First off, sorry for the week of radio silence; I was traveling for Spring Break with my wife and kids. I’d assumed I’d have a chance or two to update the Snip, Burn, Solder Blog while on the road, but instead ended up investing my writing pomodori in a new short story (not to spill the beans on it, but there’s Chicago’s elevated train, pickpockets, and naked folk in the story. I think we can all agree these will have been words well spent). All apologies, no excuses.
Secondly, this interview (conducted by the remarkably patient Mark Maynard) is now up: Inside Ann Arbor’s Workantile coworking community. It’s an +8,000 word (!!!) interview with me and the other two “owners” of the “Coworking Society,” and absolutely and profoundly unprofitable LLC whose sole purpose is to support the Workantile, a community of freelance and independent workers who share goodwill and a *lovely* 3000-square-foot workspace in downtown Ann Arbor, MI.
Here’s an interview snippet:
BILL: Again I want to unpack the assumptions here a bit. If you mean: are there work collaborations between members? Not much. We all pretty much have too much work already. There are ideas for new things, and at least a few of them have gone somewhere. But we all understand that whenever we launch a new Next Google, our dance cards are immediately filled with appointments with investors or for a boot stamping on our faces–forever. So that outcome tends to be a self-trimming branch as far as Workantile is concerned.
. . .
DAVE: Just to take a sec and disagree with my distinguished colleague: I’ve seen and participated in a fair amount of “billable work collaboration/hook-up” in the Workantile–but I don’t think this is unusual in any community. I know folks who are deep into their communities of faith; those are their goto communities, and if they’re looking for a lawyer or writer or graphic designer or builder, those are the people they ask. This is the same at Workantile, except for without the God business. When I needed a tech reviewer for the electronic projects in my very enjoyable book of geeky crafting, I ended up hooking up a Workantile member (the one that designed and built our original computer-controlled door system, in fact). When another member needed someone to write content for web sites he develops or do some of the coding for those sites, he asked around Workantile. The writing group I’m in now–and, with whose support, I’ve done my best work–was introduced to me by a Workantile member. Our email group regularly has threads that start with: “Hey; I need a contract looked at; what lawyers do you guys trust? My sewer pipe is collapsing; what plumbers do you trust? I wanna buy ethically raised pork; who knows a pig guy?” I think maybe what Bill wants to foreground is that this sort of commerce isn’t our *purpose*, just a by-product–but what *I* want to foreground is that commerce is the human business, and whenever humans are in a group fungible exchanges are brewing. Dogs sniff butts, we recommend organic CSAs, but it’s all the same.
So, if you’ve been wondering what “coworking” and “coworking spaces” are all about, or the ways folks do “Work 2.0” (or whatever damned thing WIRED is trying to call it now), then there are worse places to start than this interview.