SXSW, Coworking, And A Video about some Frequently Asked Questions
Filed under: coworking, FAQs, From the Business Side, Independents Hall, Movies
Geoff and I got back at the end of last week from SXSW Interactive, where thousands of geeks from around the world converged to discuss topics of design, technology, business, community, marketing, social media, etc.
Not only did we attend, but we were presenters: I ran a core conversation that was not only well attended, but included representation from around the world and from all different walks of coworking life. Additionally, Geoff was on a panel about “Building Regional Whuffie” and attracting innovation to your city with some other coworking space founders: Susan Evans from Office Nomads in Seattle, Julie Duryea from Souk in Portland, Matthew Wettergreen from Caroline Collective in Houston, and moderation by Tony Bacigalupo from New Work City in Manhattan.
Furthermore, the now annual Coworking meetup at the Hotel San Jose organized by Julie Gomoll from Launchpad Coworking once again fused the global coworking community for an evening of drinks and conversation, hugs and inspirations. It’s one of my favorite evenings of the year, as it seems like the Coworking Google Group descends on Austin Texas and we all get to share meatspace for a few hours.
And finally, but certainly not to be overlooked, was the first time we got to visit Conjunctured, Austin’s first coworking space that opened up shortly after it’s founders spent time discussing their concerns and hesitations with Geoff at last year’s SXSW Interactive. They’ve done a phenomenal job, and it was really great to attend a “Jelly Talk” in their coworking space. It was also great to finally meet Amit Gupta in the flesh. After many near brushes with each other over the last 2 years (and plenty of conversations online and on the phone), we finally got to shake hands.
I’m sure I’m leaving out some coworking highlights (like high fives with the crew from Beehive Baltimore, brilliant chats with our coworking friends in Paris, and being called a “Paragon”), but they aren’t the point of this post anyway.
Last year seemed to be a breakout year for Coworking in regards to SXSW as a focal point. Through the year, Tony B and myself had a number of calls with Hugh Forrest, the main organizer of SXSW Interactive about the conference’s influence on Coworking, and the potential for coworking’s influence on the conference. Hugh remains supportive, though I understand where he’s stretched thin. More on that later.
Geoff and I began to notice that this year, Coworking had certainly matured. The number of spaces has increased. Many are beginning to stabilize, and communities are really beginning to galvanize and do great things for their local communities. Those are the spaces that are at the same or similar levels of evolution to IndyHall, and continuing to exchange and dialogue with those communities excites us.
But as the movement continues to grow, the same basic questions continue to be asked by new groups entering into the fold. This isn’t a bad thing by any stretch, but it’s not sustainable for us to keep answering the same questions over and over (or anyone, for that matter).
We’re in the process of formalizing some of our thoughts and processes, but in the mean time, wanted to share some of our content with the coworking world.
We took an afternoon and sat down at the Hotel Saint Cecelia and propped up my Flip cam, and produced a 50 minute video answering 15+ of the questions we get asked the most about IndyHall and coworking. Despite some noisy conditions (produced by an unexpected landscaping crew), the video turned out well and we’re excited to share it.
We just posted that video live at a new page on the IndyHall website, specially designed for this new venture. Our number one goal here is to allow us to point people to this website (and we encourage others to do the same) when these questions get asked. This will free us up to continue evolving IndyHall, and working with other coworking communities who are evolving past the fundamentals as well.
We’ve licensed the video Creative Commons Attribution Non-commercial Share-alike to encourage people to take this content and reproduce and republish it in the ways that they see valuable, so long as attribution remains. You can even download the original .mov source if you like.
This is the first (and the longest) of the installments that we’ve created and will continue to create. If you have specific topics that you’d like to see us cover, leave a comment here or tweet the question to us (I’m @alexknowshtml on Twitter, Geoff is @geoffd) and we’ll be sure to cover it in a future episode.
Oh, and to tie this all back to SXSW, we’ve got some ideas on how coworking principals can help SXSW continue to grow without consuming itself. Would anybody be interested in hearing an episode covering that topic?
