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photo by Stef

Some notes from talking to to Alex Hillman about the co-working spaces he’s set up in Philadelphia this last year - Independents Hall.

Set up community before leasing space. Learn from them as to what they want and need.

Start with things like getting a bar to provide wifi and space when closed, then when they open at 5pm they have customers ready and waiting.

Don’t tell people to do stuff. Give them tools to do things on their own.

Couple of books to read: Small Pieces Loosely Joined and The Starfish and the Spider: The Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Organizations.

Also check Cathy Sierra’s talk from SXSW. Will look up later.

Social problems are difficult to solve.
Technical problems are easy to solve.
Geeks reverse engineer social problems into technical problems and come up with technical solutions.
[Need to think this one through a lot more. I think I get what he's saying but can't quite articulate it now.]

In short, take what works about online social environments and try to apply them to physical environments. His co-working spaces are like chilling in a forum where things like lurking, going off topic, starting new threads, etc are encouraged.

Plus the usual stuff of creating a sense of emotional ownership of the project where people are annoyed if they can’t help. (This happened!)

What can I do? Well, Created in Birmingham is a technical solution to a social problem. How about taking the systems in place there and applying them to something in the real world that attempts to solve those problems.

I’m suddenly aware that I don’t know exactly what the problems are. They do exist but I’ve never had to explicitly articulate them before. One for later!