dangerouslyawesome

Last week, Cadu de Castro Alves of Bees Office in Rio de Janeiro (!!!) noticed that it was nearly the 5 year anniversary of when Brad Neuberg announced coworking at The Spiral Muse in San Francisco.

My how we’ve grown since then. Thanks go out to Brad for not only trying something, but then sharing. He took his idea and what he’d learned, and shared it. And so it began.

Other than some Tweeting, I unfortunately didn’t get to do much to celebrate this year, but plan to change that in years to come. That doesn’t mean I didn’t take some time to reflect on what it meant for Brad to recognize and propose a simple solution to a problem that many of us have experienced first hand:

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.

From Brad’s first writings about coworking, it was clear what this was about:

choice.

Most recently, Coworking Seattle (one of the first, if not the first, regional organization of coworking efforts) wrote a definition that is among the best I’ve seen for coworking:

Coworking is about making the personal choice to work along side other people instead of in isolation.

Look familiar?

It’s on days like this, through ideas like this, that I’m reminded how lucky we are to have people paving the way for us who wish to recognize that we DO have the ability to choose, from where we work to who we work with, and we’re total dummies if we’re not taking advantage of those abilities.

I’ve spent more time involved in coworking than I did in college, and I’m 100% confident that my life has improved more from being involved in this network, this community of people, than anything else I’ve experienced in my 27 years.

I’m thankful for those who I call mentors, colleagues, and friends through this process: Brad Neuberg, Chris Messina, Tara Hunt, Geoff DiMasi, Tony Bacigalupo, Matthew Wettergreen, Jacob Sayles and Susan Evans. This short list is barely representative of the number of people I’ve learned from, though.

Every day, in some ways more enjoyable than others, I learn something on the coworking google group. When I joined, that group was less than 100 people. Today that group is subscribed to by over 2700 people from around the globe.

And the members of Indy Hall, who saw their own story and vision in mine, and decided to join us on this crazy ride. From one crazy voice to over 100, the stories told by Indy Hall members about this time in our lives are stories to be cherished, as I’m confident we’re doing something unique, remarkable, special, and amazing.

And like Brad, we’ll continue to share. Our successes, our failures, our ideas, our opinions, and our insights.

On this August 9th, and every August 9th from here on out, I look forward to reflecting and remembering the history of where one of the most important groups of people in my life came from.

Thanks Brad. Thanks Everyone.

The power of coworking is not in the facilities, because those elements are commodities and have forever decreasing value. Scaling facility up is relatively easy…you can just throw more money at it. And despite how you might feel about funding your efforts, money is and will always be the easy part.

Culture, on the other hand – which is the glue of what holds a strong coworking community together – is difficult. Especially through fast growth, which is often desired to help achieve an end like scaling the space and the facility.

Culture is composed of norms, which can be established by anyone within that culture. They can be dictated – which tends to be the way offices are run. In coworking, something different can happen.

One of the things that fascinates me about coworking spaces is that we have the ability to provide a workspace, a context that most people are relatively familiar with, and actually REMOVE the rules for how it is “supposed” to work.

Ask yourself, “What happens in an office where nobody tells the workers how to act? How to interact? What to do? Where to go? Who to talk to?”.

There’s some chaos, but chaos is good.

I learned to Embrace the Chaos from early coworking founders like Chris Messina and Tara Hunt. Our human tendencies are to control chaos, and put things in order. By avoiding that, and allowing order to emerge a bit more organically, new behavioral patterns emerge. These patterns, in the context of coworking, are the things that our members love and subsequently, the things that the press likes to write about: collaboration & work exchange. Increased charity and giving. Better support for local industries. Happier people. Increased business foundation. Camaraderie and friendship. We’re building blank canvases for work patterns to emerge from, and I think that the work patterns that exist when nobody told them to are the most interesting and the most sustainable to practice.

Those elements don’t truly emerge until someone gets out of their way and simply lets them. Telling people to collaborate is a lousy way to have it happen, because it’s always dependent on you telling them. Creating opportunities for people to discover collaboration on their own terms creates a rolling effect that’s difficult if not impossible to stop once it starts.

I like to look at coworking and ask:

Are you contributing to the development of an ecosystem – one dependent on the health of its host – or a community – a self sustaining organism that while it may have a figurehead, could live on in other capacities without you?

All of that said…the question at hand is: what are the challenges to growing/scaling, and how do you overcome them?

The interesting thing is that these same elements that provide a very strong cultural base for a coworking community can also pose challenges as you grow. But the results of overcoming those challenges are richer than if the barriers weren’t there to overcome in the first place.

Consider this essay by Michale Lopp (of Rands in Repose). In it, he talks about a pickup hockey game played by Netscape employees every weekend for 14 years. A game with only 3 simple rules. Unwritten rules, but understood rules.

Rather than referee every game and start by reminding everyone of the rules, they just played. If someone new joined the game, and disobeyed one of the rules, it was up to one of the other players to let them know the rules, and then they could play on.

That is, until, a larger group with its own critical mass came in all at once. In one game, more arguments and fights, occurred than ever had in the history of the game.

Its not because that group was unnecessarily feisty, but because it’s much harder to grow a group that’s built on cultural norms – like the rules of the pickup game or the interactions of a coworking space – when lots of new people show up at once.

So what do we have at our disposal within our various coworking communities?

First, we have our membership. Existing membership is the foundation of your culture, not you. If they want something to change, its best to embrace the chaos and let it change, for the better. Making sure that existing members are having opportunities to build strong relationships is key, because they’ll be there to defend the cultural norms important to them.

On the Coworking Google Group, some people have made recent mention of “Town Hall” meetings and members lunches. These are excellent for building relationships because they allow coworkers to interact with each other with the context of membership but without the context of work. That means they are not worried about interrupting or otherwise inconveniencing each other.

Every time Indy Hall has deviated from a focus on helping create these contexts, and at the same time experienced a growth spurt in membership, we have had issues. Some can be small, like a noticeable increase in people who come in, put on their headphones, work all day without talking to anyone, and then going home. Others can be large, like the introduction of a disruptive member. Truly toxic things, like poorly ending collaborations and even theft, are more likely to occur when people aren’t on the same page with what to expect from one another.

If you don’t know what “normal” looks like in a given culture, how are you supposed to know if something is wrong?

When the community grows quickly but nobody is there to introduce the newbs to the cultural norms, the “hum” of a coworking space – the thing that gets most people excited but they can’t quite put their finger on – tends to decrease in volume. I’ve seen it repeatedly times, and not just at Indy Hall. I’ve seen it happen on the coworking e-mail list as it has grown from less than 100 people to over 2500.

Consider your coworking efforts like mini-societies, and consider the challenges of scaling ANY society when looking for solutions.

In the last 4 years, I’ve come up with some pretty wacky ideas for how to get IndyHall into the brains of more people and, more importantly, the coworking concept into the mindshare of the ever-changing workforce.

I’ve noticed a relatively typical trend in that the kind folks who operate places where coworking takes place seem to struggle with how to market it and build a sustainable operation to support it.

I’ve been guilty of parroting the “build the community first” as the solution to nearly every problem that brand new coworking spaces encounter. It’s not a silver bullet, and it’s not meant to be. What it does is put the person who’s in the leadership role in the right state of mind – that of a leader and not just a proprietor - of the community space they’re about to attempt to operate. Being in that state of mind puts you in the most advantageous place to solve the typical, un-special problems that you’re bound to come across. That makes solving the weird, hard problems your focus. And if you give it enough time, they will show up.

But that’s not the point of this post. Lets say you’re doing a great job of developing the community before you’ve even got a space, and now you want to start converting those people to paying members so you can support a home for them to work in.

Freemium doesn’t work with coworking.

Free trials are an epidemic with new coworking entities.

It seems to make some sense. Coworking is a new concept, so charging a new member-potential to try something new raises the barrier far too high for them to walk in the door at all.

Except now you’ve created a new problem for yourself. That member-potential has significantly diminished value associated with what you just provided them. How are you supposed to charge them for the same thing the next time they come in?

In most cases, free coworking is being offered by prepubescent coworking spaces. Those coworking spaces lack the critical mass of smart, interesting, creative people that represent the primary attraction for most of the members they don’t have yet. Once you have that, it’s easier to diminish the value a little bit because you’re starting from a much higher offering of value.

But if your goal is to get people in the door that will stick around and help you sustain the business that will operate their clubhouse, you’ve gotta charge from day 1.

Case Study – The Free Trial of Doom

I got a panicked email from a coworking space owner who I’ve corresponded with a fair amount in the past, and I have full confidence is in this for all of the right reasons. The space was only a few months old, but she felt her runway shortening and was concerned about their member acquisition rates. 8 members had joined in 3 months (which, by the way, isn’t that awful when opening a space with 0 members). She was doing all of the things I typically prescribe: get out there and meet your potentials. Find ways to support them. Get them involved. Here was an excerpt from the email:

Many come and try out the space (we offer a one week free trial) but they dont come back, sometimes even after the first day. They all say they love it, the vibe is great, etc., but wtf. For the life of me, I don’t get it. We follow up, send emails, and even anonymous surveys to figure out what we are doing wrong, and people usually respond with either “it’s too far” or, “I absolutely love your space, and will sign up soon.” Soon. Soon doesn’t come soon enough. Rent in our area is high, and even though we got an AWESOME deal on our rent, we aren’t anywhere near break even.

How many times I’ve heard this isn’t a number I care to count, and it breaks my heart.

We offer a one week free trial. Kiss of death.

My response included the following:

A one week free trial is WAY too much. In fact, I don’t believe in free trials at all. You’re devaluing your Workspace before people even walk in the door by making it free. Don’t be afraid to exchange money for goods and services. It’s the only hard rule of business You’re using free space as a “bell and/or whistle” to get people in the door, but it gives them zero reason to stick around. If you can’t get them hooked in an hour, you’re not going to get them hooked in a week.

She took my response to heart and immediately made some changes. Among them was dropping the free week trial.

A few weeks later, I got a follow up:

…over the past week and a half, we’ve gotten 13 new members!!!! I guess I may have spoke to soon… not to mention that a one day trial as opposed to one week has made a HUGE difference! People come in, love it, and sign up!

In 10 days she had more than doubled (nearly tripled) membership growth that had previously taken almost 10x that long to achieve.

These specific results are admittedly anecdotal, and your milage may vary, but this isn’t the first time I’ve seen this sort of course correction.

I also included:

There’s nothing [inherently] sticky about that onboard process that you described. Show up … for free, and then a wishy-washy “I’ll sign up when its right for me”.

Not only does charging from day one give us the ability to maintain value from the moment the member-potential walks in the door, but it provides us with an extremely effective conversion point. It works like this.

Your first day is $25. But if you decide to sign up that day, we’ll happily apply that $25 towards whatever level of membership you’re interested in!

Which works nicely when our basic membership is $25, the same price as our drop in day. So you essentially get 2 days for the price of one just for signing up, and then your 2nd day lets you explore Indy Hall as a member, rather than a drop-in.

Also, because we have the aforementioned critical mass of smart, interesting, creative people, the rate that drop-ins sign up for ANY level is extremely high. We convert our paying drop-ins at a rate of 2:1. That is, for every TWO people who drop in, ONE of them typically joins at some level of membership. At our spring 2010 drop-in rates, that’s a relatively consistent 10 new members a month, and the numbers only climb as our presence grows in our region.

Other things to consider

• Not charging for drop-ins (who contribute relatively less) for the access to space that you charge to members (who contribute relatively more) is disrespectful to the people who pay their hard earned money and contribute
• What kind of people continually use something that provides value and are OKAY with not paying for it? Now compare that with people who happily pay for the things that make their lives better. Who would you rather spend your time doing business next to?

So free is bad?

Absolutely not. But it’s unwise in an early stage business to give ANYTHING away that you wouldn’t otherwise charge for. Instead, give away things that cost you nothing!

• Run free events and make them awesome and open to anyone. Work with local businesses as sponsors. Find a local bar or restaurant and make them your watering hole. They’ll appreciate you consistently bringing them customers, and you’ll love having a place you can walk into and have a good chance of bumping into someone you know.
• Partner with other local organizations and cross promote ideas, events, and opportunities when your core values align. Don’t be a logo slut: make sure partnerships are mutually beneficial, and you’re giving with purpose.
• Share knowledge. Collective knowledge is at the core of coworking and a great way to get people in the mindset of sharing is to lead by example. What have you learned that you can give away and will be interesting and of value to your member-potentials. Who else has interesting valuable things to share, and what formats can you help provide for sharing that?
• Start or support a local Jelly! Many have said that Jelly is a gateway drug to coworking, but I’ve discouraged coworking spaces from hosting Jelly in their spaces for all of the reasons I’ve outlined in this piece. Instead, participate in a local Jelly as members of your coworking space and go with the intent to meet people, not with the intent to recruit. Help a Jelly get started, but I wouldn’t run your own. Heck, even send the people who don’t want to pay for your membership to a Jelly as a free coworking alternative. Let them get hooked on a free version of coworking…there’s a great chance they may end up back on your doorstep wanting “Jelly Everyday” and decide to try out that membership after all.

P.S. Hey Alex, what about offering TOTALLY free coworking all day, every day?

That’s another post, another day.

For the last few months, I’ve been quietly been working on a new project. Actually, I’ve been working on the contents of the project for over 3 years now, but recently, I’ve been plugging it into a new framework.

Back in the fall, I was approached by David Hauser from Grasshopper with interest in helping him set up a new coworking space in Boston. David’s whole “empowering entrepreneurs to change the world” value statement for Grasshopper is clear alignment with coworking, far beyond the business proposition. Furthermore, on a very personal note, he might be the only person I’ve met in business who harps on core values as an operating model more than me.

I dig that.

David and I quickly made it past the superficial conversations about coworking spaces and got to talking about community, people, empowerment, higher purpose, and the big questions like “why” we do things the way we do them at IndyHall. David’s eyes went wide and I watched him “get it”. He said, “more people need to hear this, why haven’t you written it down?”

Fact is, I have written it down. Most of it, in fact. The problem was that it was all over the place. Blog posts on this site as well as IndyHall.org. Literally hundreds of posts to the Coworking Google Group. But no cohesive story arc unless you got me in a room and put a beer in my hand.

So we decided that it was valuable enough for David to get behind the project, not just for himself, but with the goal to create something that would help many others kick ass. The end result of the project be something with larger value.

And so, I began writing The Coworking Book.

Now before I go on to post the excerpt, I’m sure you’re asking,

“But what about everybody else that’s written about their experiences? Who the hell are you, one guy, to tell this story by yourself?”

If you’re not asking that question, you should be, because I asked myself the question long and hard before deciding how this project would take form.

Instead of thinking I could take on that task, I instead set out to write the framework. That’s it. I’m building a framework that we can hang ideas from, and to guide people in to coworking from whatever vantage point they are coming from.

I’m writing what I hope is a cohesive story arc that makes the content interesting, valuable, and somewhat linear. And I’m telling it from a single lens: my own.

That’s version 0.1. The alpha. My version. That’s what I’m releasing this week at SXSWi. I’m going to be taking time out of my schedule while in Austin to put the finishing touches on the work I’ve done so far, and to follow my own advice - just effing ship.

Beyond alpha

My plans for next steps are to begin something that begins to look like the communal composition of some of the oldest texts in history. I’ve decided that within the margins of each paragraph of each chapter of version 0.1, I’m inviting people to tell their stories.

Through their own lense.

There are going to be holes that need filling in. I need you to patch them. There are going to be disagreements on points of execution. We need to discuss them.

But in the framework I’ve constructed, there are always decision-guiding tools to make resolving disagreements simpler and to remove ego, including mine, from the end product.

All of the discussion that goes on in the margins will then be folded in to the primary text with some guidance and support of others. What others? My hope is that some people step up from the margins and want to become co-curators.

Addendum: For the coders in the room, think of the main text as the trunk, the commentary as patch submissions/pull requests, and the curators as “core team”. And lets not forget the ever growing user base that ultimately will want to use this tool because it helps them kick ass.

The tool we’ll be using to collaborate is actually built on top of WordPress, it’s called Digress.it. It’s a plugin + a theme, and while it’s not perfect, it’s pretty badass. This sort of interface was largely inspired by the DjangoBook, the official book for the Django Project, a framework for the programming language Python. What’s important to me is that people can comment with accountability and attribution on every post AND every paragraph individually, and this tool gives exactly that.

On Curation

Dave Troy has been talking about a “curatorial economy” on his blog, and its an idea that I like. Curatorial is not inherently exclusionary. It does, however, push for people to step up to plate and act. The ones who are considered are the ones who act. It’s not the same as a “do-ocracy”, where those who do get to make the decisions. This is about guiding but not imposing.

Curation is about making a choice, but with shared and articulated vision.

And that is my hope for the final product of The Coworking Book. That through a number of iterations, and communal curation, the work product that emerges is a clear, high value, extremely accessible utility for people interested in the past, present, and future of work.

Lots of commas in that last sentence. Sorry about that.

About the content

This part is important: forever, each version of the text, and the related comments and discussions in the margin, will remain online for free. Searchable. With 100% attribution.

At some point, we’ll need to “release”. Versions will each have a roadmap, with a set of goals that it needs to accomplish. When we achieve those goals, the book will be released.

When we reach a 1.0 version, we’ll only have a snapshot. It won’t be the bible, because it will continue to evolve. But we’ll have a snapshot, something that’s missing from the history books for our movement and our community.

The important part is this: we don’t stop at version 1.0. We don’t ever stop. We keep telling this story, and evolving the text. The growth and change in the sphere of coworking has changed immensely in only 3 years, and the change is accelerating. Lets snapshot things now so we can continue to measure that growth moving forward.

And without further adieu, I present you with an excerpt from the chapter “Finding your Coworkers”.

FIGHT CLUB

If you’ve seen the movie “Fight Club”, the main character who’s known as “Jack” is a hypochondriac who attends self help groups to feel better about himself. Demented and selfish intentions aside, something interesting happens to Jack: he meets Marla Singer, another self-help group junkie. In order to not appear awkward in front of their group members, they decide to split up the nights.

There’s a good chance you’re going to find a similar situation along your journey of community exploration. Except this time, this works to your advantage instead of being a detractor like in Jack and Marla’s relationship.

When you start recognizing people at multiple events, or on multiple lists…you’ve found another connector.

Connectors are the most important people in any community building effort because they are catalysts for speeding up your process. If a person is already dedicated enough to be participating in multiple events and groups, it’s not a reach to think they might want to team up with you to more efficiently map the topography of events and activities going on. They might even be able to help find more connectors.

These connectors tend to also make great leaders, and are critical to the mobilization efforts you’ll be embarking on very soon.

Over time, you will find yourself building a map of the existing communities and the active pieces of your region. Coworking can augment many of them, and they can all provide channels for potential members for your space.

More mature communities may already have these maps established, but that doesn’t mean you can’t go through this process on your own. You may uncover something that hasn’t received as much exposure as it deserves and it will go on to be one of your greatest assets once you open a space.

Some really good thoughts on Social Capital(ism) and related investment by Roger Ehrenberg came from a panel in NYC sponsored by Philly’s Goodcompany Ventures. Goodcompany CEO Garret Melby, who I enjoyed meeting after my presentation about organic team building at Entrepreneurs Unplugged back in December and spoke at Ignite earlier this week, also commented.

The full post is worth reading, but two quotes stood out to me:

…It’s an issue of how you define capital and return.

My hypothesis is that we need a whole new regime for quantifying the value of businesses that have goals other than strictly financial profit. We need hard numbers – real metrics – to demonstrate the value of initiatives that create value for society beyond the payment of staff and the generation of profits for shareholders.

But the “R” [in ROI] – the return – isn’t simply financial profit: it’s economic utility, real benefits being enjoyed by society.

This leads me to something else that I always find hard to articulate: the ROI of IndyHall, or even coworking in general.

We’ve been running IndyHall for nearly 3 years as a business for a reason, and a profitable one at that. But the metrics for ROI aren’t salient, since most of the investment has been in human, knowledge, and time capital, and the return doesn’t show up on our balance sheet. As such, Geoff and I don’t take a draw, at least not in terms of cash…because that’s not what’s we’ve invested. If there was a balance sheet for the social capital we’ve invested and seen in return, though, and we had metrics for it, we’d be able to far better express and share what we’ve accomplished.

I was just tipped off to Cobot (thanks to Allen at Centernetworks). In the last 2 years, I’ve evaluated a LOT of options for improving the management of IndyHall. None of them have fit the bill.

All of the issues stemmed back to the same thing that is wrong with most coworking spaces: the focus of the software is on the desks instead of the people.

Cobot has found a way to strike the balance between functionality that helps a coworking space run (like analytics and billing support), but also paid careful attention to the needs of the people in the space, helping them get signed up, oriented, and solve their own problems so we don’t have to do it for them. They even have a support ticket system for our members when something goes wrong. Even the pricing model is based on the members instead of the desks.

This is smart. Very smart.

Being people oriented is what’s gotten IndyHall as far as it has, and seeing software that supports that is extremely exciting for me.

Even more exciting, is software that is designed to help people get into the mindset of being people-oriented…if they aren’t already. I think that software that helps train people into good habits instead of reinforcing bad ones is great software.

Feature-wise, it’s not quite there for what we need, but I’m going to be paying very close attention to this venture because it’s got the right direction. Our feature needs are what they are, and while I hope they can support them, I’m much more interested in how they continue in the direction they are going where everything else I’ve evaluated in the last 2 years has totally missed the mark.

Gatekeepers are the leading cause of confusion, dissent, and ultimately their own demise.

Don’t be a gatekeeper.

Instead, find every way possible to help people say “yes” and allow them to execute.

The outcome is world changing.

Permission is a highly underutilized leadership skill. Let’s see if we can’t change that.

Mission #1: Try saying “yes” to something trivial that you would normally say no to, and watch what happens.

Less than one week ago, an unlikely e-mail found it’s way into my inbox. Actually, it found it’s way into 2300+ inboxes connected to the Coworking Google Group, which arguably the most active singular location to find out about coworking, share ideas about coworking, and meet people interested in coworking.

Gerrit Visser, and his partner Bernie DeKoven, had owned coworking.com for over a decade. On it, they shared articles and ideas about collaborative work and play. They periodically interacted with members of the coworking community, including some interviews with Brad Neuberg who kicked off the movement we know coworking as today.

An Opportunity

Gerrit and Bernie had been approached by two commercial entities interested in coworking.com, and decided between them that the community that had gotten behind the term “coworking” should have a shot at buying the domain first, if they were going to sell at all.

A few hours after their post the Google group with the offer, there hadn’t been any public activity so I decided to take some action and e-mail Gerrit for details.

Once I had the sale price and a target to hit, I realized that there wasn’t only no way for me to buy this domain on my own without seriously stressing my bank account, but it would have been the wrong thing to do. Indy Hall benefits from a strong sense of belonging and ownership even from people who do not technically own IndyHall. It’s peoples’ contributions to the making of Indy Hall in every step of our history that binds them to us, and to each other.

Photo by @missrogue

People support what they help create

I e-mailed a list of trusted advisors, peers, and a couple of coworking’s “patron saints” to first see if I was off my rocker, but also to propose a model for raising the funds. That model established a clear cut financial goal, defined methods of contribution, and outlined some simple rewards.

Three basic tiers of contribution, and actionable goals.

Before I could even get the model out of the hands of this short list, almost half of the target had been reached.  The concept had been de-risked.

The floodgates open

At 12:26 pm EST on Monday February 15th (my dad’s birthday), I posted a proposition to the google group based on the one that had happened in the smaller dialogue. 5 hours later, I had to put a hold on contributions because we’d actually OVERSHOT our target by a few thousand dollars. Money poured in from around the world.

Quickly, discussion on the Google group changed from excitement to excitement…with a bit of anxiety.

Woah. That went fast. Too fast?

In the hurry, I’d created a sponsorship model that was exclusionary, unless we were to raise funds without any limits. If we went that route, we’d need someone to be responsible for that extra money, and what its spent on. Talk of business entities resulted, co-ops, LLCs, and the like. The pendulum swung between highly inclusionary and highly exclusionary.

Nearly 100 emails were slung over the next 2 days, debating a number of ideas and issues. Among them, three primary ideas/questions began to crystalize.

1. How to pay for/who owns the domain, long term
2. What kind of entity could exist
3. The definition of coworking

The idea of a coworking “entity” or “organization” seems like the right medicine, but I remained unconvinced that we weren’t curing a symptom instead of a disease.

Back to core values

We’ve approached the “what is coworking” conversation before, and at this scale, it’s EXTREMELY difficult to pin down an answer of what is and what isn’t. Instead, we have core values established by Citizen Space in 2006 and adopted and iterated by many other spaces and communities. Those core values are clear and understood, and most importantly, something we can expect people to respect.

I might argue that defining coworking doesn’t help anyone long term, because if the definition isn’t allowed to change, we’re stomping out the fire we intentionally created. That’d be counter to the movement. That’d be counter to the purpose. That’d be outright stupid.

But without arguing the “what” and the “who”, we can come back to the domain coworking.com, and what it represents.

Power of Words

The beautiful thing about the internet is it’s made up of words. Domain names are technically pointers to ideas, and instead of having to remember IP addresses, DNS has allowed us to connect words with ideas.

Coworking.com connected the word “coworking” with the ideas…and the ideals…of the community, without introducing commercial and organizational overhead.

Meanwhile, the discussion (and periodic disagreement) on the Google group continued in a healthy, smart, and fun manner. It was helping people bond, and figure each other out. The armchair psychologist and sociologist in me was grinning as I watched the whole thing unfold. The word coworking truly bring people together in fantastic ways at every turn. How could someone not get excited about this?

Launch

While the community continued to converse, sharing ideas, and inching towards something truly emergent, I continued working with Bernie and Gerrit on the domain transaction. It’s worth noting that THEY were every ounce of awesome to do a deal with. Their commitment to the idea of coworking was genuine, and their continued excitement about the domain being put to this use was clear in every e-mail. Almost 80 messages between the three of us over the course of a couple of days, keeping each other updated at every turn. Not the most efficient deal by any means, but they were responsive, fun, and most importantly: I think they handled things very fairly.

Today, I worked with their technical guy Jasper to transfer the domain and complete the transactions. While waiting for DNS to resolve, I drafted the home page that I described in the initial proposition to the group. I built a single page that introduced the coworking core values, and linked to the leading community properties: the google group where this entire legacy will live forever, the wiki which is full of an extensive knowledge base (despite being incredibly disorganized), and the blog (which could stand some refreshing of its own).

I launched that website at 7pm, February 18th, with the text:

Did you know that there is a global community of people dedicated to the values of Collaboration, Openness,Community, Accessibility, and Sustainability in their workplaces? It’s called Coworking. And people seem to think it’s swell.

Again, connecting the word to the values. The most important thing we can do right now as the movement grows and more people discover the word and the actions associated with it.

Now what?

Now that the site has been relauched, we can return to the questions raised by the admittedly half-baked funding model. I’ve returned the puck into the court of the community, suggesting we focus on brainstorming a way to redistribute the funding opportunity over a wider base, and creating a more sustainable and inclusive model. I have some ideas of my own, and some suggestions from others, but I don’t have an answer yet. My hope is that the ~20 initial funders are willing to re-draw lines so we can all move forward together gracefully. I’m not naive enough to think that money won’t complicate things. But I’m confident that we will find a lightweight and sustainable model to move forward, providing as many people in the community the benefits of the domain as possible.

My hope is that we can re-orient a bit, and as Chris Messina suggested in an offline e-mail, put the focus on the humans instead of the companies that make up this community. I think that will better represent the purpose of the website, and the voices behind it.

There are infinite possibilities with this domain, and that’s very exciting. We’re starting small, and even the small achievement is huge.

Furthermore, we’ve proven that this community can move mountains together. That may be the most exciting demonstration yet.

Thank you.

For this opportunity to lead, learn, inspire, be inspired, and make some history happen.

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.

I haven’t written a post about Twitter in a good, good long while. That’s not by accident, either. There’s PLENTY of blog buzz for Twitter, and it doesn’t need mine.

In fact, even in all of the seminars, panels, and presentations I’ve given in the last year, I’ve done my best to avoid discussing Twitter. Recently, I openly asked the audience to stop asking me questions about Twitter (and social media in general) and ask me interesting, hard questions. I might have turned some people off, but I think the majority of the people appreciated it.

So why stray from a good habit?

Something interesting happened in social media, for a change.

This past week, Twitter rolled out a new feature called Lists. Lists are a way to arrange people besides following them. When you create a new list and give it a title, the people you add to that list are quickly and easily associated not just to that title, but to the fact that you applied that title to them.

This is an interesting way to get normal people to arrange other normal people, apply metadata (the name and context of the list), and for people to discover each other thanks to these new, suggestive contexts.

Sounds pretty complicated. I threw in a bunch of big words for effect. What does this boil down to?

Now, I think this is exciting. It’s going to freak a lot of people out. Maybe that’s why I think it’s exciting.

Let’s take a look at the lists I’ve been added to. Check this out:

I took all of the words used to describe me via lists, cleaned them up, and pumped them into Wordle to illustrate prominent terms in my lists just a few days after launch. I’m interested to see how this cloud changes over time.

There are some oddball anomalies, like social media and design, but I’ll take it.

What’s prominent in your list cloud?