For current information, view the Canberra Coworking page.
Rohan Mitchell Ben Hamey, Donna Spencer and myself met with Jordan from Response Driven Marketing (RDM) out at Mitchell today to discuss the sub-leasing of a portion of RDM’s office for use as a coworking space. After much enthusiastic discussion and planning we arrived at the conclusion that it’s definitely a good viable option and that we’ll proceed with setting it up as a coworking space – so we’re now proceeding to the next step of organising the furnishing and fitting out of the space office area and getting people to register their interest in using the space so we can start coordinating it and getting people in once we’re ready to go.
For those unfamiliar with the concept: Coworking is the safe and affordable option for self-employed professionals who can’t afford to bear a commercial lease alone and don’t want to work from home. While a home office has some benefits it can be quite difficult to stay focussed or to maintain a good work-life balance. Plus the isolation can drive you crazy – which is one of the reasons I started the Canberra Freelancers and Entrepreneurs Coffee a few weeks ago. You can read more about Coworking on Wikipedia.
When we first kicked off trying to set up a shared office in Canberra in 2007 we were working closely with the folk who run a very successful coworking facility in San Francisco, Citizen Space, particularly Tara Hunt who helped us work through various models and space management issues. Unfortunately we just couldn’t get enough freelancers together who were in a position to share a long-term commercial lease in a central location such as Civic.
However now thanks to the offer of a host company the lease is taken care of which was a significant barrier – so we’re grateful to Jordan from RDM for that.
Register your interest in Coworking Canberra
So now that we have a space and are just working out the details such as costing models for various types of office utilisation (drop-in, casual, ongoing etc) we now need to get people who are interested in having access to this office space to register their interest.
I will be coordinating the Coworking Canberra space for at least the first month so if you are a freelancer, small business (and we’ll only have four proper desks and six drop-in stations so I really do mean small business), entrepreneur, self-employed or otherwise just need to get out of the house to work on writing a book or use a meeting and conference room then please send me an email to nboehm@purecaffeine.com and I’ll keep you informed as we progress the planning and set up.
There’s also the Coworking Canberra wiki which you can subscribe to for edits and updates.
// purecaffeine.com, UX, design, social media and Gov 2.0 blog by designer Nathanael Boehm, Canberra, Australia. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.5 Australia License.
{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
Great initiative Nat, I hope it works out well for you.
Cheers,
Craig
Good work, chaps :-) I’ll be interested.
Hi Nathan. Great job man. Bummer! I can’t join your coworking team. I’m Rohan’s friend. We’re working together on a project atm.
I live south side in Bonython and Mitchell is too far for me to travel everyday. Has anyone contacted you who lives south side and can’t cowork in Mitchell? I would love to hear from them. Maybe we can work together closer to home in Fyshwick, Braddon and the likes.
They can contact me on online[at]benb.com.au
Thanks heaps
Ben