Liveblogging the coworking and sustainability gathering Oct 9th
You may recall a post by Lorraine where she informed the community to come to a gathering for another coworking facility in Vancouver. I am here, so I am taking as verbatim notes as I can.
| Gathering for a “Sustainability Hub” in Vancouver | (10/08/2009) |
| 5:49 | Jeremy and Eesmyal are giving the quick introduction.
A lot of talk about coworking spaces, but not sure why it has happened now.
Let’s make it happen – there may be money to develop a feasibility study to create this facility.
He helped develop the hub in Halifax. It was funny to work on this. There’s probably a lot of people who have the same ideas. About 10 months ago. Similar kind of ‘hub’ structure. Jeremy – being involved in The Halifax Hub – he started it a few years ago. They took about a year to develop the community of the hub. He started getting a business plan done. Lot of independent workers who want to work in smaller spaces. |
| 5:49 | They wanted to have this hub of innovation in Halifax. The more they talked to people, the more momentum they got – they saw this kind of youthful movement trickling through Halifax.
Halifax needed workspace that people could rent, and they put them into the Halifax Hub. It’s an evolving project. |
| 5:50 | 40-50 people there, lots of speakers, music, events, discussions, community discussions, planning discussions, they try to make it a community space, leader space. |
| 5:50 | Bring in community speakers – events, from iPhone app hacking for charities to musical events, to political engagements. |
| 5:51 |
He wants to bring this kind of energy to Vancouver. |
| 5:52 | [RAUL'S COMMENT - Uh, Jeremy - WorkSpace had been on for a long whole before it closed, and The Network Hub has been here since early 2006 - so I find it kind of surprising that you didn't see that this kind of energy/space was already here - definitely we need more spaces like The Network Hub, WorkSpace, maybe even WaveFront, etc.] |
| 5:54 | Mark is speaking about the Center for Social Innovation in Toronto. It’s very unique in a couple of interesting respects. It’s, as a workspace, there’s a very generous allotment of social space within that structure. The center of the Centre for Social Innovation is a kitchen, it acts as a mixing chamber. Allows organizations to come together in a neat way. Allows them to connect .
The other way is organizational, they have staff of about 5 people that are running the center. Almost fanatical sense of faith that this organization carries that resonates with people. The community animator – that person’s sole function is to reach out to the community of people, get them engaged, etc. |
| 5:54 | It’s been operating for a few years, they offer quite a broad scale of spaces that you can have, from having your own discreet office to hotdesks. |
| 5:54 | With that comes the access to office amenities, office address, mailbox, etc. |
| 6:03 | Bill McEwen (formerly of WorkSpace http://www.abetterplacetowork.com) Lessons learned – WorkSpace He started WorkSpace a few years ago, and he was frustrated with working in coffee shops, he wanted to get people together. The thing was a big risk, but he went for it. They got huge amount of press, there is all kinds of great people. They had some big challenges. A lot of people didn’t understand what coworking was about so they put a lot of energy into educating people – some of that energy took away from selling – so their sales were a lot slower than they had anticipated in the beginning. At the beginning they got up to 75 members, those members were paying on average $ 275 depending on the month. They did that for a little while, they broke even. He sold to Jayson Maynard last summer. Jayson had some difficulties, had to move out of town, so he had to close the business down. It was a great business, they had a lot of fun riding it. |
| 6:03 | The space was like a club. The desks/infrastructure were secondary to the social part of the business. There’s a lot of operating leverage that you take on in a business like this. Your costs are fixed and you spend a lot of energy and there is a big risk that you take on.
In another model, you should try to match revenues and expenses flows more evenly. |
| 6:04 | He would recommend selling and sending people to recruit, bring their friends in, that could have been helpful. |
| 6:05 | DID YOU CHARGE OR DID YOU GIVE AWAY THE SPACE?
That depended. They did a lot of events for free – the determining factor was – if it was FOR the members – then for sure. In some instances they charged. |
| 6:05 | Was it a scaled model – per hour, how did that work? |
| 6:06 | $ 100 a day a week
$ 250 2-3 day/week $ 400 1 day every day |
| 6:06 | Which was the membership that was the most popular for WorkSpace. Through popularity – lots of evening memberships. |
| 6:11 | Jonathan from the Global Hub (in London) This was an unconventional space. First and foremost. This is to be a bit brokered about. It’s a crazy project. Turning crises into opportunity. It’s a response. People quickly responding – a sense of enterprising. |
| 6:13 | KEVIN Formerly with Check Your Head Now with Genius / Vancouver School Board Genius is a charity. One of the projects they wanted to do was a colocation initiative – their goal (money came from VanCity) – they want to support organizations that support social change. |
| 6:15 | [RAUL'S COMMENT - I lost all of the text of Jay Catalan's presentation about The Network Hub http://www.thenetworkhub.ca] Sorry
I (Raul) also spoke about why people are talking a lot about coworking right now (because it’s popular in IT, maybe not in sustainability). Many people in sustainability aren’t aware or weren’t aware of WorkSpace or The Network Hub, which makes PERFECT SENSE because they aren’t immersed in tech. |
| 6:16 | MICHELLE From The Tyee Possibly an opportunity (David Wong) The Tyee just moved to a new office space in Main and Georgia (it’s own space). The Tyee is a daily online magazine for BC. They are fantastic (and not really modest, hehehe |
)| 6:18 | The hope is, at the very least, fill the building with like-minded tenants. The larger dream is sort of making it into a re-investment. They could just fill the building with 6,000 sq ft. It’s an opportunity, it’s very early stages, they’re here to throw that out there and see what the demand is. |
| 6:22 | OLIVE is doing the presentations, and introductions, but frankly I’m tired so I’m stopping the liveblog.
One note I should make – NOBODY from the tech community showed up, with the exception of ME and Jay Catalan (who had been invited, anyway). |
| 6:22 | Which, you know, speaks to the fact that “the community” needs a coworking space, yet nobody from the community showed up. |
| 6:27 |
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Thanks Raul,
Appreciate your transcribing key moments from the meeting. I missed the co-working space discussion at bcv09 but believe it’s an important issue.
It sounds like the pieces are all there, but there is a need for a strong collaborative style leader to facilitate the coordination of the many different efforts on this space and concentrate them to ensure success.
…isn’t that always the way
There were tech people there, the tech community is more than a few people who talk a lot… Enough people were there that you could build a business plan around.
Hi Raul — nice liveblog as always.
Re: few people from the tech “community” attending
I didn’t hear anything about this event, otherwise I could have made time to attend
Of course, I could say no one from this effort came to BarCamp. It’s the responsibility of everyone that “bridges” different interest groups to work on communication and coordination between the two, and you’re always a good example of someone that strives to do this.
It’s not a bad thing that many different groups are looking at such shared spaces. As I said, everyone will have different needs, and we can look to collaborate on areas of overlap, but also “know when to fork”.
[...] typed up much of the early discussion, but no summary of the most desired features and the true, true must haves has emerged. I also [...]
We’re hoping to provide coworking space targeting three groups, the Information & Communication Technology sector, the Creative Industries, and the Green/Sustainability sector which corresponds to three of the industry clusters we fascilitate in Vancouver’s inner-city.
Contact me if you want to know more.