OMG Andie, is the building you are in the old Caterpillar Tractor plant? That takes me back. There is an old story about that location; the owner was about to go bust from rising prices and so on, and local businesses passed the hat and gave the oweber 20K to stay in the community. It's a great story.
I have hammered out a model not dissimilar to that which works well in smaller commmunities (it does not work well in large cities so far). The for us has been to find the coworkers as they are still working at the kitchen table -- and San Leandro has a long history of that also. If you keep your barrier to entry low at entry and make stepping up from one level to another easy and painless, then it does start to work. We also found that making it possible to step back as necessary is also key in this particular approach. Absolutely vital for us have been: 1) to treat all coworkers with equal dignity; every one of them, from the ones who are travelling and have no more connection to the communty thatn a correspondence address or events membership; 2) to keep bringing them in contact with each other by any means necessary; :-) 3) to encourage a culture of looking in the community first for whatever you need. I have found tht the best way to start with this is to do it yourself; 4) to encourage a culture in which we acknowledge that none of us is good at everything, so together we can do it better; 5) to speak, think, communicate, breathe, and live the notion that it is all one seamless solution, from the kitchen table/garage to an international enterprise. Artists can be challenging in terms of community, boundaries are important in my experience it is the nature of an srtist to seek boundaries and kick againstr them very hard. :-) I find that so far the best approach to hotdeskers has been to treat them as guests to our home, as it were, I also have partnerships witih building owners, who "get" the community thing in varying degrees. Ahem. -- Visit this forum on the web at http://discuss.coworking.com --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Coworking" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
