Every year The Stranger does what they call “one nice thing” when they hold an auction called Strangercrombie. During the month of December, they auction off all sorts of items from various retailers and service providers around Seattle and donate all the money raised to a local charitable organization. They also auction off various items in one issue of the paper. You can buy Savage Love, the cover, or a music review… that kind of thing.

Jacob and Susan, in their ever-present good-heartedness, bought Last Days this year, (which I think is the best part of The Stranger) and this is our week!

Today, Last Days made our inaugural visit to the Office Nomads office, where we were greeted by co-owners Jacob Sayles and Susan Evans, affable and attractive citizens with a shared passion for “individuality without isolation.” “The digital revolution gave people an incredible amount of independence in being able to get work done from home, or anywhere,” says Jacob. “But that independence can be isolating, and you see people starving for community. That’s what we offer here—full office amenities in a shared, communal setting.” “It’s about the work-life balance,” adds Susan. “Anyone who’s worked from home can tell you how blurry the boundaries can get. A coworking space can help you compartmentalize your life. Your home can be home again—someplace you go when you’re done working and ready to relax.” As someone who routinely works cross-legged on a bed until our lower extremities scream from the restricted blood flow, Last Days understands.

The rest of David Schmader’s coverage is great too. You should read the whole thing.

Thanks to The Stranger for the opportunity and for doing a good thing. (This year Strangercrombie brought in $60,000 for the good folks at Fare Start.)Thanks also to David for doing such a kick-ass job on the column this week (and always). We really appreciate you coming in, checking out the space and getting to know us and the people that work here. We hope you’ll come back.

Thank God for Mother Jones. The wise, old magazine (and now of course Web site) published a good-sized piece on coworking this week.

Personally, I find it to be one of the best I’ve read on the subject. First, it is well written and an entertaining read. But what really makes this look at the coworking movement compelling is that Kiera Butler, the author, takes a closer look than most at the idea that independent workers crave community and seeks to understand that desire rather than just accepting it.

As shocking as it may sound, we may actually need the office, despite its reputation as a soul-sucking pit of conformity and monotony. In a recent analysis of 40 years of research, Stephen Humphrey, a professor of management at Florida State University’s business school, found a strong correlation between the level of social interaction at work and job satisfaction and productivity. He also found that this correlation has strengthened over time—that now more than ever, the office has become a refuge of sorts. “It used to be that everyone could hang out around the water cooler—now we telecommute or spend two hours in our cars on the way to work,” he says. “We suddenly start to realize, we miss socializing—and we need it.”

Even better, I’m pretty sure Butler must have used the synergistic benefits of coworking at Citizen Space in San Francisco to fine tune her angle.

I wanted my share of spontaneous collaboration, too, so I announced that I had to brainstorm story ideas. I braced for a roomful of annoyed glares, but my fellow coworkers stopped what they were doing and began playfully tossing suggestions my way—as if it were a game, not work. It was very unofficelike, in a good way.

In the end, she concludes, simply: “Sometimes the least important thing about going to work is, well, work.”

Thanks for the picture go to factoryjoe at Flickr.

Last week was a week of many events at Office Nomads.

On Monday we had two things happening in the space after normal working hours (whatever those are).

On the very unofficial side of things, Chris, Tim, Eric, and Jacob all got together to play board games and drink. I was going to go too, but came down with a really annoying cold (that has yet to pass completely). Apparently the boys had a really good time (except for an unfortunate run in with Mille Bornes which they all hate) because they were still talking about it two days later when I got back to the office.

According to a new note on our blackboard, Board Game Night is bow every first Monday of the month.

Also on Monday night, Office Nomads played host to Sustainable Capitol Hill’s monthly general meeting. Unfortunately they don’t yet have a web site so I can’t link to them. Susan is involved however and gave me a run down of the organization to share with you all. Basically, they’re working to make Capitol Hill the kind of clean, green and community-oriented neighborhood we know it can be. Oh heck, let me just quote the draft mission statement she sent:

Sustainable Capitol Hill is a network of neighbors, businesses and community groups dedicated to making Capitol Hill a sustainable community. We are working to create a vital neighborhood — one with strong connections between people, place, and the local ecosystem. Through education, organizing, and action we can make our neighborhood a model for a sustainable future.

According to Matt at 8 Block Walk, Sustainable Capitol Hill is an email list (sustcaphill@gmail.com) and a lot of meetings. There are monthly meetings, and committee meetings. I know they’ve put on a few events in their time, including the rad-sounding Tank Tops to Totes that I wrote about on Seattlest a few weeks ago. There’s a lot more stuff they want to do from what I hear, so if you’re interested, drop a line and see what you can do.

Wednesday, Susan and Jacob hosted the first-ever Office Nomads Wednesday Lunch which promises to become a weekly event according to ye olde blackboard.

Basically, everyone who working in the office sits down in one of the conference rooms and eats together. Last week we were going to talk about the space and what we all want from it. But it really was just an opportunity to take advantage of our intentional community and eat lunch with people, not computers. Almost all of us were there and really, it was just a bunch of people eating lunch together. Mostly a lot of joking and really a lot of fun. Feel free to drop in and have lunch with us at noon on Wednesdays.

Thursday night at Office Nomads, Susan hosted a woman-only clothing swap. I’ve heard about these kinds of events before and lemme tell ya, I’d love to go if only they’d have me cause I love free clothes. No dice though so it’s back to Goodwill for me (I found some awesome t-shirts this weekend). Anyway, Susan says the women all had a great time and she is now thinking of hosting a more public clothing swap in the near future. Stay tuned.

Coming weeks hold the promise of more events in the space including the monthly Sustainable Capitol Hill meeting which all are invited to attend, possibly an art show and who knows what else. Of course, I’ll let you know when I know, but you can also check out our Events Calendar if you want to be on the cutting edge.

Not a super week for links this week, but that’s because I was working on lots of other things, so didn’t have time to spend surfing the Web. If you’ve got something cool we should check out and share, leave it in the comments.

• # 7 on this list is my favorite. But there’s so much more to this list that is fascinating. Predictions 1, 2 and 3 are spot on. One of my non-Office-Nomads gigs is writing for a very behind-the-times publishing company that I’ve been trying for four years now to stop from sending their weekly flagship publication as a PDF… but they’re all old and stuck in their ways. Their time will come.
• I have to admit, I am a bit surprised that for the second week in a row, the Smal Biz Resource blog is on my links of the week, but it’s actually an interesting read. This week, it’s results of a study about the effects of telecommuting on those stuck in the office. Not surprisingly, those left behind don’t like it.
• Laura, a friend of Susan’s (who, incidentally introduced Jacob and Susan) posted an awesome picture taken in the space this week. I had to share.

Welcome to Office Nomads’ first Links of the Week post. We’ll plan on putting these up on Fridays. They’ll include a collection of links from around the Web (where else would they come from?) that we found interesting but didn’t write a full post about or other items we feel you should notice.

• From Mbites comes a post on coworking flash-mob style. We love the concept because it brings folks to work together in a communal setting but gives it a catch-as-catch-can quality that appeals to our wild side. Anyone who wants to try and flash-mob a work day here at ON is more than welcome!
• That CNNMoney article continues to bring us some wonderful attention. This time from the Small Biz Resources Blog where Gayle Kesten notes that while freelancers are happy to see the kids back in school after the holidays because of the silence it brings to home offices, that silence quickly becomes deafening. Coworking to the rescue!
• Jacob decided that along with starting the coolest coworking space in Seattle, he’d try and earn some life points for doing it too. Go vote for him at RealityAllStarz.com. Let us know in the comments if you’ve got a project you want points for too.
• Blog pimpin’. It’s gotta be done or no one is ever going to know about the joy of Office Nomads’ blog. So we added the blog to Technorati. You should go there and give us a little boost. We’ll throw a vote right back at ya if you ask us to.
• Finally this week, we found a great list of useful web apps over on Lifehacker we decided to share. Hopefully something on this list will make your days go a bit more smoothly.

That’s it for this week. Hope you had a great and productive week. Enjoy the weekend!

Photo is courtesy Laenulfean at Flickr. Thanks!

I came across a wide-ranging article about the coworking phenomenon on Corofolot’s Creative Seeds site today.The piece caught my interest because it addresses problems beyond the lack of office tools and distractions in coffee ships and that we independents face when making choices about where to work.

A temporary on-site cubicle, a cobbled-together home office, and a jovial but ultimately isolating coffee shop are the three most common options, and all of them lack the most important quality of the ideal creative workspace: other creative workers with whom to interact.

By the end of the article the author, who is obviously a proponent of group-work spaces, sees coworking spaces like Office Nomads and other as a one more cog in this new-style economy we’re all building and imagines coworking’s place in the evolutionary scale of work places. He calls it “a step on a continuum” and mentions groups who have formed coworking spaces organically such as Independents Hall in Philly and TENPOD in PDX.It’s amazing to me, now that I’m paying attention to it, how much we all think about where we work and how that space really affects the quality of our work (not to mention our enjoyment in doing it).

When it rains, it pours. Coworking is all over the news right now. In addition to the awesome article about us on CNNMoney.com, the venerable New York Times took notice this week of the issues being encountered by independent workers who tend to work out of home offices.I have to say, as a freelance writer/professional blogger myself, with this paragraph the article’s writer summed up the problems Office Nomads is there to help independents solve:

Ms. Young Wiese is one of many of the millions of Americans now working outside traditional workplaces who have found themselves surprised by how difficult home-office life can be. It requires strict self-discipline and an ability to tune out spouses, children and pets. For the more sociable or emotionally needy, it can feel like house arrest, especially if the phone hasn’t rung in a while.

It simply doesn’t get any more true than that. When I started freelancing last year, I thought working at home would be the bees knees. No office to go to at an appointed time, no one telling me what to write or when to write it, no dress code. I realized right quick though that working at home isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. For me, it happened when I realized that it was no longer quite as joyful to put on my sweat pants at the end of the day if I’d been in another pair all day long.I’m convinced that it’s reasons like that why “the use of communal work spaces has been on the rise among [Freelance Union] members for about three years, ‘and in the last year it’s started accelerating.’”Check out the Times article. I’m sure that out of the many different types of home-office users and the issues they face you’ll find someone tackling an obstacle familiar to you. I found David Behl.

He misses the studio he used to share with two other photographers. “You don’t see anybody,” he said. “You don’t go out for lunch. It’s easier to get depressed because there’s no one to complain to.”

Office Nomads hit the big time with a great story about us on CNNMoney.com that also discusses the coworking movement in general.

But of course, we’re especially happy that a lot of the piece is about us. Thanks especially to Nomad #1 Chris Haddad who summed up perfectly our raison d’etre for writer Matthew Amster-Burton:

“I’ve been self-employed for four years now,” Haddad said. “It’s a lot of fun, I like doing it, but the walls close in really fast. There were several times where I realized I hadn’t put on pants or left the house in 30 hours.”

“When I was first here, it was like, wow! It’s all the good things about having an office, which are coworkers, a separate place to go, more space,” Haddad said. “But there’s nobody standing over your shoulder making sure you’re not checking personal e-mail.”

The piece goes on from there with quotes from Nomad/Office Manager Erik Von Blon and a story from Susan about a day when we all went off on a late-afternoon tangent about Britney Spears (don’t ask).

Of course, Susan gave some more serious reasons for working at Office Nomads, including the article’s closing quote

When I ask Evans how to connect to the network printer, she hands me a USB drive and quips, “You can’t bring a printer to a coffeehouse.”

What a great way to start out 2008!

Office Nomads hit the big time with a great story about us on CNNMoney.com that also discusses the coworking movement in general.

But of course, we’re especially happy that a lot of the piece is about us. Thanks especially to Nomad #1 Chris Haddad who summed up perfectly our raison d’etre for writer Matthew Amster-Burton:

“I’ve been self-employed for four years now,” Haddad said. “It’s a lot of fun, I like doing it, but the walls close in really fast. There were several times where I realized I hadn’t put on pants or left the house in 30 hours.”

“When I was first here, it was like, wow! It’s all the good things about having an office, which are coworkers, a separate place to go, more space,” Haddad said. “But there’s nobody standing over your shoulder making sure you’re not checking personal e-mail.”

The piece goes on from there with quotes from Nomad/Office Manager Erik Von Blon and a story from Susan about a day when we all went off on a late-afternoon tangent about Britney Spears (don’t ask).

Of course, Susan gave some more serious reasons for working at Office Nomads, including the article’s closing quote

When I ask Evans how to connect to the network printer, she hands me a USB drive and quips, “You can’t bring a printer to a coffeehouse.”

What a great way to start out 2008!