sharing economy

The Impact of Coworking

Community Manager collaboration, community, coworking, freedom, freelance, happiness, location independence, positive psychology, productivity, remote work, sharing economy ,
The Impact of Coworking
The Impact of Coworking

What is coworking?

Here is Brad Neuberg’s original conception (this blog post represents the first public expression of the term as it is used today), which we think captures the spirit as well as any other definitions out there:

Traditionally, society forces us to choose between working at home for ourselves or working at an office for a company. If we work at a traditional 9 to 5 company job, we get community and structure, but lose freedom and the ability to control our own lives. If we work for ourselves at home, we gain independence but suffer loneliness and bad habits from not being surrounded by a work community.   

Coworking is a solution to this problem. In coworking, independent writers, programmers, and creators come together in community a few days a week. Coworking provides the “office” of a traditional corporate job, but in a very unique way.

Here’s one of our favorite definitions, from Coworking.com, managed by a team of coworking space managers and owners who have been central to the coworking movement from its early days: 

The idea is simple: that independent professionals and those with workplace flexibility work better together than they do alone. Coworking answers the question that so many face when working from home: “Why isn’t this as fun as I thought it would be?” 

Beyond just creating better places to work, coworking spaces are built around the idea of community-building and sustainability. Coworking spaces uphold the values set forth by those who developed the concept in the first place: collaboration, community, sustainability, openness, and accessibility.

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How was coworking born? 

Some think that coworking is inspired by the artist’s studios of the beginning of the 20th century. Indeed somdther and work alone or together. These places were created to improve creativity by meeting inspiring peoples, and to make an economy by sharing the cost with others. 
The aim of these places was almost the same as coworking spaces as we know them today.
It’s in Silicon Valley in 2005 that the concept of these collaborative workspaces really took off, with the creation of the first « real » coworking space in San Francisco by Brad Neuberg (at least in name, though there were several similar spaces that didn’t use the coworking moniker that began the same year in other places).
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Why join a coworking space?

Coworking spaces offer dynamic locations of exchange and sharing. Freelancers, entrepreneurs, and creatives from diverse fields enlarge your network, but more importantly serve as a resource of experience and knowledge and potential collaboration or inspiration. For many members, however, the most important benefit is purely the positive social energy. Members often feel more motivated surrounded by other focused, hard-working members. 

 One of the biggest benefits is improved work-life balance. Location-independent professionals often work from home or from cafes and face one of two common challenges. Either they spend too much time alone and miss the social proximity and social connections they used to have before they were independent OR they have a partner or children at home and have difficulty explaining to their partner or kids that they really do need to work even though it’s true that they set their own schedule.

Most coworking spaces also organize events that help facilitate both the social relationships, motivation, and professional development. Locus, for example, organizes weekly coffee breaks and lunches, and monthly pub nights and game nights to facilitate meaningful social connections. For motivation, Locus hosts weekly Work Jams, where members sit together at the same table and use a timer to work together for a half day with planned breaks, and weekly critique-free writing meetups to help provide a sacred time and place, and positive social energy, for focused writing. 

 Coworking spaces promote sustainability as key players in the sharing economy. They allow members to dramatically reduce commute times because they are often located in the neighborhoods where their members work, and they reduce operation costs and startup time by providing great office infrastructure to members who could never justify having meeting rooms, data projectors and other high-quality office equipment in central locations if that space was not shared among many other location-independent professionals. 

 Many coworking spaces also serve as a kind of landing zone, helping to connect global and local. About 70% of Locus’s members, for example, come from countries other than the Czech Republic (nearly 30 different countries), with the language of the space being English. This allows newcomers to Prague a ready way to form a community with other people like them, and also with English-speaking Czechs who are welcoming to an international community and reading to share local knowledge. Czech members, who make up about 30% of Locus’s members, get the complementary benefit of ready access to a friendly international community and a workplace where they can practice their English on a daily basis.

Finally, coworking spaces simply offer convenience and accessibility. Coworking spaces have become so widespread that as long as you live in a large city they will often have options that are centrally located OR in your neighborhood, with 24 hours a day, 7 day a week access, and with membership plans that meet your particular needs. Locus, for example, is in both a central location and one of the most prized residential neighborhoods in Prague, Vinohrady. It offers all members smart-phone based access 24/7, 365 days a year, and has membership options from as little as one day per month to unlimited use. For the many members who travel abroad but would still like a reliable office in Prague, there are options to put your membership on hold for up to a year. And for members who already have a full-time day job but want to start their solo career, there’s an Evenings & Weekends option.

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Some statistics about the impacts of coworking 

According to global research by Deskmag and Deskwanted:
  • 74% of coworkers are more productive,
  • 86% have a larger business network,
  • 93% have a bigger social network,
  • Over two-thirds feel more creative and collaborate more on projects
  • A third reported an increase in income.

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Still not convinced?

Come and try a day of coworking for free at Locus Workspace. 

Sources

https://www.business.com/articles/coworking-74-of-coworkers-are-more-productive/
http://codinginparadise.org/weblog/2005/08/coworking-community-for-developers-who.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coworking

The C in Coworking Space Also Stands for Community

Community Manager collaboration, community, coworking, digital nomads, entrepreneurship, events, happiness, location independence, Locus Workspace, Prague, productivity, remote work, sharing economy, Writing , , , , , ,
We’re excited to be “syndicating” a blog post from Robin Terrell’s amazing blog on the future of work (with a particular emphasis on the location-independent variety): The Global Mobile Worker. This post in particular was meaningful to us because it’s about the meaning of community, and in particular the community Robin found (and helped create! – Thanks, Robin!) at Locus.

Along with creating this blog and being a member of Locus, Robin is a Berkeley-educated lawyer, a writer (her book, Two Broke Chicas—a travelogue about her adventures traveling around Central & South America, Mexico, and Cuba with her partner–is available on Amazon), a technology / startup junkie, a proud Amazon employee.

We’re excited to be able to share her blog post here…

wordgram-of-cowork
When I first arrived in town I used Meetup to find people who shared common interest. That led me straight to Locus Coworking space. Once in the door, I quickly connected with both the startup community and the writing community, common members of co-working spaces. It has been almost three years now and although I never signed up to co-work at Locus, I realized that I spent time in one of the two spaces at least once a week.
When my new job took me away from Prague for months, my homecoming included reconnecting with my friends at Locus. I write every Saturday with a dedicated group, committed to various forms of media that involve the written word. We have bloggers, and novelists, and game script writers, and PhD students writing a thesis. We come from different countries, different generations, different genders. Our bond is a long-term fascination with words on a page.
It was through Locus that I joined my E-publishing Mastermind group that has single-handedly taken me from talking smack to preparing to upload my first ebook, Two Broke Chicas, a Travel Series, December 26th, just in time for people to use their Christmas gift cards and make their New Year’s Resolution to travel more. Mentor members, like successful sci-fi writer, Bill King, have made my dreams come true.
While plopped on a big fluffy couch to wait for the group to start, I realized how important Locus was to my social life, and sense of being, in Prague. What my virtual membership gave me access to, besides one day a month and access to my e-Publishing Mastermind group, was a community. A place I could belong with people who shared my passion for a flexible work life.

Community = Thrive

Just like we need a Tribe, we need a community. Research found that people who belong to a co-working space report levels of thriving that approach an average of 6 on a 7-point scale. This is at least a point higher than the average for employees who do their jobs in regular offices. Read more: Why People Thrive in Coworking Spaces
infographic-co-work
Grind, is a growing network of coworking spaces in New York and Chicago. Community manager, Anthony Marinos, shared, “When it comes to cultivating our community at Grind, we’re all about the human element. We consider ourselves as much a hospitality company as we do a workspace provider. Our staff knows all of our members by name and profession, and we’re constantly facilitating introductions between Grindists.”
Research in Forbes magazine showed that entrepreneurs with larger and more diverse networks grow their businesses bigger.Co-working spaces can be a place for women, known for being great communicators and collaborators, who don’t excel at building power networks can find a safe space to start. (Women tend to build deep and narrow networks women-networkwhile men wide and shallow ones.) I’ve added several women to my network from Locus, and started an informal dinner group to encourage young professional women to support each other, over a glass of wine.

Building Intentional Communities

Some experts believe that co-working space should be built more like intentional communities. Example, Brooklyn’s Friends Work Here. Founded by NYC-based Swiss-born designer and entrepreneur Tina Roth-Eisenberg, who’s also behind the international lecture series CreativeMornings (which happens monthly in Prague, but mostly in Czech) and Tattly. The space came as a response to Roth-Eisenberg’s negative experiences in “soulless” coworking places that are more focused on making money than cultivating inspiration among its members.

A Wealth of Human Resources

Locus is how I found my brief dog-sitting gig. I enjoyed several days of pretending to own a dog, forced to take several walks every day, which did wonders for my mental health. I’ve enjoyed people passing through town and people here for the duration, like my friend Sarah who first came when it was Czechslovakia, and still communist. She is at heart a historian, writes historical fiction, and loves talking about the history of this country she calls home, as a well-informed outsider.
It was hysterical and inspiring to sit in on Texas Holdem’ Poker night, where people from around the world turned into ruthless gamblers who might gut you for a pair of Ace. It was motivational to listen to Regina and Mike talk about becoming Courageously Free, and through that relationship I was interviewed for their podcast – which should be out just in time for my book launch.
There were people at Locus doing, looking for, thinking about the exact same things as I was. We all wanted to marry our fascination with social media and our passion for words. I could pick the brains of people who, like me, were inspired by Prague, determined to make their literary dreams come true. We figured out all kinds of ways to make money with words. My critique and Saturday writing buddy, Beth Green, will fix your words for a fee. Which still leaves her time to search for an agent for her first novel, represent on Booklust and @bethverde, and be a Wanderlust columnist at thedisplacednation.com.
My writing group has sustained me, in ways both creatively and emotionally, over noodles and pivo at the Vietnamese restaurant down the street from Locus. We’ve discussed our lives and our loves, U.S. and European politics and the meaning of feminism.
We’ve shared critique groups and book front-cover
launches, like Sonya’s soiree for Under a Caged Sky, held at Locus Slezka, where we toasted with glasses of wine under the skylight, with Prague as the backdrop.

Staying Engaged

partyOnce I’d had that moment of realization, that my co-working space was my community, I started to look around for other ways to participate. Engaged in the social media connection and found easy, fun ways to stay involved. I am looking forward to the Christmas Party catered by Ethnocatering, a social enterprise of migrant women that serves authentic food from Georgia, Afghanistan, Belarus, Iran and Armenian. You can’t find this deliciousness in restaurants. I know, I said it, that bad M word. Well, I must own it because here in Prague, I’m a migrant. A tax paying, law abiding expat seeking shelter and new beginnings.
I know I’m not alone in this revelation and would love you to share your experience of finding community in co-working spaces. Tell us your story in the comment section here at the Global Mobile Worker Project.

Crowdfunding Portals on the Czech Market

Will Bennis Czechia, entrepreneurship, investment, sharing economy , , , ,

Below are a few crowdfunding portals on the Czech market. I’d like to keep the list current and have some details about each, so let me know if you know of any others or have any comments about the ones in the list. Specifically it would be nice to know their pros and cons and whether they have any particular industry focus.

  • Hithit (Czech, Slovak, English; as of 3 Oct 2015 seems to be the largest and best known)
  • startovač (Czech only)
  • kreativcisobě.cz (Czech only)
  • nakopni mě (Czech only)
  • Everfund (Czech-language only; as of 3 Oct 2015, new on the market)
  • Fundlift (still not launched as of 3 Oct 2015; claims to be first EQUITY crowdfunding platform on the Czech market)

No longer operating:

  • Fondomat.cz (no longer operating; may have been the first on the Czech market)

Locus accepts Bitcoin and its own new local currency, the Locus Laugh (LOL)

Will Bennis Locus Workspace, sharing economy , , ,

As befits a coworking space, a business with strong associations to social enterprise, community building, crowdsourcing, and other contemporary social ideals, Locus has long been into the idea of local and other non-governmental currencies. At the same time, we’ve also been cautious and slow about embracing them with anything beyond the non-commital “That’s cool!” approval. This is mainly because those of us involved in running the space just don’t know enough about it to feel anything but irresponsible doing more, but also because–truth be told–there’s hasn’t been enough time in the day to think about taking it further. That has changed in the last couple weeks, first with the introduction of the ultra-local currency, the Locus Laugh (currency symbol: LOL), and now with the decision to start accepting Bitcoins for Locus membership. Here’s a little background on both.

Locus now accepts Bitcoin

Locus has been lucky enough to have had one of Bitcoins great advocates–Slush–as a member of the workspace during a big part of his time developing the first Bitcoin mining pool (and during a big part of Locus’s time as a coworking space). He taught me what little I know about Bitcoin and maybe two years ago we agreed Locus should start accepting this largely unregulated digital currency for small purchases (drinks and snacks). I decided not to accept them for membership in the workspace, mainly in response to Slush’s admission that Bitcoin exchange rates are not without the occasional large fluctuation.

I never really took the time to announce it or make it accessible to members, but Slush himself bought drinks and snacks using Bitcoins (back when the exchange rate was a staggering $12 / Bitcoin, way up from the few dollars on the Bitcoin it had recently been and could easily return to). And so, without noticing, Locus collected some Bitcoins (1.191 to be exact). Now, Slush probably ate a couple hundred crowns worth of snacks, but with Bitcoin’s success, that’s turned into over 4.000 CZK for Locus (now with one Bitcoin trading at over $200). And now I ask myself what I was thinking not accepting Slush’s membership payments in Bitcoin (a method of payment he said would suit him). It could have funded a new wing for the Locus library.

Well, today Slush stopped by Locus and we talked again about Bitcoins and membership. I decided to start accepting Bitcoin for any Locus related payment, including membership (maybe violating the sage investment advice to buy low and sell high; or to accept payment in currencies that are undervalued but not in currencies that are overvalued). So now Locus is one of the few businesses in the Czech Republic to accept Bitcoin for all its products and services. And proud of it! Thanks for the inspiration (and help), Slush!

Accepting Bitcoins for membership is exciting and just happened today, but I’m even more excited about Locus’s other venture into non-government-backed, sketchy currency, the Locus Laugh.

Locus Laughs (LOL)

Another Locus member (Melvster, who confidently predicts the Bitcoin will soon trade at more than $1000 dollars to the BTC) has a broader interest in digital currency, working to develop web standards that would allow conversion and payment across all sorts of measurable values, such as Facebook Likes or time or whatever else you can think up that can be accumulated and awarded, including traditional government backed currencies (hopefully I’ve got the Melvster right). A large part of his interest has been in trying to understand less-monetary and more-psychological aspects of exchange relationships that could be built into his models and tools, something I’m interested in, too.
This has proven particularly relevant in running a coworking space and thinking about how to reward members for contributing to the community while keeping these kinds of contributions outside the domain of what the psychological anthropologist Alan Fiske would call market pricing (where exact quantitative values can be and are assigned to social exchanges), and helping to keep (or move) social exchanges into the domains of communal sharing (basically giving to others without concern for what you get in return, what is standard in some small-scale societies and is still common today in many family relationships), or at least equality matching (basically trading one kind of non-economic good for another without being concerned that they match up exactly on some numeric scale). The idea of a married couple trading ironing for cooking dinner (equality matching) goes down a lot more easily than the idea of each spouse paying the other 10 Euros for their respective deeds (market pricing), even if just cooking dinner for the family without concern for what you’ll get in return (communal sharing) might seem the best marker of a healthy marriage. So how to reward community support without shifting the relationship among coworking-space members to one of market pricing, and even try to help move the relationships toward communal sharing?
Enter the Locus Laugh (LOL). Doesn’t take itself too seriously, awarded somewhat freely for good deeds toward the community, but still with value, at least in terms of Locus goods. Laughs can buy Locus products and services and they can be traded among members (or non-members), so that one person who has some Laughs to spare can trade them for a service from another member who’s positively Laughless. Of course it’s just an experiment and we don’t really know how it will work to encourage positive contributions to the communty or to keep those contributions out of the market pricing domain (or instead move good social deeds in that unfortunate direction). Locus Laughs after all don’t really get out of the domain of market pricing. They have a monetary value, at least in the world of Locus Workspace, and they are priced in units (which happen to be directly tied to the Czech Crown). But hopefully they’re far enough removed and take themselves sufficiently unseriously–you get rewarded for Laughable deeds, and a lot of Locus Laughs are Laughter–that they do a relatively good job of serving their function. And if nothing else, Laughs are fun. They make people smile. LOL.
Thanks Melvster and Slush. And check your LOL Ledger.

FREE coworking around the world for Locus members and other independent workers in Prague

Will Bennis collaboration, community, coworking, events, jelly, Locus Workspace, sharing economy , , , ,

One of the cool things about coworking is that a lot of people who decide to get involved in it really care about the idea and the value it has to offer, and not just about the business as a business. Sam Spurlin‘s several recent posts on this blog attest to this. Another sign of it comes from the grass roots cooperation across thousands of coworking spaces around the world that have contributed to coworking.com. The particular example I want to write about now are four options for free office sharing options across coworking spaces around the world: (1) the Coworking Visa, (2) The Prague Coworking Visa, (3) Loosecubes, and (4) Jelly. 

1. The Coworking Visa.

The coworking visa is one of the greatest largely-unknown sources of added value to participating coworking spaces, and also one of the most impressive examples of value-added cooperation across competing businesses I know of in any industry. If you’re a member of Locus or of another coworking space that participates in the visa program, you may know about it already. This is an informal group of about 500 coworking spaces around the world that have agreed to let members of other “Visa”-participant coworking spaces use their space for free (usually for up to 3 days, but the terms depend on the space; Locus is free for up to a month, but limited by the terms of the other coworking space). Here’s a link for details with the list of participating spaces and their terms, organized geographically. 

The coworking visa was the fortunate brain-child of two of the women leaders of the coworking movement, Julie Duryea of Souk in Portland, Oregon (now run by someone else and maybe under a different name) and Susan Evans of Office Nomads in Seattle, Washington. They proposed it on a google group to a network of people running coworking spaces around the world, and it was almost immediately successful.


2. The Prague Coworking Visa.
A group of coworking spaces in Prague (including Locus) were inspired by this visa program to create a Prague version of the visa that allows members of each space to use the other spaces for up to 25% of their membership time. See details here.

 
3. Loosecubes
Loosecubes is a corporate alternative to the Coworking Visa and it remains to be seen whether their intentions are pure and how well the system will work, but as it stands it looks very promising. It is an invite-only workspace-sharing network of about a thousand coworking spaces and other shared offices around the world. Right now (and from what they’ve told me, this is their permanent business model), their system is absolutely free for members of the network (including Locus Workspace members). This means you can use any of the other spaces on the Loosecubes network for free, though each space has its terms in terms of number of free days. So if you’re traveling abroad and want to cowork in most major cities around the world (though biased towards Western Europe and North America), you’ll have a coworking space to work at for free. Loosecubes also provides a software backend and a user-interface that make it easy to use and (it seems at least) perhaps more reliable than the Coworking Visa. 
 
4. Jelly
 
Jelly is informal coworking that started around the same time as the coworking movement itself with a group of freelancers in New York City who decided they’d rather work alongside other people than alone in their home office or at a cafe. They starting meeting as a group at each other’s homes or cafes, they created a wiki, and Jelly grew into a movement, with groups meeting to work together rather than alone around the world. Here’s a sample list of Jellies around the world on Meetup.com.
 
The group of collaborating coworking spaces in Prague mentioned earlier hosts a rotating series of jellies across their three spaces, which means people who don’t work in a coworking space (and may not want to) can experience some of the benefits of coworking for free every two weeks, and get to know a few of the coworking spaces in the city in the process.
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To me the added value that comes from sharing membership across coworking spaces (and with the public)–not just for independent workers and coworking space members, but also for the coworking spaces themselves–is immense. For the members, of course, it means they can literally work their way around the world (as long as they stick to major cities), for the price of the coworking space membership they already have at their home city. For coworking space owners, it means a wonderful influx of interesting visitors who add spice to the host spaces and use resources that were mostly available and going unused anyway!