Tracking the coworking trend

In college, I was a cub reporter and then a columnist for our daily paper. We had a significant circulation for a college paper — 30,000 copies per day. Which meant we had a decent sized staff. Though that experience was a quarter of a century ago, vivid, happy memories of the newsroom come back easily. And lately, as I research and write about coworking, as well as actually cowork several times a week with a friend, those memories pop up more frequently.

Technically, writing for the college paper wasn’t coworking. We were all working for the same employer and the same cause. But here’s how it resembled what is shaping up as the model for the growing trend in coworking: we were in a room without cubicles, busy at our desks, but also willing, able and often eager to toss ideas back and forth. Sometimes we were helping each other with our actual work, sometimes we were offering much needed distractions from anxiety-inducing deadlines. The bottom line, though, was always this: community.

After college I drifted back and forth from working for others to working for myself, often patching together a combination of these two. In the very early days, working with others usually meant waiting on tables and bartending, squeezing in alone time to work on my writing whenever I could. Then the financial scales eventually tipped in favor of me working almost exclusively at home, cranking out essays for magazines and then content for websites.

Somewhere during and after the boom of the 90s, telecommuting became an everyday thing for a lot of folks. Those of us who worked at home cited many of the same benefits: you can work naked, you don’t have some boss figure monitoring you, you can work any hours you please.

But it seems like most humans always come back to the need for some community. Maybe not forty hours a week. Maybe not with the annoying structure and politics of the same office, same coworkers, same job. But still, there’s that need to connect, even if the connection is unspoken and comes in the form of comfort knowing that person across the coffee shop from you — a person you might never even speak to — is also living, breathing, and working alone-but-not-alone.

More and more articles are popping up in the news about this full-circle working development in which those of us who claim to prefer self-employment never stopped wanting some involvement with others. Hence the growing popularity of coworking in the US, Canada, and Europe.

CNNMoney.com recently posted a story about Office Nomads, a coworking space in Seattle. And the Montreal Gazette highlighted Station C, a coworking space founded by two partners tired of working alone.
Interestingly, both places claim that profit is not the goal, at least not for now. The goal is community. Interestingly, both places claim that profit is not the goal, at least not for now, which is one way their model is different from LaunchPad Coworking.
There are other differences, too. While Station C has a kitchenette and Office Nomads offers unlimited coffee, neither offers a café. Also, both are pushing for monthly memberships wherease LaunchPad Coworking’s focus is hourly (and there won’t be any monthly rates).

Reading about these endeavors excites me. The excitement is in part because I accidentally stumbled into being part of this trend at the beginning — much as I was (pardon me for sounding like “Internet Founder” Al Gore) one of the first bloggers, back in 1995 when Prodigy hired me to write about my life online. I love helping make good ideas grow and am glad for this latest opportunity. (And I have to say that, being here in Austin, a city open to new ideas and creativity, has offered many chances to do just this over the years.)

Even more than that, though, is the idea that once LaunchPad Coworking is open, officially offering the coworking concept to Austin, I will have an opportunity to recreate that unforgettable, much loved college experience. I’ll be working around others like me, folks passionate about their work, folks hustling to make things happen because when you work for you, there’s not much room for slacking. Even now, I’m planting the seeds. I find myself, as I discuss coworking with my fellow self-employed friends, not just discussing the concept of shared space, but also discussing the ups and downs of running a business. I get pointers from people I wouldn’t have thought to consult before — event planners, theater producers, realtors, marketing gurus.

Just like the sections of my college paper didn’t have a lot of overlap in subject — the sports section was far different from the features section for which I wrote — on the surface my work doesn’t have much in common with my friends’ work. But then, it does. Because, as at the paper, we share the most common elements: passion, love of our work, and the need to strategize ways to success. And, of course: community.