What Does Coworking Look Like?

When I tell people I'm a journalist for a magazine with offices in Portland and San Francisco leaving just me in Seattle, the assumption is that I work at home. I then explain Office Nomads and coworking. More and more,  people realize they've heard of us or at least the concept of coworking. Rarely, I think, do they really get what coworking is. If you're involved in coworking at all, you know how badly I want the questioners to understand that coworking is more than shared office space. That it's community, incubation, colloboration, happy hours and zombie plans (more on that later).Patrick from The Movement in Toronto has put together a podcast that is his attempt to explain coworking to the world. Actually, through a podcast he runs called Prototype, he's letting some of the players in the movement explain it themselves. I just listened to the first two episodes and absolutely adored it. The show is a collection of voices from across the globe (literally) explaining the different feelings, set-ups, members, designs, business plans and other features of their coworking spaces. The result is an amazing cornucopia of the coworking possibilities that are out there. As different as each space and person sounds, they also all sound alike. As Patrick says on the Prototype blog:

In speaking with a friend about the podcast, I explained the amazing lesson was that all of these people sound like they’re describing the same place. In his subtle and knowing way, he responded: What I hear is that they are the same people.

Each episode is just a collection of the voices from different spaces explaining their space seemingly without prompting. That tight juxtaposition is what makes the differences and similarities so apparent. Butted up against each other, you hear statements such as:

"It's shared office space.""We have a hot-desking policy...there's no set desks.""It's like a mobile phone tariff across the month.""You can be a tenant here if you can tell me why you're a social innovator."

or

"The space is a great loft.""We built a board room/library/kitchen that people can get some privacy in.""When we moved in, it was a bad looking, 80's sort of of office.""The front door and the back door are both steel doors and they are zombie safe. They're rated up to 50 zombies. We also have a zombie attack plan.""We've got  nice open plan kitchen and just behind that we have got a library area. It's sort of cushions. People sleep in there, meditate in there.

It's all so different, so unique. We are, after all, hearing from Colab, Office Nomads, Citizen Space, Station-C, Workspace, The Hub, and The Center of Social Innovation. And yet, they're all similar in a way because wherever you go, coworking is obviously needed in a variety of different formats. I'm looking forward to learning more about the other spaces around the world, and to using this podcast to help explain the varieties of coworking  when I'm asked about it again in the future.