Coworking Ireland

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…

I’ve said before that I’m not really interested in using a public coffee shop for working. I think it might be more workable in the US where internet access is ubiquitous and there’s certainly more of a laptop culture but laptops are still few and far between in Europe.

The spacial logistics for using a coffee shop are also pretty poor:

• Tables often too small (designed for two lattés and a danish)
• Coffee plus laptop = bad (Trust me on this one)
• Laptops often too big (Come on Apple!)
• Large laptop bags obstruct walkways (this creates coffee+laptop situations)

Read More…

Now that NASA is coworking does it mean we can twin with the International Space Station? Hmmm, don’t imagine I’d get much work done there!

Damien Mulley floats the very cool idea of applying the FON model to Coworking-

“Wouldn’t it be nice to travel the world or country and hop from one place to another for plug in for free in return for you having a Coworking facility that allows a few free seats for the nomad Coworkers?”

Wouldn’t it just! So let me see if I’m interpreting Damien’s idea correctly. Let’s say 8 people in Dublin were renting a coworking space between them with 2 spare places available. Now, if that group of 8 people joins “The International Coworking Club” (TICC) and agrees to let any other members avail of their 2 spare places free of charge then they can also travel to any other TICC location worldwide and avail of a cowork space free of charge. Comments?

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…

This article in The New Yorker debates commuting.

“I was shocked to find how robust a predictor of social isolation commuting is,â€? Robert Putnam, a Harvard political scientist, told me. (Putnam wrote the best-seller “Bowling Alone,â€? about the disintegration of American civic life.) “There’s a simple rule of thumb: Every ten minutes of commuting results in ten per cent fewer social connections. Commuting is connected to social isolation, which causes unhappiness.â€?

What of coworking? Read More…

Paul Giguere had a alternative view on our post about coworking and informal learning -

“I think however that the idea of informal learning and coworking, as described, are a bit off. I agree that informal learning can incorporate the social aspects of learning by and through other people, but in and of itself, this definition is only a part of the equation… The content is important (Corbett would have you believe otherwise) and workers need access to that content when they need it and in the manner they need it to meet the contextual requirements of the task at hand.”

Read Paul’s full post for context. Matt posted a comment which is keeping the conversation going -

“One of the things about Co-Working is that it’s an exploration into what might be possible if people start to consider other methods of working. I used to “co-workâ€? in university more than a decade ago. It was just the way we worked…. Content plus co-working plus good people plus whatever else may make for a compelling learning environment for some disciplines.”

David Copithorne of Cork based startup Waveson has the following proposal for Enterprise Ireland -

“There have been parallel conversations between people about the lack of small tech company support, looking at Enterprise Ireland (EI), and around co-working. How about somebody proposes to EI to simply do the following:

At some trial location they provide 24×7, hotdesking facility. During this trial anybody who’s engaged in generating invoices or in a business generating cashflow (not necessarily profit) pays for the privilege of using the facility. BUT any startup gets a three month waiver on the fees, thereafter paying like everybody else. The startup would pay some sort of deposit in case things go pair shaped. Read More…

Just a quick reminder that the next SoHo Solo meeting is on in Cork this coming Monday morning 8.30am at the NSC, Mahon. Jenny Kent tells me that there’s quite a bit of interest among the group in the idea of coworking so please come along if you’re interested in bridging the two initiatives.

In response to Matt Johnston’s suggestion for a pushpin map charting Coworking locations I jumped into the new Google MyMaps feature and produced this quick draft of Coworking Locations in Ireland.

I thought it would be useful to have the following colour scheme for pushpins -

• Red = possible (requiring a lot of negotiation)
• Yellow = probable (being actively pursued)
• Green = confirmed / active

Any suggestions?