes we’re too busy to handle everything that’s thrown at us, sometimes there’s a dry spell. Read More…