Holy moley it’s been an amazing few days!
Friday night: the Austin Coworking Meetup was a smashing success! Easily 100+ people attended over the course of the evening. I met folks from Indy Hall, Office Nomads, Station-C, Austin Jelly, notanmba, La Cantine, Citizen Space, Cooper Bricolage, and a slew of people either doing coworking or interested in coworking. Energy was high. Conversation, wine, and beer flowed freely. In fact, we had such a good time, we decided to schedule another one for this evening. So if you’ve been as inspired as we have this weekend, join us tonight and let’s see what we can come up with!
Another Friday highlight was really getting to talk to the Conjunctured gang, from right here in Austin. You guys rock!
Saturday: BarCamp Austin happened at Idea City (GSD&M). We did an impromptu coworking panel there. Lots of coworkers showed up for that one, too. We had great conversations about values and the future of coworking. One discussion involving Alex Hillman debated the importance of space in coworking. Alex says it’s about the people not the space. I say it’s a balance and that one informs the other and affects the energy of the group. I think it might be a generational thing — I’ve got a few years on Alex. And I also think it is about the space for them, but maybe it’s more seat-of-pants, intuitivefor them, whereas we are doing things in a more intentional manner. The inspiring thing at BarCamp was that all these values we discuss - it’s not just lip service. These guys are living it. It’s for real. We could all feel it, and it was invigorating in that “we can change the world” kind of way.
After BarCamp we had the SXSWi Core Conversation on Transparency in Business. Susan Price from Firecat Studio and I led that. It was more really good conversation, of course, with Alex Hillman and Drew Jones and Todd Sundsted from NotAnMBA taking active roles. We realized what a broad topic transparency is, much more than could be covered in an hour, but the hour was invigorating.
Sunday: Like god, I rested.
Monday: So here we are and here’s what I’m getting ready to do — I’m going to have our architect’s meeting wherever we can find a space to settle down and spread out. This is me putting my money where my mouth is with transparency. Anybody who wants to find Murray and me (look for the blueprints and renderings on the table, or floor if necessary) is welcome to look over our shoulders.
FYI, that’s Spike Gillespie being extra wired at the day stage at SXSWi.
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2 responses so far ↓
1 Todd Sundsted // Mar 14, 2008 at 12:15 pm
Space may not matter to everyone in the same aesthetic way, but space and all of the physical bits that we surround ourselves with matter tremendously in terms of our efficiency, effectiveness, in terms of how we interact with others and the surroundings, etc.
2 Alex Hillman // Mar 14, 2008 at 4:17 pm
Fantastic writeup of the events of the weekend. It was one of the most exciting, enlightening, and inspiring weekends. I loved every minute engaging with the coworking community, and your Austin-based team is doing some brilliant work.
I agree that it’s a balance. It’s not about the people or the space, but how people interact in space. My argument is that not having a space is a technical problem (easy to solve) and not having people is a social problem (harder to solve). It’s order of operations, but bottom line, I completely agree that this is all about balance, and the balance can either be strategically planned or organically discovered. If I had my guess, we’re going to all end up at the same place having taken different roads!
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