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May 9th, 2008
Yesterday saw another impromptu co-working session with Stef, Chris Unitt, Dubber and myself working in Rootys for most of the afternoon. It was good but as always we had power issues with Rootys only having one working electricity socket so we were sharing a power brick between us.
It got me thinking that the first step in working towards getting an actual co-working space would be a collectively owned 4-way extension lead so Stef bashed this out in a couple of minutes:
Nice! So I popped next door to Street Print to get a quote for some stickers, the idea being we can leave power strips around town with the Brum Coworking URL on them, or something. Stickers are cool anyway.
And so today I went to the cheap shop and bought a £2.99 4-way lead which I’m going to leave at the Custard Factory for the next time we need it. Consider this post a ground-breaking ceremony. It all starts here!
Dubber blogged here about the hilarity of Cow Orking
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April 29th, 2008
Following on from the coworking crawl last week and in prep for tonight’s bloggers meetup I’ve been working through some of the ideas and thoughts that have been floating around over the last few months about setting up some kind of informal working space for us digital nomad types in Birmingham. I see there being a number of these in the future from cafes that are quiet out of peak times (Jibbering in Moseley for example) to community centers such as the Moseley Community Development Trust building which recently got a grant to develop a coworking space for creative industry types (of which there are many in Moseley) up to purpose build office spaces with formal membership and services along the lines of eOffice on Smallbrook Queensway. And there are many other similar things in the pipeline – the Custard Factory, for example, are interested in developing something along these lines and there are many smaller office/studio complexes that could move into the coworking sphere such as, off the top of my head, The Arch in Digbeth or The Fireworks in Jewellery Quarter.
So space itself isn’t going to be a problem. Initial enquiries by myself and others indicates we might even be able to get free space for an initial period just to see how it works. The important thing, I think, is what we want from that space, not just in terms of equipment and services (wifi, desks, sofas, etc) but socially and in terms of ethos.
Some ideas might be:
- Somewhere that isn’t home but isn’t a full blown office
- Where they are like-minded people to share ideas / resources
- A place where low-level events could take place
- Some sort of digital advocacy / training centre
- A secure base for those who don’t need a permanent office, or already have one out of town
- A real-world space that adjuncts online communities
- A social club
And so on. What I’m looking to do is gather as many of these together as possible and boil them down into a list that can be presented to a landlord or similar. Like I said, the space is probably there for the taking. We just need to know what we’re going to do with it.
The comment box is yours…
