Where the Coffee Shop Meets the Cubicle

According to this story in Business Week:

"Over the past few years, co-working facilities—both grassroots, co-op-like versions and for-profit models—have started popping up across the country and the world, from Seattle to Copenhagen. A co-working wiki hosts pages for dozens of other cities with co-working initiatives in progress. And while the concept of shared office space is nothing new to entrepreneurs, an increasing number of them are signing on and finding that the community-building and networking benefits outweigh even the virtues of a shared fax machine."

Be sure to check out the slide show. For a long time, I have said that we need new kinds of "third places" geared to the realities of flexible virtual work.  Part coffee shop, part hotel lobby?  The right space is hard to describe.  Love to hear what you think.

Comments

[Michael Wells]

Seems a lot like the Starbucks as conference room and Kinko's as back office in Daniel Pink's Free Agent Nation. Funny how all of these ideas seem to converge.

[Richard]

Michael - I agree: General idea is similar. But the space needs to be more appealing, more stimulating. Coffee house - Starbucks - has some elements. But it's hard to work there - really work. A good hotel lobby is closer, but not quite right. An international airline lounge - sort of getting there. We can do a whole lot better. The creative age demands it.

[Mark Kuznicki]

For your readers' background info, that Coworking group was started by busy community beaver Chris Messina and others behind the global BarCamp community, the mother of all open tech communities.

Chris and equally talented partner Tara Hunt work out of Citizen Agency, http://citizenagency.com/ in SanFran. Many interesting social, community and technology innovations coming out of this crew and good people to talk to sometime.

[rachel]

there is a renewed interest in a coworking space for toronto, and we're taking cues from some of the best coworking facilities already in existence plus adding some of our own elements. we're hoping to get something up and running within a few months.

the creative age does demand it, and what a third space it can be!
r.