Kategoriearchiv: Praxisberichte, Beispiele, Best-Practice

Many people think that “Free Coworking” is just an idea. No!!! There are already places that offer “Free Coworking”!!! One of them is Gangplank in Chandler (Arizona). One very important contributor to finance “Gangplank” is the council of Chandler: “Gangplank is a meeting place available to anyone interested in working in an environment that fosters creativity and collaboration. It offers free conference rooms and a large area where individuals can participate in mentoring sessions and listen to regularly scheduled brown bag lunch speakers. The City’s partnership with Gangplank entails an exchange of subsidized office space for new technological developments that benefit the community. It is a forward thinking partnership meant to encourage other innovative developments in our downtown.”  

In my article on the development of a common coworking platform, I introduced the idea of “decision by consensus” (Systemisches Konsensieren). In his comment to the article Morten Årstad was so kind to mention the English Wikipedia Article on “Consensus decision-making“ I had not been aware of. On studying the Wikipedia article, I noticed that the work of the three Germans (Visotschnig, Schrotta & Paulus) is not known by Non-German speakers. I therefore decided to set up piratepad to develop the subject further. I believe that it is quite likely that there are also other authors and practitioners in other languages whose work is not known beyond their mother tongue. I think we should collect this work and develop it for “Free Coworking”. This work is extremely valuable not only for coworking but in all areas of group decision-making like conflict resolution, politics etc. I therefore like to invite everyone to develop this topic further in the public piratepad I set up. Please spread the word for this important subject!!!  

To spark a few emotions at the beginning, I like to look at the currently largest social network “Facebook”. By closer examination you find out, that it is already run to a large extent by the users. The obvious one: Content. I guess no discussion on that one.  Another example: Support. According to a german site, it is not possible for Facebook to provide a contact form or direct email support. The explanation:  With 750 million free users, the company could not finance such a service. Well, what is the solution? People have to collaborate and support each other :-)) I leave it at that as an introduction because this article is not really about Facebook, it is about “Free Coworking” and the way Coworkers can connect on a common platform!  

Sometimes everything looks great when you look at a building. A wonderful concept. Excellent ideas. An extremely unusual construction, but for some reason one gets the impression that something did not quite connect in the end. Where is the community? How do people use the building in practice? As I have no inside information, I can only judge by what I found in the internet. Is that first impression right or not? Has anyone been to this creative environment or knows something about it? Please share your experiences on this or similar projects by commenting below or sending us an email to redaktion@coworking-news.de .  

In his TEDx talk in November 2009 Michel Bauwens made some very interesting observations about peer to peer production. He points to the fact that when people create something in common, they create their own infrastructure.  On the other hand when people link to share their expression they tend to use a corporate infrastructure like Facebook or Flickr. I see coworking at the moment as a combination of these two.