dangerouslyawesome

Co-author of The Cluetrain Doc Searls writes on the Project VRM blog:

You are not a human being on the Web. In fact, as Paul Trevithick put it (at one of our first VRM meetings at the Berkman Center), the Web has no concept of a human being. It is fundamentally an arrangement of files and connections between those files. Hyperlinks on the Web may subvert huaraches, especially when they are authored by human beings (such as here, in a blog, which is a human expression); but the Web itself is oblivious to that. We still lack the means, on top of the Web (and the Net) to form and maintain relationships that are anything more than a very crude, partial and highly distorted imitation of those we have out in the real, human, social world. Put another way, social contracts in cyberspace have a long way to go before they catch up with those in real-world social space. In fact, they may be two hundred and fifty years behind. “Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains”, Rousseau wrote (in The Social Contract, Or Principles of Political Right(Du contrat social ou Principes du droit politique), in 1762. The Age of Enlightenment followed, during which we began to work out a variety of social contracts involving governance, commerce, education and religion. I submit that we have hardly begun to do the same on the Net or the Web. “Markets are conversations,” the famous first thesis of The Cluetrain Manifesto(and later a chapter of the book by the same title) was meant to help model the social contract in cyberspace after the ones we have in meat/meet space. This has happened only in those places where the interactions are most human. It has barely happened where the interactions are most corporate. More on “Where Markets are Not Conversations“.

Don’t get me wrong, I firmly believe that the web allows us to maintain much larger bases of looser connections and there’s immense value in that. But companies placing dollars (instead of heartbeats) into social campaigns online to accomplish ANYTHING (marketing, support, recruitment, or otherwise) are missing the entire “social contract” needed to balance the operation in a sustainable manner.

I was interviewed for a book about passion based businesses back in early 2008, and it’s finally hitting bookshelves next month. I’ll share a link once I’ve got one.

In the chapter about risk, I’m quoted saying:

“It’s all embodied in this concept of embracing chaos. Everyday something crazy is going to happen. There’s nothing I can do about it. How can I capture that energy and spin it some place positive? It’s one day at a time. What’s next? Tomorrow is next. That’s as far as I know.”

Coworking is growing, and there’s no question about that. New spaces are opening to the tune of a few a week, and press coverage is anything but limited.

We’ve hit “trend” status, it seems, and a number of publications are taking notice.

Trends don’t just include positive growth, though, they include negative growth as well. While spaces are opening up and the coworking google group is humming with activity, I’m concerned about a number of spaces that are struggling to find break-even between their membership and their expenses.

Moreover, nobody is talking about the big R word that is normally saved for corporate human resource departments.

Retention.

Coworking spaces are jumping through all kinds of hoops to get people in the door. But are those people staying? Are they contributing? Are they collaborating as is suggested by most coworking literature?

What things are people staying for? Why are they leaving?

I’m currently working with our intern Parker on sifting through our 2009 numbers to produce some concrete numbers and data related to our retention rate. I’ve gone on record to say it’s been good, but have never been able to say how good.

My goal is to find concrete numbers relating our growth and our retention directly, and to interview people who’ve left or lowered their membership level to find out why. I hope that we can produce numbers for 2008 and the 2nd half of 2007 (while we were open), but our recordkeeping methods might make that difficult.

We need data.

This post is an open call for participation from other coworking spaces to do the same. In order to participate in my research, I’d like the following:

1. A month-to-month assessment of membership counts, and what level of membership they pay for (full time, flex, etc).
2. A month-to-month assessment of member exits, and any insight into what those exits were related to.
3. A month-to-moth net gain of membership.
4. A count of drop-ins that returned, and how often they’ve returned.

To speed things up, I’ve created a very basic one-year worksheet to get you started. You can download it as an .xls here.

The number of spaces that have been open for over 12 months is small, so I’m hard pressed to limit these responses to spaces that have made it beyond their first year. Instead, I’d like to suggest that you have at least six months of active membership under your belt in order to submit your statistics. The more data you have, the better, but I won’t turn anything down.

You can send your space’s stats using this handy dandy form.

Then what?

I’ll be publishing all of the results, along with our own results, openly and licensed under creative commons for mashing up, sharing, and inclusion in other coworking materials.

Thanks for your help and participation.

Wish I were with you but I couldn’t stay
Every direction leads me away
Pray for tomorrow but for today
And all I want is to be home


Stand in the mirror you look the same
Just looking for shelter from the cold and the pain
Some want to cover, safe from the rain
And all I want is to be home


Echoes and silence, patience and grace,
All of these moments I’ll never replace
No fear of my heart, no absence of faith
And all I want is to be home


All I want is to be home


People I’ve loved, I have no regrets
Some I remember some I forget
Some of them living some of them dead
And all I want is to be home

Home, Foo Fighters