The latest UnThing: Coworking

October 11, 2006 2:03 pm Dave Neary work, work/coworking

Anyone who has worked for long periods from home gets lonely. You miss having a coffee machine where you can complain about the problem you’ve been having or chat about your dog’s gastritis. You miss eating with other people. You miss having office noise around you (OK, maybe not so much that one).

So here comes coworking. What is it? It’s a shared space, somewhere where you go to get your human interraction while working – an office with café culture, someone’s apartment with an open door day for people tired of working alone.

Interesting idea. The next step is shared living space, for those of us who spend a lot of time travelling, and prefer to stay with like-minded people rather than in hotels.

3 Responses

  1. aguafuertes Says:
    October 11th, 2006 at 11:45 pm

    Hi Dave,

    shared living for travellers is nothing new, check out http://www.hospitalityclub.org/

    It’s basically a database of people who are willing to accomodate travellers. There more than 200.000 people in it (well, I guess not all active, but still), and it really works.

  2. Rob Says:
    October 12th, 2006 at 12:59 am

    The virtue of coworking (or just regularly working at an office with other people) is that you leave for home in the evening. There are well understood rules how to behave in office while private behaviour is much less restricted. Think of all the problems people have in share flats (especially if they aren’t friends). In short I’m sceptical about the shared living concept. 🙂

  3. Max Says:
    October 12th, 2006 at 2:30 am

    Of course it depends on the personal taste etc. But i can tell from about 10 years of living in shared flats that i really like it a lot. There is a bigger culture of flat sharing here in germany so it’s quite commen for students. But i even grew up in a House three families were sharing – 1 kitchen, 1 washing machiene, 1 living room etc. I can say it was really great. There were 3 families with 3 kids and 5 of the adults were working. But still there was always someone around to look after the kids. And kids to play with as well.

    Now i am living in a shared flat with 14 people. We buy our food together and cook together and i really enjoy that. There is hardly any way of having the posibility of eating 2-4 warm meals a day while only going shopping every 7th week (2 take care of the shopping each week).

    But of course this depends a lot on what you like. And on the people sharing your flat as well. We do have a quite strict policy for new flatmates and that helps to reduce conflicts. Everyone has to agree upon every new flatmate. Actually the people living here are causing less stress than the fact that a lot people move to other towns after some time because they were exchange students etc. You really get to know each other quite well so it’s usually a very sad moment to see people leave.

    Well yeah. But that’s just one way of shared living. There’s a lot of people who just do it to save upon the rent and internet connection etc. which is cool too but i really like our common partys and the friends of friends who are coming over regularly and the livelyness of the whole place. But i never lived in a flat alone – so i don’t really have a comparison.