Progress on the book…
Last night, on the Not an MBA Google Group, I started a new thread about a few historical sign posts that point the way to what we call “coworking” today.
For many people, the fact that coworking is happening is enough. When you hear people with traditional jobs wishing they were freelancers—not because of the pay or the independence or the lack of a boss—so they could cowork, you know something big is afoot.
I’ve said before that coworking (along with nomadism et al) is going to have a huge impact on work and business in the (near) future. In order for that to happen, coworking has to be more than a fad—in fact, like any successful idea/business/solution, it has to address and solve a real human need.
To find that need, I started to look for things that looked like coworking, in the present and in the past. The thread is a partial brain dump of what I’ve found, starting with La Ruche in Paris, best described in modern terms as a live/work space for artists. It reminded me of the Hat Factory (in style, not necessarily in quality of the tenants who I know are a upstanding bunch).
One note, in the thread I use the phrase “working together-alone” which I picked up from a 2001 article in Inc. magazine on the San Francisco Writers Grotto and 116 W. Houston (now Nutopia) titled “Alone Together”. Five years from now everyone will use “coworking” to describe whatever coworking becomes, but right now I want to focus on what coworking represents in the context of human need, not on the term itself.
One more note, forums are better than blogs for discussion, so I encourage you to join the group and discuss. I’m out of time, but I’ll post more of the material here over the next few days.
See Timeline of Working Together-Alone (AKA Coworking)
- Bandit
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