Pitching in: Coworking inspires generous ripples

A while back, I posted a note to the Google Coworking Group, asking for anecdotes from fellow coworkers about help they received when they were starting out. I wasn’t looking for tips on how to solicit help so much as I was interested in documenting how the coworking movement inspires generosity and cooperation that is sort of analogous multiple rings on the surface of a pond caused by one tiny pebble.

Our core team causes ripples that reach out to our friends, who offer their knowledge. For example, when we were wrestling to come up with a good, fair cancellation policy, and one we could implement with Spacer, our reservations software, I put the problem to my left-brained boyfriend. Fresh ears, fresh thought process. He contemplated for a while and tossed me back some ideas that I then took back to Julie.

Rippling out further, we’ve also turned to our community online, which includes coworkers from around the world. We met a lot of these folks in real time at SXSWi back in March, swapping ideas and inspiring one another. One of the folks we met is Alex Hillman, who helped start up Indy Hall in Philadelphia and who is a tireless advocate for coworking. Alex spends a lot of time zipping around the country checking out other coworking spaces and reporting back to the growing community.

His response to my query was most excellent and he provided several great examples of help IH received when they were first coming out of the gates. Here’s what he had to say:

People pitched in all along the way. One of the early examples I remember from when we were doing Cream Cheese — our version of Jelly — lots of restaurants and bars and cafes hosted us at no charge, letting us take up space and use their wifi. They didn’t have to let us stay but they were happy with what we were doing and that was one of the first touches of generosity from the outside that we felt.

Once we had the space itself, Belkin donated the power distribution, networking, networking cable, and router. For the first six weeks or so we were getting boxes of new toys from them regularly. That was a couple of thousand dollars worth of stuff we didn’t have to buy. And they earned some brand loyalty from a lot of our members. They’ve been very supportive of BarCamp as well.

One of my favorite stories was when we got furniture. The first night we were putting Ikea desks together — I sent out an email saying, ‘Come on over for the next few days, we’re putting furniture together, bring your own drill.’ Sure enough people brought drills — at one point we had half a dozen people at a time putting together desks and chairs. When we ran out of furniture to put together people still kept showing up and seemed disappointed we’d run out. What was great about that was not only just having everyone pitch in but you can see how far that carried forward in the sense of ownership that everyone takes in the office. Almost everyone that works there has chipped in at some point.

Most recently we ran gigabit Ethernet to all of our desks. That was a user-initiated task. Somebody said it would be great to do, it would help us with our internet connection, and offered to pull together resources. A couple of other people agreed to come in on a Saturday and help us run it. We’ve had a great deal of that all along the way. I think it’s a testament to how strong our community is.

One of our early supporters chipped in a good chunk of financial capital to help buy our first digital projector with the agreement that we do something cool with it. We used it for events and movie nights. Then, when we were trying to come up with a way to get some of the noise issues in the office down a little bit — it gets a little noisy sometimes — we came up with the idea to project a Campfire chat room up on the wall. That’s there all the time. That way the projector is being used for something cool and everyone gets to communicate in the chat room and we have a bit of a transcript as well as well having other people contribute to our in office conversation. It was just another act of goodwill translated into to something good.

Photo by Judson Collier