We’ve now got free starfish stickers in a jar at Gramstand, so now patrons of Gramstand can grab a sticker, slap it on their laptop lid, and find other folks in the cafe with the stickers and start talking to them!

I have no idea what will happen, but my hope is that people will be able to better identify one another and start talking to each other without the need for a middleman.

Many people have come to Gramstand looking for fellow coworkers but didn’t have any way of knowing who was who… this should help address that problem.

Come on by and take a sticker! Find someone else who has a sticker on their lid and introduce yourself. Ask what they’re working on. Tell them what you’re working on. Then let coworking do its thing!

Our friend and longtime coworker Alex Linsker is working on a book. He’s taking inspiration by an amazingly well-written, well-illustrated, concise, and eminently useful (if you’re an Architect) book: “101 Things I Learned in Architecture School“.

Hang out in our cozy cafe basement space and work with other writers-to-be. Share your wisdom and your questions with others! And most importantly, get to write! At the very least, writing a book is a way to get your ideas on paper to inspire others and promote your business.

Alex will be working on his book idea, “101 Things I Learned About Organizational Democracy.” Bring your own book idea, and some paper or a laptop.

Event Details:
Gramstand
214 Avenue A
New York, NY 10036

Wednesday, July 23 from 1-5pm

RSVP here.

See you there!

One fact worth noting is his research into how many people work from home. He cites a 2006 US Census survey which indicates that 4% of New Yorkers works from home.

Out of 3,597,547 workers aged 16 and over, that’s 143,901 people.

Wow.

I also tried to make sure the discussion wasn’t one-way. It’s easy for me, or Sanford, or others to talk at length about coworking, but it’s important that everyone in the community be able to participate equally. There were a lot of new voices, and, they each had something important to contribute to the discussion.

As we went around the table, there was an obvious common thread: people are working at home, and it’s driving them crazy.

I noticed another pattern as well: coworking consistently attracts upbeat, self-motivated, interesting, intelligent people. And the enthusiasm among them is universal.

The main takeaway: the people who showed now all know each other a little better, and are now part of the community. And now they’re ready to help build New Work City and NYC’s larger coworking world.

We’re now hoping to have a critical mass in time to sign papers for June 1st. We’ll soon have letters of commitment drafted, so we can have a tangible list of how many people are seriously committed to joining and supporting our space. Starting with that, we can have a much better expectation of when we’ve hit our critical mass (by our current estimates, we’d need the equivalent of 21 full-time commitments to be able to move into the Balcony space– this can be broken down into different levels of membership, but it’s our basic target).

We’re off to a great start, but need to continue to get the word out to more people who’d be interested in this space. So if you know someone who you think might be interested, let them know!

More good things are in store for both CooBric and NWC. Exciting times!

As you know, a few of us (led by Tony) have been working hard to close on a space in NYC for coworking - and we have enjoyed some incredibly positive responses in the last two weeks that have helped us craft a working proposition for New Work City (things to come). In this search, a number of hard lessons have come to pass that I think should be considered in terms of facts and figures:

• Back in April of 2007, Darren Herman announced his desire to make a similar thing to our dream, and 45 days later realized the challenges that accompany this task and decided to pass on the idea.

  In a separate conversation, Darren shared with me his challenges - especially the need to have a tight management on costs and a strong operational group to ensure delivery of the service and space.

  But on top of it all, the challenge of running a space like his (and very similar to NWC) is a near-total dedication of core people to deliver 24/7/365. This is not a startup or a restaurant or some company that you might be able to turn off for the holidays - this is a social good, a service that often requires non-stop attention to the needs of the community.

  Darren has been a terrific source of information and has helped us move forward through some interesting challenges.

• Recently, NYSIA closed its incubator amid difficulties getting continued of government funding to run the space.

  In talks with Angelina Jao, there were many lessons that were captured in the efforts to build the Incubator - instructively, events that brought community members together into a common space.

  I believe some of the challenges NYSIA had had to do with the cost of the space (55 Broad is a Class A building with excellent services) and a very high square-foot cost structure (services layered on top of the basic real-estate cost).

  But, as we learned, another challenge was that NYSIA was more in line with a full-service office space, not necessarily a community space - like the one Darren was creating and NWC has our eyes on.

• Over a week ago, I attended the NY-Israel Tech Meetup at Blank-Rome (organized by Yaron Samid from Pando) where I luckily met Cheni Yerushalmi, one of the founders of Sunshine Suites.

  Instead of being competitive about his offering or threatened by our vision, Cheni has been incredibly forthcoming and we have had a couple of meetings where we have discussed his vision and our vision of NWC and the challenges faced.Cheni brought home (for me in particular) the importance of understanding the challenges that exist in this cost structure and the need for slavish dedication to operational costs and services for an enterprise like Sunshine.

  And while I may not share in Cheni’s aesthetic style for some of the common areas, he has had six years of on-the-job training which has brought to light a number of constraints that are not often thought of when an endeavor like coworking is undertaken and desires to expand. While I may not personally like the Suite structure that Cheni has built, I do see the benefit and vision that he has and completely recommend it for people who connect with it.

• We also met with John McGann from Nutopia and discussed a number of the lessons he has learned from building from his original vision back in the late 90s.

  John has been incredibly generous with his insights and thoughts and helped us flesh out the finances for the space and given us a real-life point of view of the associated costs and concerns that await any space such as this.

  My personal favorite kernel of truth came from a simple analogy he presented us - how people tend to work. His model was in terms of how people tend to study is essentially how people tend to work - they either:

  • study by themselves - in their dorm room, in a cubicle or their research office
  • study in a controlled community environment - quiet library or study room
  • study in a more dynamic community environment - coffee shop or external study hall

  When looking at the options in the marketspace, there are lots of the first (MicroOffice, TechSpace, Sunshine Suites), a couple of the second (paragraphNY) and a perceived availability of the latter (Starbucks, coffee shops in general).

  But Nutopia, Darren’s vision and NWC are sorely missing in the marketspace which is more closely aligned as a mixing of the three.

• David Rose is launching a space at Rose Tech Ventures for $700 a desk (outside of SparkSpace incubator, IMHU), which is with the intent of cultivating serious entrepreneurs in a space where others can share.

  In David’s situation, he has a direct benefit to the space - access to entrepreneurs who can cross-pollinate and a built-in marketing savings by having a group of NY Tech Ventures providing word-of-mouth marketing and foot traffic for potential deal flow for David and Rose Tech Ventures.

All of this reporting is meant to give you an insight into our efforts on moving forward with NWC and sharing with you - our community. Tony spends about half of his days working on this effort, with the intent of making it happen. We have been investigating options that help reduce our risk and merge our vision with symbiotic offerings as well.

At present, we have at least two organizations that are talking with us about a co-sharing of a community space, and one organization has expressed interest in sponsoring a “incubator”-like space if we can offer solid details on how and why. (more…)

These efforts now have a name. That name is New Work City.

New Work City is the name of the new coworking space we are putting together. While there is a strong level of interest right now, we will need more interest before the space can move forward. Once we hit the tipping point, we’ll be in a position to establish the space!

We’re hoping to move very quickly, in part because several of our members need to move their businesses very soon– and they can’t wait to get the space open!

So if you’re interested, add your name to our Membership Interest form.

We are also soliciting sponsorships. Sponsoring our space will be a fantastic way to show support for entrepreneurship in New York, and will help connect you with the vibrant NY independent and entrepreneurial community. You can list your interest for sponsorship here.

I’m really excited about all of this and especially about the enthusiasm of the early responses. Much more soon.

Also, it should be noted that CooBric will continue to run and grow– we’re continuing to build the community at Gramstand, which has grown nicely lately, and we look forward to both CooBric and New Work City growing and doing more awesome things together in the future.

These are exciting times!
Tony

Matt Cooperrider, a CooBric’er who’s helping an initiative to get a .nyc top level domain created, is kicking off this idea with “Grassroots Tuesday”.  He’ll be there on Tuesdays working on his projects, and encouraging other people with similar interests to join him.

To help facilitate this, we’re also adding a Twitter account to keep up to date. Follow @CooBric on Twitter or check the wiki for details.

If you’d like to do something similar, email me (tony at coobric dot com) and we’ll hook you up.

Are you coming to Gramstand regularly already? What are you working on? What kinds of people would you like to work alongside?

Bring your laptop and a friendly disposition. It’ll be fun. There’ll be grilled cheese.

Then we’ll head over to Lunasa for TechDrinks at 5:00 to celebrate a day well done!

RSVP for Coworking

RSVP for TechDrinks

See you there!

I only had to spend a few moments with these folks to arrive at a powerful realization: Coworking is for real. It’s not simply a trend or a freelancer’s hobby; it is in fact part of a larger shift in the very way we work and live.

As the use of the internet becomes more widespread and as technology continues to improve, we find ourselves increasingly connected. More and more of the work that we do is done electronically, and less and less work requires actual face-to-face interaction.

If you didn’t have to drag yourself into an office to do your work, would you do it? You might likely not. But after working from home for two years now, I can say this: You don’t want to sit at home every day either.

Human beings are explorers. We’re also social beings. We want to get up and move around every day and find out what other humans are doing. If technology gives us the choice of where to do our work, we will seek out the places that accommodate our natural needs.

This is where coworking comes in. The location-independent worker needs places to go to do their work, where they can show up when they want and meet new people and friends.

At the Hotel San Jose in Austin, on Friday, I stood in a 50+ strong crowd of people, many of whom are running or starting spaces and communities all over the country (not just USA, either: Canada and France came too!), and the rest people interested and involved in the cause.

Speaking to these people, it’s clear that I was not in the company of any ordinary people—these people were largely successful, intelligent, experienced entrepreneurs, and they believe that they are onto something. The growth of interest in coworking has been palpable, and it continues to expand rapidly.

When my good friend and Indy Hall founder Alex Hillman and I parted ways last night, he left me with an incredible statement: “When I came to SXSW last year, I left with the goal of bringing coworking to Philly. This year, I want to bring coworking to the whole world.”

Count me in for that. I’ll start with New York :-)

What does this mean? It means that we are interested in hearing what you are interested in doing for the next space. What is your vision of the next “coworking space”? With experiences in Cafe Fuego, Gramstand and House 2.0 - and chatting with other coworking types (ask Tony about his trip to SXSW), we are getting closer to making it a reality.

So, can you tell us what you’d like to see at a coworking space? Put it here on the blog so we (and others) can see. Would you like:

• a sofa or two
• a coffee maker, coffee shop inside, a restaurant
• open space or cubicles
• music for the room, or simply wifi for all

We are looking for people who are interested in being “anchor tenants” - individuals and organizations that are interested in sharing the risk of being charter members in the space. If you are interested, please email Tony (tony AT coobric….you know).

Looking forward to passing along some great news in the future.