dangerouslyawesome

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.

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.

I write a lot about IndyHall on this blog, but I don’t think I’ve spoken at any great length about another local organization, Philly Startup Leaders. I’ve recently joined the organization as part of a newly formed advisory board, along with a number of other people from various local organizations that support and contribute to the local scene, as well as others who have been long-time fixtures and observe Philadelphias growth from another vantage point.

Philly Startup Leaders, like IndyHall, has modest beginnings: started by a couple of people who had or were involved with startups to discuss the challenges of being a startup in Philadelphia. Those early meetings, all held over beers as far as I’m aware, have transformed into a strong mission for the Philadelphia startup community:

“…above all else, startup entrepreneurs need each other.”

So what’s been fascinating to me has been watching IndyHall and PSL, two different communities grow alongside each other with similar purpose and vision. Lots of crossover has taken place. We share a number of members. Some of us have worked together. All good, healthy things for the ecosystem.

The PSL board has done a great job of growing membership, creating and evolving new events for the membership to participate in, crafting a manifesto, and providing the primary venue for community: the PSL-Talk e-mail list.

That e-mail list, a phenomenal resource for the community, seems to also be one of it’s greatest weaknesses.

There’s currently a flare-up (well, it’s currently as public as the e-mail list is…another issue…and it’s persistent in back-channels) about “self promotion and sales” in the list. When a new thread author, or an existing thread responder, posts something that is less about contributing information to the community and instead, advertises themselves as the solution to a specific problem, they receive a slap on the wrist (public or private, at the board’s discretion). The response is usually something like this one, from PSL co-founder and president Blake Jennelle:

Steve, you could have sent this solicitation to Yasmine directly. Promoting your consulting services is not appropriate over PSL talk. This is your public warning as per the policy you see in the footer. If this happens again you will be removed from the list.

The policy in the footer that Blake refers to reads:

The PSL Talk List is /not a sales channel/.  If you use the PSL Talk List to make a sales pitch to the community, you will be warned, publicly. If you do it again, you will be removed from the list.

I want to be clear and say that I understand why this rule is in place. Lists that are primarily solicitation, job postings, and the like do a lot of harm to the balance of “has” and “needs” of a community.

I liken it to the situation that IndyHall has with recruiters and job-postings. We wanted to make IndyHall a place and a community where people can be more effective at getting their work done. If the ecosystem becomes a place where people can come to get work, vs a place where people come to do work, the has/needs balance gets out of whack.

This is a tricky situation to deal with, for a couple of reasons. First and formost, the LAST thing I want is to be the person, or organization, that gets between a person and the opportunity of their lifetime.

When there’s contact from recruiters, startups, companies, etc about the talent at IndyHall and their availability, we explain that we’re an organization that provides physical space and community resources to our membership, as well as a highly collaborative environment that they can use to get their work done. Work exchanges hands all the time, but we don’t get in the middle of it. If you [recruiter/startup/company/etc] is interested in coming to IndyHall as a member, to use the space and community resources in the same way as anyone else who walks in our door, we welcome you!

So rather than police their intentions, which are to find a candidate for the job they have open, we frame it appropriately. There is absolutely nothing stopping anyone from walking in the door and joining IndyHall. So long as you can work from anywhere, pay your membership, come on by.

What’s nice is…because the culture is established by the existing membership, most anti-culture behavior sorts itself out. Rather than police culture, which is a very top-down way of looking at things, we carefully frame the situation.

If that person, whoever they are, feels they aren’t getting what they came there for, odds are, they came for the wrong thing. And most importantly, they won’t come back.

So, I came down on Blake’s response in the e-mail list where he slapped the so-called service provider on the wrist for an infraction that I’ll keep referring to as “anti-culture behavior”.

Someone who specializes in the topic of a question responds, and it’s sales. Someone who’s novice (or less experienced) responds, and it’s a-OK. Does anybody else see the problem here? I think there’s a difference between letting the group know what you do (within the list, which is the only unified point of membership of PSL) and overtly selling it to the group. What happens when someone asks about office space, and someone other than me recommends IndyHall? What if that person is a member of IndyHall? Is it better if they aren’t a member of IndyHall? It’s not me selling, but they’re selling for us (without my direct influence). What happens when somebody asks for help, like in this case? Experts aren’t allowed to be responded to in public discourse? What does that accomplish? I know that a LOT of energy goes into keeping this list anti-sales, and don’t think that I don’t understand why. Maybe if that energy went into focusing on what this list is, instead of what it’s not, the message would be clearer to people joining PSL. I don’t think the barrier to entry is to high or too low, I just think that you’ve put up the wrong barrier.

I admittedly painted some broad strokes, for the sake of illustration. But I made my point, and framed in the context of this post, I think it makes even more sense.

So Blake responds:

All Steve had to do was answer Yasmine’s question over the list and let his expertise speak for itself. This would have been a much more effective sales pitch. Alex, when you share your expertise on workspaces, when Wil shares his expertise on SEO, when Aaron shares his expertise on marketing, that unquestionable adds value to the list. It’s when you send a solicitation, beyond giving freely of your expertise, that people get annoyed. PSL talk is about helping each other for the sake of helping each other. That’s the culture that draws so many people to this community, as to Indy Hall. That’s the culture that we care so much about protecting and nurturing. That’s what PSL IS about.

Which, again, I completely agree with. Except this part:

That’s the culture that we care so much about protecting and nurturing.

I think it jumped out at me because I said something very similar in an unrelated conversation with Sean Blanda, co-founder of TechnicallyPhilly just yesterday.

Blake and the PSL board have always taken the approach of policing, posting signage (the footer warning), and warning/banning offenders.

What concerns me about this approach is that I don’t know if you can protect and nurture culture at the same time. By protecting it, you’re not letting it build up its own cultural defenses, which would truly be nurturing it into maturity.

My most recent post to the list encouraged Blake in two directions: first, to take some of the board-only-back-channel-discussion into a public forum, and make the most of the smart problem solvers he has as peers in his community. Second, to focus on what PSL is and stands for, instead of trying to keep out everything that it isn’t. Since, Blake has started a new thread doing just that, in which I’ll be sharing this post, as well as participating in the group discussion as much as is appropriate.

I don’t have the exact solution for PSL. I’m not a genie. And believe me, I’m far from perfect.

But I do know that policing culture is historically ineffective (culture’s going to go where it wants) and if the PSL board and the community it represents put more energy into nurturing than protecting, the solution would likely begin to materialize as a much clearer, and more sustainable approach to the problem.

I’m a huge fan of the Brains on Fire blog, especially after meeting Geno and Spike at BlogOrlando last fall. This crew is smart. Super smart. They don’t just get the cluetrain, they run circles around it.

From their latest post,

So now let me tell you why peer-to-peer works better: Because it’s peer-to-peer. I don’t care how good your intentions are if you come from inside the company, you’re still from inside the company and people aren’t going to trust you completely. You are a PR tool. You are doing your job. It’s been proven that the vast majority of people trust people “just like me.” One of my favorite things that Holly, Fiskateer #1, said to us during her training was, “I’m a crafter FIRST. And a Lead Fiskateer SECOND.” This is the honest, transparent perspective that only someone from the outside can bring. So the people in the community know where their loyalties lie. They are not part of the machine. They are part of the community.

The entire post is based on two different pathways for guiding community leadership. One is to pick a representative from within the company, and the other is to look to the community of users and empower them.

If you’ve been reading the cluetrain-a-day series, you’ll know which I (and the Cluetrain) (and Spike from Brains on Fire) recommend.

Great post, Spike!

Congratulations to Dave Troy, Newt Fowler, and the whole Baltimore community for what might be one of the fastest paced “call to action” to “space openings” I know about.

Dave just announced on the Coworking google group that they are opening with an astonishing 25 members at various levels of commitment. This is brilliant.

How did they do it?

They fostered community instead of rushing into the space. When the time was right, they had a space that the community needed, instead of a space that needed the community.

I’m sick of saying it over and over. Somebody finally listened. And they are succeeding.

If you need help figuring out where to get started with your coworking initiative, I’ve got this little thing I do…go sign up for a session.

just noticed an interesting tweet from my buddy Chris.

This post isn’t about Linux Journal. It’s not about stealing subscription logins. It’s not even about Chris Messina (sorry dude).

What this tweet tipped off in my brain was one of several still missing links that I’ve been trying to deduce about the coworking community that I’ve grown to love oh so much. Not just IndyHall and the organizations in its periphery, but the place where some might say the most central coworking activity takes place: the coworking google group.

We’ve never been exclusive about who joins the list. That would be counter to the mission.

We moderate, but only to keep spam out of the inboxes of well over 1000 people around the world participating in the coworking conversation. Cuz we hate spam, and we know you do too.

Wait. Over 1000 people on the list? Yes, that’s a lot, but that’s only a fraction of the people talking about “coworking” and, more importantly, the people doing “coworking”.

That brings me to my point.

What do we do about all of the people who are doing “coworking”, successfully or not (by whatever measures), who haven’t given back?

Hear me out.

In software development, the open source model doesn’t require that by using the software, you contribute code back. Or forums support. Or anything, for that matter.

It only requires that you don’t violate whatever license it is distributed under.

In early days on the coworking list, it was easy to keep talley of who was up to what because there were only a few dozen people. It was easy to know what people were up to, and keep a mental note of each person’s progress.

Now with people joining the list in droves (a good thing, mind you, that I’m both happy and proud of), and yet still hundreds or thousands not making mention of themselves on the list, I wonder if a crucial part of the global coworking community is being underserved.

When I describe the beauty of the coworking movement to someone, it goes something like this:

Coworking isn’t really a franchise, but it’s sort of an open source franchise. I say that in the capacity that there is no monetary buy in to participate in the community, and yet, you’ve got the experiences (successes and failures) of everyone before you to work with. We’ve got a wickedly strong toolbox, and you can have it. At this stage in the game, with all of the press, you’ve got a very strong brand and high rate of press visiblity to work with. You can use whatever you want. It’s here for you. All we ask is that as you grow, learn, and achieve, you remember where you started and keep us posted. This isn’t just for us, cuz we’re going to do it too. It’s for the generations to come, as the movement grows, morphs, and evolves.

So if it seems a little absurd that I’m freaking out about people branding themselves as “coworking” and not contributing to the list (or any visible forum), you see what I’m getting at?

It’d be like opening a burger stand that sells Two All-Beef Patties Special Sauce Lettuce Cheese Pickles Onion on a Sesame Seed Bun, slapping a pair of golden arches on your window, and calling yourself McDonald’s. You think they’d be pissed about that?

Of course.

And it’s not even about trademark and copyright (ok, with McDonald’s it is).

In the case of coworking that I’m trying to illustrate, it’s about representation.

I’m not asking for a financial buy in to use the brand “coworking” (if anybody should, it’d be Brad Neuberg, but even he doesn’t want that from you). The fact that Brad has only ever asked that his name be attributed as the origin of the word as related to this movement is key, and I understand his reasoning completely: the success of the movement that contributed groundwork to is a crucial part of his C.V., and when he gets around to his next big idea, it’s important that his attribution in the coworking history books is present.

Attribution. Linkbacks. A track record for, and of, sharing. This is all really, really important or else the whole thing risks toppling in on itself.

I think part of the problem is that we only took care of part of the equation when discussed coworking core values back in the fall of last year. Not unlike open source software, open source models like coworking should probably have some sort of license attributed to them. That way if and when people abuse the groundwork laid for them.

And, in this case, that’s a lot of hard work by a lot of people, not just me or Geoff or Bart or Brad or Chris or Tara or Amit or Tony or Patrick or Dan or Eva or Raines or Felicity or Marcus or Jacob or Susan or Matthew or Ned or John or anyone else that’s been involved in this community, online or off. And I know I forgot a lot of people people…it’s a BIG ass group. I love you all, seriously. But my illustration is my point. Too many people to thank. So shouldn’t we be careful in preserving the opportunities for thanks that we still have?

What would a coworking license look like? I’m not totally sure yet. I know I’m not interested in restriction, since that would be entirely counter to the principles of the movement. I’m just looking at little things to help enforce reciprocity.

Am I interested in policing such a thing? Of course not.

But if there’s something on paper, misunderstandings can be dealt with.

Even open source software has a license. Who and what it protects is what’s different about that license and a license for commercial software.

I’m not pointing fingers. I’m really not upset about any one thing in particular. I’m just making observations.

And remember, I’m not a founder of this movement. I will never, ever take credit for that. I, myself, was one of the people who came along and saw a good thing. It’s brought me some incredible experiences and connections and quite frankly, changed my entire life.

And really, all I want is to help give back even a little piece of what I’ve gotten from this community. As the movement grows, those expectations need to be set forth clearly.

CreativeCommons is a type of license, and it’s designed to set forth expectations. Some like it, some hate it. I think it’s created more freedom for people to experiment with content while attributing sources and linking back.

And since that’s what we want with coworking (more people to experiment on the model and link back to their inspirations, as well as provide new inspirations), I think that could be helpful.

I know not everyone thinks about giving back, and if you require people to, you’ll always be disappointed. That’s the unfortunate reality. I accept that.

I think we’re lucky to be part of a community where the leeching is still the less-common situation. But as the movement grows more and more, the opportunities for exploit increase.

If you think about it, 1000 people are easy to work with, if you compare them to the millions that I know I want to see living and loving the coworking community as much as I do.

</coworking-hippie>

Geoff and I were out chatting about some things last night and in conversation I mentioned the term “Civic Entrepreneurship”. The word came out of my mouth nonchalantly, and frankly, I’m not sure where exactly I’d heard it before, or if I was using it in the appropriate context. Either way, Geoff’s reaction to the term and what it might mean, was enough to get me to think more about it on my walk home.

Confident it was impossible that I had coined the term myself, and curious about any kind of real context, I decided to ask google for a definition.

The first result, a newsletter from the Center for Community Economic Development at the University of Wisconsin, caught my eye. The result summary contained enough information to match what I’d considered myself, so I dug deeper.

The term civic entrepreneur combines two important American traditions: entrepreneurship–the spirit of enterprise–and civic virtue–the spirit of community.¹

The article goes on to establish five important qualities in civic entrepreneurship.

1. Realistic understanding of contemporary economic realities and willingness to embrace those realities on a local level, building a foundation for larger future growth.
2. Results-driven attitude towards change. Focus on why things can happen, rather than why they cannot. Focus on mobilizing resources to an end game.
3. Collaborative leadership style, rather than leading with formal authority they lead with credibility. Strong ties between economic development and community development. Strong bridging between these two arenas.
4. Long-tail self interest. The individual leader’s end game is long term, short term and narrower goals are heavily focused directly on community involvement. “Give give give, till your face falls off”. Sound familiar?
5. Creating, and enabling, new leaders. Playing different roles within different teams. Heavy focus on teamwork and encouraging collaborative growth.

A lot of this rings so, so true to everything I’ve been immersed in for the last year and a half. But I’ve noticed something else.

A lot of “civic entrepreneurship” qualities read a whole lot like what’s evolved into this moving target people are calling “social media”. This piece, for me, is a great and humbling reminder that even new and exploratory concepts aren’t new, simply evolutions.

I laugh, often, when I (or anyone else, for that matter) are referred to as “social media experts”. How can you be an expert in something that most people struggle to define in the first place? It’s too new for there to be real experts.

Are you an expert simply by being an early adopter? I think that’s a difficult, and dangerous, thing to quantify given the connotations of “expert”.

Social Media leadership? Certainly. I know a lot of brilliant social media leaders. Social Media Innovaters? Absolutely.

Now. I’m not sure if you could call yourself a Civic Entrepreneurship expert, even though the arena is well defined, and well established. Proof? The points in the article cited above were written nearly 10 years ago.

I have to wonder how many participants of the social media space have read the newsletter. Or were they too busy suckling their RSS feeds looking for the latest trend to mimic.

Although, I have to think that there’s something intrinsically humbling, probably tied to quality number 4 above, that most “civic entrepreneurs” wouldn’t go so far as to call themselves an expert.

There’s a difference between calling yourself an expert, and being identified as one.

Be realistic. Be persistent. Share responsibilities. Be humble. Know your roots. Care.

At SXSW, during the coworking core conversation, Geoff made a point that blew my mind with it’s obviousness. That exact same point is relevant to this conversation as well:

These aren’t secrets to successful coworking. These aren’t secrets to successful business.

These are the secrets to being a good human being.

¹Reference: Civic Entrepreneurs: Economic Professional as Collaborative Leader