This post is part 4 of a 5 part series exploring the 5 core values of coworking: Collaboration, Openness, Community, Accessibility, and Sustainability.

I think community is my personal favorite of the coworking core values, and perhaps one of the most misunderstood or most often taken for granted.

It’s easy to make mistakes around the idea of community. Experts in the field of sociology can’t even agree on a definition, Wikipedia mentions that by the 1950′s there were nearly 100 “discrete definitions”.

It’s the people.

In the context of coworking, though, I believe that a focus on community means putting emphasis on the people, their interactions, and the relationships that form above everything else. At Indy Hall, every decision we make considers members and their opportunities to interact with one another.

We > Me

We organize events that encourage people to explore each others interests in and outside of work. Show and Tell, Lunch & Learns, and Happy Hours provide a spectrum of formal and informal opportunities to step away from the desk and get to know a coworker.

We share rituals and experiences that allow new members to join the tribe and develop camaraderie.

We broadcast our favorite places to hang out outside of our coworking space so that people can easily gather on their own.

We attend and support other events and initiatives together, both enhancing them with the sense of “togetherness” but also showing the uninitiated that the “togetherness” is accessible to them.

We learn, share, grow, play, experiment, celebrate together. We commiserate and console each other as well.

The coworking space is a tool

A coworking space is just that – a space. It’s not a community until it has people in it.  

Geoff and I wrote about Coworking as a “clubhouse”, and I think that language is more accurate of a description than “office” for most of the best coworking spaces in the world. But it’s important to remember that in order for a clubhouse to be useful, a club – a community – should be in need of a home.

This is why I stress the “community first” not just as a mental model (as in, “consider the community first”), but as an order of of operations. Can a community form because a coworking space exists? Absolutely. But it takes time, and therefore a financial runway for what might be an undeterminable amount of time.

You don’t own a community, you belong to a community.

Its that very natural sense of belonging that I think drives people to coworking spaces more than anything else. But I think that as a coworking space owner, it’s important to remember that you’re not the coworking community owner.

I think the best relationship for a coworking space owner to have is to belong to the community that inhabits the space. That connection is authentic, and therefore breeds more authentic relationships in the space. You don’t necessarily need to be a leader in that community, but you should be prepared to be an active member of that community.

I was actually remarking to my friend this morning that I absolutely love that I can come to Indy Hall as a member, far more than I care about coming to Indy Hall as an owner. The oft-forgotten truth is that coworking space owners can get the same benefits from coworking as the members do, mostly due to the fact that they themselves are (or should be) members.

Communities of Trust

People in proximity is a good first step towards community, but as I’ve said community doesn’t really happen until people are interacting. We’ve found that relationship formation is the primary event that transitions a group of people towards being a “community”.

If relationships between coworking members are like tendons, then trust is the the muscle that makes a coworking community strong and healthy.

We start by trusting our members, and knowing that sets a stage where trust is a valued part of being a part of the community. When you start the relationship with coworking members off on one where you don’t trust them, you can’t ever expect them to trust you, either.

No two communities are identical

Indy Hall’s original tagline was “this is how Philadelphia does coworking”, and we remain true and honest to that statement. We didn’t stick a CitizenSpace clone in Philly, we looked around and took the time to understand the communities that already existed, what those people were like, and how a Philly-flavored coworking space would work.

I wouldn’t ever encourage somebody to replicate Indy Hall, nor do I think it’s really replicate-able. Instead, I urge people to learn from the lessons we’ve learned, share some of our ideas, but interpret them to fit their community .

I personally think that the coolest thing is that communities, like the people in them, have personality. Squelching that personality is a waste – instead, embrace it. Own it. Live it. You’ll love it.

Want more? Here are my other essays on the core values: Collaboration, Openness, Community, Accessibility, and Sustainability

To the comments!

This is my perspective on community as it pertains to coworking. What’s yours? Leave a comment below.

This post is part 3 of a 5 part series exploring the 5 core values of coworking: Collaboration, Openness, Community, Accessibility, and Sustainability.

The core value of openness may seem redundant after reading about accessibility, but the nuanced difference is an important one.

Coworking, much like its sister movement of Barcamp, was given birth to by a group of advocates of open source methodologies. Their ideas of openness are the reason that Barcamp and Coworking are the core reasons that the two movements exist in the first place, so without this core value, I probably wouldn’t be sitting here writing these essays, and I certainly wouldn’t have the global community of coworking participants to call my comrads.

I think Chris Messina says it best in this interview,

Openness is unfortunately one of those words that’s become somewhat geriatric, losing its teeth and forgetting what it means . . . There’s the Facebook “Openness” and Adobe “Openness” and Government “Openness” and they all mean different things. When I think of openness, I think of “freedom”, “forkability”, and “interoperability.” Regardless of the definition of “open” or “openness” that you use — yes, you must always fight for openness, and you must always fight for decisions to be made that are more transparent, more expansive, more liberal, and more inclusive. This should be the case for both moral and economic reasons. When I think of openness I also think of biology and the human body. The human body is an “open system” and thrives because of its openness. The human body is constantly exchanging things it values little for things it values more. Whether you’re talking about oxygen and CO2 or nutrients and waste, the body cycles – value in and waste excreted. It requires openness to live.

The fact that Chris and early coworking founders realized that by making coworking “open”, that it could evolve into something much larger than any one of them could control – and that would ultimately be the best thing for the idea.

Freedom

Coworking as a movement embodies freedom and independence. It represents choice, the ultimate freedom. Coworking Seattle’s about page says…

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

…and this rings true to Brad Neuberg’s comments about what drove him to create the first coworking group.

Forkability

This idea is important on two levels.

“Forkability” is the ability to take the “source”, of one project and use it to begin a new project. In software, the source is code. In coworking and other non-software applications, the source is lessons learned, ideas executed, and core values.

Coworking has become a global phenomenon because the idea was “forkable”. The early founders made their lessons, ideas, and values available to people like myself to build our own versions on top of. And in turn, we created even more possibilities for newcomers to the movement.

On a local level, forkability means that the members of a coworking space should be able to make it what they want it to be, within bounds of reason.

I’ve described Indy Hall as a “blank canvas” an office. That is, what happens when you provide basic office amenities only – desks, chairs, power, internet, meeting rooms, bathrooms – and let the people who inhabit that office decide what’s most important to them? Giving them an opportunity to make it their own.

The stories I tell of the cool things that happened at Indy Hall aren’t things that Geoff or I went out of our way to make happen. The stories I tell of the cool things that happened at Indy Hall are all stories of other people, our members, who built on top of the most basic infrastructure we could provide.

What’s particularly cool about coworking is that it gives people the chance to create new solutions to the problems they have, rather than relying on the old solutions that haven’t been working as well.

Our members know that we are open to them forking Indy Hall, especially when the things they decide to do benefit other members in addition to themselves.

Interoperability

And most importantly, we contributed back to the origin of our fork whenever possible. That’s the primary motivation I have for sharing as much as I do on this blog as well as on the Coworking Google Group. I’ve learned so much from others, and want to give that back.

With all of the coworking “forks” running around in the wild today, how do we share back, keeping the ecosystem alive and healthy?

I think that the understanding and being committed to of these core values – Collaboration, Openness, Community, Accessibility, and Sustainability – are the key to maintaining interoperability between forked coworking initiatives.

Common core values provide common ground for discussion and understanding. Being able to bring together those disparate opinions and ideas are going to be increasingly necessary as we learn more beyond where people work, and continue to explore how people work and why people work.

Want more? Here are my other essays on the core values: Collaboration, Openness, Community, Accessibility, and Sustainability

To the comments!

This is my perspective on openness as it pertains to coworking. What’s yours? Leave a comment below.

This post is part 2 of a 5 part series exploring the 5 core values of coworking: Collaboration, Openness, Community, Accessibility, and Sustainability.

Today I want to take a look at the core value of accessibility.

They’ll select themselves in.

One of the unique elements of coworking is that anybody who can work from anywhere can do it. You don’t even need a special coworking space to do it. You can cowork in a living room, or a park, or even somebody else’s office. But the key element here is self-selection.

If you think about it, it’s actually pretty remarkable. A coworking space is one of the only places in the world where every single person in the room is there because they chose to be. An environment composed of willing self-selected participants is a remarkably positive and productive place to work, as you’ll find out talking to anybody who coworks. I think that many people who cite unusual productivity levels from working at a coworking space are actually feeling the benefits of a) choosing for themselves where to work for the day and b) being surrounded by others who choose where they work for the day.

The key to this interaction even being possible, though, is that the coworking space allows the members and participants to self select themselves in.

An application process, is the “baby with the bathwater” scenario for this problem. While an application process may keep people out, or keep things “balanced”, you are also likely to be keeping out people that you don’t intend to because you hadn’t considered them viable members.

Over the last 4 years, we’ve had many people surprise us. Maybe their experience level seemed lower than average. Maybe their social skills needed a little work. Maybe they were shyer. Maybe they were boisterous. Maybe they were snarky. Maybe they were know-it alls. In time, most of those attributes vanished. They started to be themselves, instead of the person they thought they had to be. And in the best cases, they improved themselves over time. When you have the vantage point of watching somebody progress their personal and professional skills over the course of a few years, you’ll surprised how much people can grow. If you let them.

Coworking as a melting pot allows all of these extremes to normalize on their own. It trusts that when people have to actually deal with other people instead of have managers, mediators, or human resources solve their problems for them – most of the time, things work themselves out.

They’ll select themselves out.

In the early days of Indy Hall, we were excited to be meeting anybody who wanted to be around. Not because we were desperate to fill our office, but because we were genuinely excited to be finding more and more people who were awesome.

Then one day, somebody not so awesome showed up. I knew personal stories about this person, and decided that I didn’t want that person around Indy Hall. I talked it over with Geoff, who was able to look at the situation without my biases.

“If we don’t let in one person because you don’t like them, what kind of precedent does that set for everybody else? We want Indy Hall to be a place where anybody – even people we don’t know yet – can feel welcome, be a part of and contribute to something great.”

My commitment to the core value of accessibility was being challenged.

I had to trust that this person would make the right decision for themselves: either they would change their behavior from what I knew to have happened in the past (a positive outcome), or that they’d leave on their own when they realized they wouldn’t get what they wanted (also a positive outcome).

If they were truly not aligned with our community as I expected, the latter was the most likely result.

Inside of a couple of months, that person simply stopped showing up on their own.

This interaction has happened more than once. On only two occasions in four years have we had to ask somebody to leave.

You need both.

The core value of accessibility relies on both of these dynamics to be in balance. When a coworking space’s philosophy remains committed to this core value, the remarkable outcomes and benefits that make coworking more than a trendy way to share real estate start to take form.

When everything shakes out, you’ll be glad you created a unique environment where you can trust people to surprise you in a positive way.

Want more? Here are my other essays on the core values: Collaboration, Openness, Community, Accessibility, and Sustainability

To the comments!

This is my perspective on accessibility as it pertains to coworking. What’s yours? Leave a comment below.

This post is part 1 of a 5 part series exploring the 5 core values of coworking: Collaboration, Openness, Community, Accessibility, and Sustainability.

As a reminder, the coworking community rallied and bought coworking.com so that we’d have a place that tied the word “coworking” to the core values of coworking. These values originated with CitizenSpace, and have been interpreted by dozens of coworking spaces around the world.

I’m noticing that coworking core values aren’t even on the radar of most of the newest coworking spaces opening around the world, so I’m hoping that by taking some time to riff on each one, they might get some visibility and be considered an important element to keeping the movement alive as more than a trend.

This first post focuses on the value of sustainability. Sustainability is a loaded word, with lots of connotations.

The most obvious are the “green” effects of coworking. Resource sharing is inherently green, as is commute reduction. While I consider these elements relatively superficial, that’s not to downplay their importance. But the reality is that, in a modern society, does “being a responsible eco-citizen” belong in the list of top line core values? Efficiency is a benefit, but not a core value. Striving for efficiency is a good goal, but it’s not a core value.

That is to say: if you’re NOT considering the environment you inhabit, the other effects and values really don’t matter that much.

So if sustainability doesn’t mean “going green”, what does it mean?

Sustainability, in my mind, is about making sure that whatever you’re doing can be done for as long as it needs to be done. In less vague terms: are you building your community, your coworking space, your infrastructure, and your business models in a way that they aren’t dependent on outside resources to persist, to grow, and to flourish.

A Farmer Once Told Me

I had the pleasure of seeing Joel Salatin speak at TEDxMidAtlantic in 2009, and remember being struck by what this farmer had to say. I highly recommend his 15 minute talk.

A community that can feed itself is free. A community that cannot feed itself is not. It's that simple.

July 25, 2011 3:00 pm via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@JoelSalatin

Joel Salatin

In the early days of Indy Hall, Geoff and I were talking about how to take the momentum we’d built and turn it into the coworking space that everybody wanted. One of the important insights Geoff drove home was to make sure that we’d be able to sustain ourselves – our membership should be able to cover our costs as well as provide room for growth – or else it wasn’t worth building the infrastructure to help that community grow.

We looked at for profit and non-profit models, and determined that in order for us to persist, for us to be sustainable, being a for-profit business provided for us most efficiently. We could stay lightweight and agile, but still remain benevolent and community focused. Most importantly, we would grow in a way that was dependent on no one except for the people who benefitted from the resources we could rally.

This is a perfect balance for us, and continues to be as we’ve grown over nearly 4 years.

As long as they need us, we’re sustainable and independent. When they no longer need us as we exist today, we’ve either already morphed into what they need, or the business ends. And that’s okay.

Joel’s tweet above is about food. But if you read past the fact that he’s talking about food, what he’s really talking about is nourishment.

A community that isn’t able to nourish itself lives in dependency of whomever is providing for it, and therefore is not only not free, but not sustainable.

The end of life is dependent on the source more than on the needs of the community.

Conversely, a community that is able to provide for itself doesn’t exclude itself from external sources of nourishment – but it is free, sustainable, and independent.

The people and businesses we support will live as our reflections

I firmly believe that the longer a coworking space is able to do what it does best, the healthier the people and businesses who work from it will be.

• The understanding identity, of who you are (not just who you aren’t).
• The support network for growth.
• The open and honest exchange of information and ideas.
• The humility taught by not having to be the smartest kid in the room.
• The reintroduction of the natural relationship formation into business deal workflow.

These are all things that are necessary to “heal the world”, just as much as the elements of “going green” are.

If we’re healing the planet for people who aren’t living and working sustainably, what’s the point?

Want more? Here are my other essays on the core values: Collaboration, Openness, Community, Accessibility, and Sustainability

To the comments!

This is my perspective on sustainability as it pertains to coworking. What’s yours? Leave a comment below.