Business Bricks

Link to “Where the Coffee Shop Meets the Cubicle,” by Kerry Miller in BusinessWeek yesterday. Excerpt: “Over the past few years, co-working facilities—both grassroots, co-op-like versions and for-profit models—have started popping up across the country and the world, from Seattle to Copenhagen. A co-working wiki hosts pages for dozens of other cities with co-working initiatives in progress. And while the concept of shared office space is nothing new to entrepreneurs, an increasing number of them are signing on and finding that the community-building and networking benefits outweigh even the virtues of a shared fax machine. […] In a recent report on the future of small business, the Silicon-Valley based Institute for the Future pegged co-working as a trend to watch over the next decade (see BusinessWeek.com, 1/31/07, “The Face of Entrepreneurship“). After co-working first took off with clusters of free-agent programmers and writers, its flexibility and low cost have also proven a good match for startups unwilling to sign a long-term lease. Because many of these facilities operate on a gym-membership model that doesn’t assign workers to specific desks, co-working is cheaper than most subleasing arrangements. And unlike traditional business incubators, co-working isn’t just for startups with high-growth potential.”

A CoworkingBrighton has been one of my several uncurrent nonprojects since we transplanted down here last year, but we’re at step 5 of Chris Messina’s tiny five step strategy for getting started:
1. join coworking@googlegroups.com yup, link
2. add your location to the wiki link goes to a stub on the wiki where you can add your interest if you’re in Brighton
3. blog about it yup
4. start hunting for others doing the same thing outside the coworking community yup
5. and if you find no one, bootstrap a location like a library or cafe until you build up enough interest to pay for your own space 13 Brunswick Sq., see twywdioyhtmtfohycdia

Other coworking groups in Europe:
CoworkingBirmingham, UK
CoworkingCardiffBridgend, UK
CoworkingLondon, UK
CoworkingEdinburgh, UK
CoworkingSheffield, UK
CoworkingCopenhagen, Denmark
CoworkingMunich, Germany
CoworkingParis, France
CoworkingCologne, Germany
CoworkingBarcelona, Spain
CoworkingBrussels, Belgium
CoworkingMilan, Italy