Thanks to all who were able to make it out to the first meetup about the opening of our second coworking space. It was great to see some new faces along with some current members, and to get to hear more about what folks are looking for when it comes to building our next coworking community.

Hosting meetups such as we did last night is an important step in the early days of any coworking space. Not only is it important for us to provide a space for members of the community to give recommendations and pose requests for how the space will work, but  there is huge value in creating a way for members to actually get involved in the process. As we’ve said before, people support what they help to create. We hope that folks who are interested in this earlier phase will join us to go visit spaces, continue to brainstorm with us as we develop the plans for the space, and get to know other members before we open the doors to the next space.

If you missed the event, never fear – the next one will be soon! And as always, if you have any suggestions, feedback, or recommendations to make, drop us an e-mail at grow AT officenomads DOT com so we can get you in the conversation.

We are pretty excited about this week.  What’s not to be excited about?! Member Lunch on Tuesday is sure to be a hoot.  Then AirBnB is hosting a meet-up here at ON.  We love AirBnb’s mission and are super psyched to meet them.  Yoga, Happy Hour and Sweet Jams round out the week.  Great week, right?!

Busy week here! We’re starting a monthly Business Development Meet-up on Tuesday and then working on developing our own business on Thursday with a discussion about our new space at The Red Door.  The grand finale to the week will be brought to us by Charlie and his sweet jams.

When people ask us what differentiates a coworking space from other possible workspaces, we now have a way to quickly summarize:

Happy new year everyone! We are hitting the ground running in 2011 and are excited for the next steps towards opening another coworking space in Seattle.

We wanted to write with an update on the Neighborhood Campaign we launched in November. After hearing from approximately 120 potential members (whoa!), we can now confidently say that we are now focusing our efforts north of the shipping canal. The majority of our responses were for Ballard, Fremont, and Greenlake. We’re thrilled!

So what’s next? Well, we’d love to meet those of you who are really interested in our next space! We’d like to invite you to join us for a casual coworking meet up on Thursday, January 27th from 5-7pm at The Red Door in Fremont. We will give an update on our progress, and will talk about the future space and how it might work. Please RSVP by either adding yourself to the Facebook event or by e-mailing grow AT officenomads DOT com.

Hope to see you there!

You can see a video of my presentation as well as the slide deck I used here:
http://officenomads.com/2010/11/coworking-europe-2010/

As 2010 comes to a close, it’s a great time to reflect on all the excitement of the past year!  Here – briefly – are some of the highlights at Office Nomads in 2010:

• Welcomed 76 new members throughout the year! Some members have since left, but many are still here as the year comes to a close!
• Rocked out 4 great open houses, bringing in beautiful new art to our space, and raising many a glass to the great times here at ON.
• Introduced Part Time Memberships to our offerings, creating a wider range of membership options for Seattle’s nomadic workforce.
• Got an awesome office dog.
• Ripped down a pesky wall, bringing light and life to the green room.
• Created and continued partnerships with some incredible companies, including Biznik, Dibspace, and Zipcar!
• Tested out a couple of months with Night Owl extended hours. Let us know if you’re interested in having us continue late-nights in 2011!
• Held awesome workshops with and for our awesome members.
• Turned 3!
• Gave talks about coworking at spectacular events in Seattle and Brussels!
• Contributed to the purchase of coworking.com, for the good of the coworking community worldwide.
• Promoted and collaborated with our fellow Seattle coworking cohorts through Coworking Seattle Meetups!
• Decided to grow. Whoa.

We owe our deepest thanks to our incredible members who make up and support our coworking community. You all are simply incredible, and we can’t wait to see what 2011 brings.

Big ups,

Susan, Jacob, Alexandra & the team at Office Nomads

This week we are pretty excited about the holidays.  So much so that we are having a Morning Happy Hour on Thursday.  Yep, it’s a good way to kick off the holidays.  Friday we will be closed and we will reopen on January 3rd.  Also important to note is that there will be no Night Owl on Thursday.

We hope to see you sometime this week!

This week at Office Nomads we have a great workshop on Bike Commuting happening.  Tuesday at 12:30 we’ll be chatting about the laws, how to commute safely, and tips we should all know about.

Hopefully see you soon!

I was honored to be invited to speak at the first Coworking Europe conference in Brussels. The conference was amazing. I love talking about coworking and how great was it to be in a room with 120 other coworking enthusiasts. There were a number of folks from the US but I was the only space owner. I met people from all over including Brussels of course, England, France, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Russia, The Netherlands, lots of people from Germany and as far away as Latvia and the Ukraine. There were folks opening up spaces, established space owners, researchers, government officials, as well as representatives from Cisco, Medusa, and Steelcase.

The event was at The Hub Brussels which I have to say is an impressive coworking space. They have 5 very gracious hosts that work hard to make everything go smoothly for all their guests. The setup they have is a little different then how we do it at Office Nomads. For one, there are no resident desks. This leaves the room pretty flexible and everything is on wheels to make it even more so. We showed up on a Thursday morning and the office was in full swing. The next day, the first day of the conference, they had transformed everything into a large event space. Saturday, after everything was wrapped up, we watched as the hosts put it all back in a period of less then 15 minutes.

I talked fellow nomad Trevor into coming along so we could talk to folks about Nadine, the open source coworking software project we are working on. We also talked quite a bit about the CoworkingDB project and the topic of coworking affiliations and networks came up quite a bit. I’m still processing all the conversations so I’m not sure what to report on at this time.

After Brussels we went on to Amsterdam. We were stuck in our hotel for the first day due to stomach sickness but the second day we made it over to The Hub Amsterdam. From the Coworker.NL site, and from what we were told at The Hub, it seems there is quite a bit of coworking. I was not able to find anything on the coworking wiki and couldn’t get in touch with the folks behind coworker.nl. I would have liked to have more time to visit smaller independent spaces and make more connections in Amsterdam. It’s a great city and I would love to spend more time there.

Next stop was Berlin, where I am now. Alex Lang, one of the bright minds behind Cobot, put us up at his apartment which is quite nice. He’s traveling in Istanbul so we don’t get to hang out with him more. Today we are hanging out in Co.Up, his coworking space and there is a great atmosphere here. Lots of natural light and it didn’t take long before we were engaged in some great conversations with Thilo, Alex’s partner, and Jan, a member and developer for CouchDB. Yesterday I spent the day at Betahaus and had lunch with founders Christoph and Tonia. In the evening I went out to dinner with the team behind Club-Office. Between Co.Up, Betahaus, and Club-Office I’ve seen quite a spectrum of coworking here. If I lived in Berlin I’d have a hard time choosing between Betahaus and Co.Up since they both feel like home. Perhaps I wouldn’t choose.

We have a little more time here in Berlin and then Trevor flies back to Seattle and I fly to London on my own. I have plans to check out The Hubs and The Cube as well as Hub Culture, and Tech Hub which have nothing to do with The Hub. Also meeting with Richard from WorkSnug, an iPhone app that helps folks find a place to work.