Redefining Coworking

After reading The Business of Coworking at NotAnMBA I was inspired to write this post.

The current definition of coworking needs revision. Coworking is not a space, a community, a set of values, a business model, or any combination of those things. Those topics are about coworking, but they do not define coworking.

If we look at the definition of coworking on the Coworking Wiki, we read that “coworking is a cafe-like community/collaboration space for developers, writers and independents.” This defines coworking as a noun and as a type of community space. Wikipedia does a bit better at defining coworking, but still place a lot of emphases on “the space.”

From my experience with Jelly, coworking is not a space or a noun. It is a verb. Coworking is something you are doing. For example, I’d use it in a sentence like this: “Today I am coworking at Jelly.” Or, “I might go to Citizen Space to cowork.” From this usage I’d like to propose the following definition.

Coworking is two or more individuals working independently or collaboratively who are socially interacting while they work.

As a verb you can cowork with people, you can be coworking, or you may have coworked. You may even go to a designated coworking space.

Also note, that this definition does not mention anything about a space or even proximity. This leaves the possibility to cowork remotely. Second Life and Yahoo! Live come to mind.

When we talk about creating a “coworking space,” “coworking community,” or having a specific set of values, we’re really talking about how to create an environment or community that will encourage the activity of coworking. Arguments over values, profits, business models, and furniture can neither undermine nor enhance the definition of coworking. Build a pool and I may go swimming. Is it a free pool? Do I have to pay to swim? Is the water clean? Are kids allowed in the pool? Is there a swim team that meets at this pool? Is the pool’s owner honest? All of these thing may affect my decision to swim in the pool, but are ultimately a matter of taste.

In summary, coworking is NOT a cafe-like community/collaboration space. That’s like saying swimming is a pool. And arguments such as for-profit versus non-profit need not become heated. Coworking is coworking regardless of where it’s at, what values people share, or how big the community is. If you’re working and socializing, you’re coworking.

Austin Jelly Laptop Stickers!

Austin Jelly Laptop StickersSo a couple of months ago Brian Massey had the great idea to print some Jelly stickers at Mikons.com. The idea being that you slap one of these stickers on the back of your laptop and new Jelly attendees will be able to locate a group of Jelly-ers in a public setting, such as a coffee shop like Cafe Caffeine! I’ve had one of Brian’s original stickers on my laptop for a couple months and it’s been a great ice breaker at Jelly.

We’ve been out of Brian’s original sticker print-run for awhile now, but today I got a new batch in the mail! Big thanks go out to Stephen Gutknecht for fronting the money to purchase the stickers.

If you’d like a sticker let me know at Jelly. They cost $2 a piece to print. Not so coincidently, we’ll be accepting donations of $2 per sticker. 🙂

Alternatively you can hop on Mikons.com and create all kinds of schwag using the Jelly icon and have it shipped straight to your door.

I had a little trouble with the checkout process at Mikons, but Mark was fantastic about helping me, and it turned out to be an over the top customer experience.

You can haz Austin Tech Events Widget without WordPress!

Not too long ago I posted about the Austin Tech Events Plugin for WordPress. Several folks asked me how to install it sans WordPress or in a older version of WordPress that doesn’t support widgets. Well I’ll tell ya’.

Step 1. Download the latest version of the Austin Tech Events widget and upload it to a subdirectory on your site.

Step 2. Go get yourself a Google GDATA API key here.

Step 3. Add the following code to the head section of your site. Note the sections in red. You need to add your Google API Key and be sure to change the paths below to reflect where you uploaded the Austin Tech Events widget folder.

<script type="text/javascript" src="http://www.google.com/jsapi?key=YOU GOOGLE API KEY GOES HERE"></script>
<script type="text/javascript">
	var calendarURL = 'http://www.google.com/calendar/feeds/i8m14fqigtkhpj744qml1vht920bq5j0%40import.calendar.google.com/public/full';
	var pageMaxResults = 15;
	var parseWiki = true;
	var showNav = true;
	var weeks = null;
	var widgetListSize = null;
</script>
<link type="text/css" rel="stylesheet" href="http://example.com/wp-content/plugins/austin-tech-events-calendar/css/thickbox.css" />
<link type="text/css" rel="stylesheet" href="http://example.com/wp-content/plugins/austin-tech-events-calendar/css/style.css" />
<script type="text/javascript">
	function addLoadEvent(func) {
		var oldonload = window.onload;
		if (typeof window.onload != 'function') {
			window.onload = func;
		} else {
			window.onload = function() {
			if (oldonload) {
				oldonload();
			}
				func();
			}
		}
	}
</script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://example.com/wp-content/plugins/austin-tech-events-calendar/js/date.js?ver=alpha-1"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://example.com/wp-content/plugins/austin-tech-events-calendar/js/jquery.js?ver=6124"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://example.com/wp-content/plugins/austin-tech-events-calendar/js/thickbox.js?ver=3.1"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://example.com/wp-content/plugins/austin-tech-events-calendar/js/wiky.js?ver=1.0"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://example.com/wp-content/plugins/austin-tech-events-calendar/js/functions.js?ver=0.85"></script>

Step 4. Add the following code to body of you page. Place it wherever you want the widget to show up.

<ul>
	<li id="austin-tech-events" class="widget widgetWPNGCalendar">
		<h2 class="widgettitle"><a href="http://door64.com/event">Austin Tech Events</a></h2>
			<div id="wpng-cal-widget-events" style="display:none;"></div>
			<div id="wpng-cal-load-widget" class="wpng-cal-loading">
				<img class="wpng-cal-image" alt="loading..." src="/wp-content/plugins/austin-tech-events-calendar/images/loading_large.gif"/>
			</div>
		<div>
			<script type="text/javascript" defer="defer">
				widgetListSize = 5;
				addLoadEvent(loadCalendarWidget);
			</script>
		</div>
	</li>
</ul>

That’s all there is to it. Check out the example I created of the Austin Tech Events Plugin installed on WordPress 1.5.2. Proof it can be done! 😉 The biggest disadvantage to this approach is that you won’t be notified of code updates like you would on a proper WordPress 2.5 widget install.

Let me know if you have any questions!

Austin Tech Events Calendar WordPress Plugin

Want to promote the tech community in Austin? This is your WordPress plugin! You can see an example of the plugin on my blog’s sidebar.

The Austin Tech Events Calendar plugin is a “branch” of the wpng-calendar, a WordPress plugin for integrating a Google calendar into your WordPress blog. I’ve customized it to best display events from the door64.com events calendar.

To install this plugin:

  1. Download it from here
  2. Upload the plugin to the “wp-content/plugins” directory in your WordPress installation
  3. Activate the plugin in your WordPress admin panel
  4. Go get yourself a Google GDATA API key here
  5. In your WordPress admin panel, goto “Options -> Austin Tech Events” then enter your Google GDATA API key. If you’re running WordPress 2.5, look under “Settings -> Austin Tech Events.”
  6. Under “Presentation -> Widgets” add the widget to your side bar, alter the options if you like

That’s it!

For more information about this plugin checkout the documentation from the the wpng-calendar site.

Drop me some comments if you have questions or feedback! 🙂

PS. This plugin uses Javascript to interface the Google API. I’d love to rebuild this plugin using PHP so that the links inside of the event descriptions would help each organization’s page rank in Google search. If anyone wants to take a stab at converting this from Javascript to PHP, I’d love you forever!

Have an old version of WordPress that doesn’t support widgets? Not using WordPress at all? Check out this post: Austin Tech Events Widget for those without widgets or WordPress.

Austin Tech Community Events Calendar Strategy

We have a lot of awesome tech and entrepreneurship communities in Austin: door64, Geek Austin, Social Media Club, Bootstrap Austin, Refresh Austin, Jelly, and Startup Drinks, just to name a few. Recently Austin has been doing really well intermingling and cross pollinating our communities, and that has got me EXTREMELY excited. Just the other day Social Media Club had their meeting during Austin Jelly, during that cross mingling Jelly got a few new coworkers and Social Media Club got some new member interest. How cool is that?

One large barrier I’ve found organizing Austin Jelly is the proliferation of calendars online for me to post my events to. And each of those calendars has their own small audience, so of course I need to post to all of them to reach the largest audience. What we need is ONE shared calendar feed with an API so we can display and post events from our organizations website. But the key thing is that the backend is shared, so we’re promoting each others events across the web.

Matt has done a great job developing the community and the calendar at door64.com. One great thing about the door64 calendar (aside from the amount of events posted there and the audience size) is that it’s already integrated into Google Calendars, which is a huge step towards making it easy to spread.

I’d like to help make the door64 calendar THE tech event calendar for Austin. I believe the way to this is by developing the following:

  1. Create WordPress Widget for Austin Tech Events
    (Are you an Austin Tech blogger? Why not promote Austin Tech events by using this widget? PS. It’s almost done, check it out on the bottom of my blog’s sidebar.)
  2. Create automated batch push of Austin events to 3rd party calendars via API
    (AKA: Post an event to door64.com and it gets pushed to these other event calendars.)

    1. Upcoming
    2. Craigslist
    3. What else?
  3. Create an event posting API
    (AKA: Post events to door64’s calendar from your organization’s website. Keep your brand, but cross promote your event.)

What do you think? I’d love to hear everyone’s thoughts.