After crossing 713 Ts, dotting 562 Is, and leaving a small tissue sample with the City of Austin, we are finally starting. Yesterday evening, after a frustrating day, I said to Tina “I just want to go to sleep and wake up when the demolition starts.” And damn if Tina didn’t call early this morning, waking me up with “We’re starting, come on down and take the first whack.”

And I did. I took several whacks, as a matter of fact. I got a a good start taking down the marble around a structural support.

Tina and I even get our own hardhats. I’ve never been so happy to look like a dork as I was this morning :)

The demolition will not be televised, but it will be available via our Flickr Photoset. You can also subscribe to the whole LaunchPad Coworking Flickrstream.

We’ve had another great response to the call for shared stories about good will and getting started. Recently we posted some tales from Alex Hillman about how Indy Hall got a good running start with community help and some toys from Belkin. Now Susan Evans of Office Nomads is here to check in with a report all the good things — tangible and otherwise — that came to ON while they were getting off the ground. And she explains how she and her partner Jacob Sayles strive to give back to the community.

Here’s Susan on the topic of sharing:

We’ve gotten a ton of donations and they’ve all been super helpful in creating the foundation of what we have going at Office Nomads. Since we’ve started, people have bestowed upon us:

• Furniture (tables & chairs from a local business who was changing out their furniture)
• Coffee (a local business had a ton leftover after an event, and it has kept our caffeine buzz afloat for the first 6 months, and we still have more!)
• Donuts (oh how we love our local vegan donut shop — Mighty O)
• Chalkboards (from a local language school that was switching out to whiteboards)
• Plants (from a few friends who had some for us to adopt)
• Beer! (we love Sierra Nevada!)
• Catering services (also for our 6-month open house)

When we moved into our space, there were a few leftover desks in here from the last tenant. In the end all of this free furniture was unusable for us (it was all way too big and bulky for our space) so we were trying to figure out what to do with it. Insert Craigslist into the picture. Within a day, a lovely couple from a town nearby came to pick up some free desks from US to use in their tattoo shop. They could not have been more excited. We got to watch someone have the same reaction we did when we got the free furniture — so excited to have things that could work in our space and so thankful that someone was willing and ready to let us just take it all. A few days later we got a whole bunch of postcards and a thank you note from our new tattoo-designing friends who reported being thrilled with their things. The whole process made us all warm & fuzzy.

We’ve had some insanely fun and productive work parties here at ON, whether it be building conference tables, front desks, or painting walls in our space. The space reflects all of that hard work and fun for sure and it is palpable when people come in to check us out — the vibe is fun, casual, and (well, I’m a bit biased…) beautiful. We’ve had about 3-4 major work parties in the space to get everything looking settled and nice, and it is amazing to have the space finally in a place where there aren’t a half-dozen half-finished projects laying around. We feel all grown up now, and it’s thanks to all of the great work of our talented friends and colleagues!

There has also been a ton of bartering for us to do since we started up the space, including lots of wonderful resources for us. We barter with people who have been able to provide us office management help, blogging and marketing assistance, web design, postcard flyers, advertising on a local business networking site, networking assistance, interior design help and more. It’s been pretty amazing to watch people come in, love the space, and see what they can offer us in exchange that is not money. We feel lucky every day to continue to foster the growth of our business this way.

In addition, Jacob and I do a lot of reaching out to local organizations to bring them in here in exchange for growing our network. We both volunteer heavily with a few organizations, including Sustainable Capitol Hill, BarCamp Seattle, and a few other groups who use our space regularly (Passages Northwest is one of them — a local experiential education nonprofit for girls I volunteered with for years). I feel very much that we are able to give as much as we receive in our space, which is wonderful. In growing our community we have made some truly excellent connections that make our business network stronger and makes us feel like a strong part of our neighborhood.

Wordle is a neat, lightweight web application that lets you make beautiful tag clouds out of any text. I entered the text of LaunchPad Coworking’s Executive Summary directly from the business plan, did a bit of simple tweaking, and got this:

Here in the US, we don’t hear much good news coming out of the Middle East. I was thrilled this morning when I saw that the Coworking Wiki had been edited — Coworking Beirut had been changed from “Launching” to “OPEN!”

Rootspace, a community space for innovation and sustainable development, has opened in Beirut, Lebanon. We couldn’t be happier for you!

And thank you for helping us all feel like we’re part of something that really is changing the world :)

I first met Diana Prechter seventeen years ago when I was a waiter and manager at the Magnolia Café south, which she and her husband Kent Cole own (along with the other Magnolia Café on Lake Austin Boulevard). Diana and Kent know more than a few things about creating interesting spaces that are very Austin-centric. Diana also owned Prima Dora, a gift store. And now, moving from bricks and mortar, she and Ruth Framel have put their web development skills together to create TodayInAustin.com, which aggregates all the good things going on in Austin on any given day. I recently caught up with her via email to get her take on building community in Austin.

Spike Gillespie: What’s the purpose of TodayInAustin?
Diana Prechter: We want to be an entertainment web site that is simple to use and represents the broadest range of interesting events. Our web site reflects who we are: a couple of Boomers who have more free time, disposable income, and who want to know what our options are for entertainment without too much internet socializing or advertising getting in the way.

Spike: In a recent interview, you said it took about a year to get up and running. How do you get the word out?
Diana: I don’t think you can ever underestimate the power of word of mouth advertising. Little by little, the word is leaking out about our site. We’re getting close to 300 subscribers who want to get some thread of news from us daily. We’re thrilled and we anticipate more growth.

Spike: Do you see TIA as a community building tool?
Diana: Whereas other entertainment web sites are good at promoting art or music events, we are the only one I know of that’s inviting businesses to enter the “entertainment” calendar. We include any organization that has a bricks-and-mortar location and fun events for the public. That means that we need the participation of business and arts organizations to support what we are doing. The more they participate and cross-promote each other (and us) the better for all of them.

Spike: You’ve had a lot of business success in Austin, not just financial success, but also success in creating distinct, memorable locations. Did you and Kent accomplish this more in a learn-as-you-go fashion or did you have really specific goals and strategies?
Diana: Let me just say that the Magnolia Cafes only reflect who Kent, I and our employees are. We’re not very slick. We’ve never hired a fancy consultant, never even let a professional decorator give us (much needed!) advice. The permanent painting on the wall at the South location was done by an employee, the hanging dinosaurs by a customer, and the cooks in the kitchen are much better cooks than Kent and I. I would say that Kent has been an excellent leader and has a great sense for managing resources; but equally important is the idea of “strength from below” for our business. We’re there to clarify the vision for the Magnolia Cafes and provide our employees the resources to best serve the needs of our customers. We are so very grateful for the unique Magnolia Café community of employees and customers.

That sense of gratitude and community working together is the foundation for TodayinAustin as well. Ruth and I work hard, for no pay, learn-as-you-go, but ready to be in a place of giving something back to a community that’s been very generous and loving to us. And we are daily learning from the community and from “the ether” and trying to integrate what we learn into TIA.

Spike: When people visit TIA do you think they feel more overwhelmed by the possibilities or relieved there’s a way to sort them out?
Diana: Simply put, our goal is for people to feel relieved! It’s got to be simple for me to enjoy this information. I would never go to 2 or 3 web sites to find out what’s going on today, and Austin has over 100 of them. We are trying to sort the information in a simple way and we are evolving in response to the community. TIA offers an elegant solution. TIA does the reading and filtering from over 100 web site feeds. On a single day, there may be only 5 events or more than 25, but you can see them all in a few seconds in a Reader. Click on them to go to the web site that published the information.

Offering a mobile solution is also part of keeping it simple. People can be on the go, out in the world, and ask “what’s fun to do now?”  Our events look great in mobile devices like the iPhone and Blackberry.

Spike: Some people view the web and the wired life as isolating, others view it as a real community builder. At LaunchPad Coworking we look at it both ways — we’re building a space to help folks who do a lot of work virtually to have a physical space in which to commune. You’ve been online a long time — what’s your take on the online life and web as a tool/community fosterer?
Diana: Coworking sounds like it will be a great idea for some people. I hear about people who work at home and they (1) eat too much, (2) are too distracted, or (3) can’t stop working. Well, I sort of fall into that last category. Personally, I like being alone, and can concentrate for hours without hardly breathing. I need a support group for exercise!  Also, I’m beginning to feel repetitive stress injury at my desk and keyboard. Could I rent a space at the coworking office already equipped with some ergonomically correct desk/char/keyboard? Maybe I’m a candidate for a coworking space. Probably if I could read an online profile of the other co-workers who’ll be sharing the space, to understand what they’re hoping to gain, that would help me figure out if there’s a buddy for me in the group, overlapping my personal strengths and weaknesses.

Murray calls it the louver. Tina calls it the sombrero. I call it the vault. What is it? It’s the ceiling in the LaunchPad cafe — the beautiful brainchild of Murray Legge, inspired by Shigeru Ban — built to shield our view of the drab cubicles upstairs, but let in the natural light from the skylights.

Below are a couple of screenshots captured from a flythrough of the Google Sketchup file containing renderings of the architecture at LaunchPad Coworking. Granted, I’m biased, but I find these images quite beautiful.

Drew Jones (right) is, along with Todd Sunsted (left), cofounder of Aquifer Design LLC. He and Todd also publish NotAnMBA. Among other projects, Drew is working on a book about coworking, and he and Julie have been working together to make InnovationCamp and Innovation Labs a reality in Austin. I caught up with Drew recently to find out what he does, how he does it, and what’s up with all this innovation stuff.

Spike Gillespie: Tell me a little about NotAnMBA.com — how and why did it start? What is its purpose?
Drew Jones: About two years ago Todd and I began collaborating on building an educational application that could cut through the mounds of crap that constitute the world of business education. That was called cafeen — an application that Todd built and still sits on the shelf. NotanMBA is a prose version of our rant against the soulless, stultifying world of business education (where I come from).

Spike: Let’s talk about Innovation Labs and Innovation Camps. First, what is an Innovation Lab? How does it work? Can you give me a hypothetical scenario?
Drew: First, I’ve just discovered that InnovationLabs is actually a company in Walnut Creek, CA, so using that name might get a bit dodgy. It (as well as InnovationCamp) is inspired by creativity mashups that I’ve noted over the past several years. Particularly, I really like IDEO’s space called the GYM, which is an innovation center where they bring in small corporate groups and take them on a creative journey. They also send groups out shopping for theirs and competitors’ products to collect ‘artifacts’ from the field. The idea is to get out of familiar spaces and relationships, and take on new roles in other people’s shoes. It is an empathy-building process akin to what anthropologists experience in the field.

InnovationCamp and Innovation Labs are purely experimental, but in the same spirit as the type of experience that IDEO tries to create for its participants. The Camp concept is lifted straight from BarCamp — an unconference with very few rules, where everyone is encouraged to be a participant, not just listener. Innovation Labs is similar in that we look to create cross-pollination mashups, but for one particular company.

This is what Aquifer Design intends to do as a followup to the camp: We will meet with a few senior people at company X about a particular problem domain they have — a question about extending or canceling a product line, a query around consumer insight research to probe for a new service offering, a need to reposition an existing brand through a fresh corporate identity treatment, an HR problem where employees are so risk averse that no one is willing to take chances, etc. We will then invite a few young designers (many of whom currently live and roam in coworking spaces), who tend to approach and solve problems in entirely new (i.e Millennial) ways. We see the ultra pragmatic, tech-tool laden young designers as a go-to source of creative outsourcing for lumbering companies who currently can’t get out of their own way. We call this process ‘innovation outsourcing.’ We hope that InnovationCamp is the first of many efforts at this.

Spike: You and Julie are putting on an Innovative Camp in June. What do you hope to accomplish?
Drew: Austin is the perfect community, and GSD&M Idea City is an awesome space for Innovation Camp. Julie and I share a GenX/Boomer fascination with the creative energy that is out there among designers young and old. While we don’t know for sure what will happen, we hope that the interest, conversations, and projects that are sparked there will continue. Our hope is that, going forward, Innovation Labs can extend this energy at Launchpad Coworking. If we can splice this first one together just right, Julie and I are hoping that LPC will be Austin’s GYM. We want it to be the place where creativity and talent meet up and where tangible things are envisioned and created.

Spike: Is there a “best mix” when bringing types of people together to solve problems?
Drew: I’m not sure if there is a best mix, and we are still trying to figure out whom to call in. Each community has its own cultural/economic signature, so we should go with that. In terms of Austin, obviously the tech community will hopefully be well-represented. Also, I hope for the sustainable architecture community to turn up, those interested in public transportation would be great, and those interested in innovative approaches to education would be really helpful. Also, I would love to have the “low-tech” (i.e. real) artists — installation artists like you see at Burning Man and Flipside, as well as film and video folks. Bring them all on!

Spike: Is this a free system where people simply join in to help others and gain what knowledge they can? Or are some attendees paid?
Drew: InnovationCamp is free and totally open. It is a Woodstock for collaboration and innovation. Innovation Labs will be part of Launchpad Coworking’s and Aquifer’s business, and we will bill for those. Ideation and strategy creation is (sometimes) a rather high-level thing, and companies already spend significantly there. We envision a new model where we play a leading role in the discovery phase of successful innovation (Discover, Define, Develop).

Spike: Do you, personally, have a favorite process for problem solving?
Drew: Having spent many years in academics, my routines to date are very solo and very selfish. This is partly why I am drawn to do work that is more collaborative than in my past. Right now, I am really into covering all the walls of my office in poster size post-it notes, so that I visually write out what I’m thinking. This gives Todd and me a common visual to work from. Also, we use Google Docs extensively for just about everything we do. It is the ultimate platform for collaboration when not in the same place. I’m almost done with using Microsoft stuff (including Word) altogether.

Spike: I’m a freelance writer. What’s an example of a problem I might present to a group, and who might be included in that group? What might I expect to gain from the experience?
Drew: We have encountered freelance writers in most of the coworking spaces/communities we have visited in our research. So it is a central trope in the scene. As for what can be gained there, I think a process where people actually shared pieces, read each other’s pieces, and tried to collaborate on writing about a specific topic would be illuminating. Really hard, but productive. I find collaborative writing really tough, as I’ve written academic things by myself for years. But when Todd throws in a really rich section or chapter, I have a deep sense that the project is definitely better than if I did it all by myself. Getting this kind of boost from others is empowering. It is a process of letting go, but the return on that is a strange but great feeling.

From a different angle, I would think that in a session where writers gather there might exist some synergies in terms of interests, editorial, etc, which might spark ideas for a shared publication or blog. Many of these exist already, obviously, but so much of it is crap. There will always be room for good writing, especially good writing in one place. Harper’s had to start somewhere!

photo by Amit Gupta

Yes. Yes we do.

The City of Austin has generously decided to let us build LaunchPad Coworking. There’s an official permit that our general contractor has to pick up to post onsite, but some of the info is online. Here’s the meaty bits of our shiny new building permit.

Can you say All Systems Go?

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

Our friends over at NotAnMBA have posted an article that brings up some Big Questions that haven’t really been discussed publicly — at least not directly.

From The Business of Coworking:

If a space is for profit and sees itself as providing a place for independents and remote corporates to work, is this coworking? While I would answer yes!, there are plenty of voices out there that would suggest that this is not coworking but is rather just ‘office space’ rental.

LaunchPad Coworking is unabashedly for profit. We’re building a high-end space, no doubt about it. There’s no way we could sustain it charging people a few hundred bucks a month, which is why we’re renting space out in smaller increments (hourly for individual spaces, hourly/daily/multi-day for meeting rooms).

So let’s look at 2 ends of the alternative workspace spectrum.

At one end are places modeled after Citizen Space in SF and Indy Hall in Philadelphia. These locations are run by champions of the coworking movement. They are very cooperative in their setup. Their aim is not to make a profit, but to make enough to keep things going, and to be a catalyst for the careers of independent workers. They put community and collaboration and accountability and transparency high on their list of criteria for success. Conjunctured Coworking will be using a similar model here in Austin.

At the other end of the spectrum are companies that are basically executive suites. Regus falls into this category nicely, so I’m going to use them as my prime example, but there are many others,.

To me, executive suites are all about the façade. You get a mailing address, share a receptionist, have an office in a fancy shiny (and usually soulless) space, and you can bring clients in and pretend you have a company this is more than “just” you.

Maybe that was useful 20 years ago. I know back in the day when Go Media, a business I started on a shoestring, was me in my garage, I had to work extra hard to convince clients I was capable and reliable. My setup wasn’t unheard of, but it was pretty rare (we’re talking late 80s here) and corporate folks frowned upon it. Because I lacked a slick office it was hard for them to take me seriously despite the fact I was producing great work. (Or something like that.) I never did go the executive suite route, but I knew many who did in large part to impress such clients.

That’s no longer necessary. Most of the professionals out there these days know that companies like Microsoft and Dell and HP and, later, the majority of successful internet companies started with a geek in a garage..

I’ve heard more than one person say “coworking is about the people, not the place”. I think it’s about both. And I suspect the people who have adopted that mantra actually do understand that you also need to have a comfortable place to work. A great team will quickly lose steam in a dark, dreary setting. But they’re very right that if you don’t have a bunch of people ready to get on board with your concept, and eager to see you succeed, merely having a groovy space won’t bring success.

LaunchPad Coworking has a hell of a lot more in common with Citizen Space and Indy Hall than with our local executive suites. I, and everyone working to make LPC a reality, have way more in common with Tara Hunt, Alex Hillman, and the great guys of Conjunctured than we do with Regus.

We are doing this because we want the opportunities for community and collaboration. And we’re building the kind of place where we want to work.

Some of this may well be an age thing. Much to my astonishment, many of the folks starting coworking spaces (you know who you are!) are *cough* young enough to be my kids. The LaunchPad Coworking core team is mostly folks in our mid- to late 40s (sorry, Marie, but as the one person in your 30s, you get stuck being a parenthetical :)

But really, this is a lot more about finding some “right” definition of coworking, isn’t it? A broader definition makes room for coworking to be about different ways to work. Geography isn’t irrelevant, but its much less relevant than ever. Virtual teams are commonplace. Public wifi and broadband cards allow us to be online always, everywhere.

Not everyone is cut out to work independently. Some people need the office, the cube, the structure, the stability. Nothing wrong with that. But those of us who have the discipline and the temperament to work remotely need some options. Sometimes home is right. Other times a coffee shop might work just fine. And for some people, a low monthly fee for a coworking spot is perfect. But for many folks, on-demand works best. That’s the niche we’re filling — the spirit of monthly coworking spaces without a monthly commitment. Plus, for customers with a smaller budget and those who are content to work in a more bustling atmosphere, we have free wifi in our café.

That we’re building a for profit business doesn’t leave me feeling inauthentic or untrue to the spirit of coworking as it currently exists. Our way isn’t competing with other ways, it’s just adding to the possibilities. It’s all coworking.