horsepigcow

My life has been on such an amazing whirlwind since I posted that Hillary and I made the decision to shut down Citizen Space.

First off, nobody was very happy with the news. Where I was feeling just fine with letting it go, the residents, the other coworking catalysts and many others who have been involved were sending me messages that went sort of like:

“Noooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!”

I explained over and over again that the decision wasn’t a *bad* thing. It wasn’t done because we were at wit’s end. Just that we couldn’t put the energy needed into keeping Citizen Space the vibrant place it once was and, well, that there were lots of awesome spaces now to continue the legacy. Still, multiple people responded to my very logical answer that they were still unhappy with the whole idea of shutting down CS.

Then the offer emails started pouring in. At one point, Hillary, April and I had to create a spreadsheet to keep track of all of the people who were interested in taking over the space. Some people wanted to raise money to keep it open for a short while, others wanted to take over the space and rebrand it and some wanted to take over the name AND the space. This wasn’t an easy decision. Of course, keeping CS alive meant that the name AND the space should remain intact, but we didn’t want just anybody carrying that on. We had to make sure that someone would remain true to the Coworking values as well as keep those awesome things like ‘free dropins’ alive as much as possible (even though this was never a good business decision, it was definitely something we treasured as it brought energy to the space and gave weary travelers somewhere they could be without concern).

All of this and I’m still a gazillion miles away and busier than I can already handle, so Hillary (who has the world’s craziest travel schedule AND a small child) and April had to coordinate and meet with everyone. Thank goodness I have the world’s best co-owner and the world’s best GM (big ups) because they helped narrow it down to the final decision.

And that decision is…Citizen Space will remain open! yay! It will be re-invigorated with new ownership (Hillary and I will remain shareholders and advisors) and energy. And I got to meet Toby Morning and his crew at SXSW Interactive and I’m excited to say that his love and enthusiasm for coworking and the legacy of CS will make it an even better place to work from now on.

Toby Morning will bring his energy and love of startups into the space starting April 1, 2011. He thinks big. He loves the community. He is passionate about startups and the amazing culture that the social web has fostered. I look forward to seeing Citizen Space and all of the projects he has planned around it blossom. I’ll do a more in-depth video interview with him this Friday when we do the transfer and post it here and on the CS blog so everyone can meet him.

But if you are also in San Francisco this Friday, March 25, 2011, COME TO THE CITIZEN SPACE TRANSFER PARTY!! We’ll have a dj, beer (as in free as in beer), wine and nibblies for everyone. You can meet Toby and his partners in person as well as help us celebrate the transfer and the rekindling of the space. Sign up for it here.

I’m really happy that this all came together like it has and that the Citizens can continue working from CS every day.

And thank you for your continued love and support. Coworking and Citizen Space are projects I’m proud to have spent the past 6 years pouring my love into because I’ve gotten so much more out of both.

In early 2006, a group of us dreamers got together in a coffee shop in the Mission District of San Francisco to discuss how we were going to start a permanent space that was “like” a coffee shop, but was intended for independents and digital nomads who needed a place to work with others but separately. That meeting turned into a space and then another space and then something really amazing happened…because we did this all publicly and transparently, it started a worldwide movement.

That movement is Coworking, which at last count is a loosely-joined consortium of over 600 spaces worldwide and growing. There are now more than 3,000 members on the Google Group representing pretty much every country in the world. I have no idea how many people have been touched by Coworking (have worked in a space). But I’m pretty sure we can safely assume close to 100,000.

Citizen Space has always been my baby, though I still administer the Google Group and I used to be in charge of the blog (now that honor belongs to the fabulous Angel Kwiatkowski of Cohere) and tried to keep up the wiki (which now the equally fantastic Jacob Sayles of Office Nomads makes sure is clean as a whistle). I opened Citizen Space with Chris Messina in November of 2006 and expanded it with Hillary Hartley in February 2009.

When we opened CS, there were some other coworking-ish spaces in town: artist spaces, writers spaces and, of course Teh Hat Factory (which we opened with several others in spring 2006). But there weren’t any Coworking spaces. Today I think there are something like 7 or 8 of them. And they are doing a damned fine job of moving the movement forward and serving the needs of the community.

Which is why when we were told by April (Citizen Space General Manager) that the space was declining in membership and, well, it wasn’t really the community hub it used to be, I sat back and pondered the future of Citizen Space. It used to be the beacon for the movement – being one of the first spaces that launched the movement PLUS being run by a couple of the founders of the movement – but now the movement itself is well on its way and doesn’t need a beacon. It has real momentum and new hubs.

So…the time has come for Citizen Space to move on. We’ve put a call out to see if anyone wants to take it over or otherwise put the time into it that we no longer can (I’m in Montreal, Hillary has a baby and a house outside of SF and Chris is at Google), but really, I’m more than okay with letting it go. It’s done its job. She’s created her legacy.

Stay tuned for the next steps. There will be a sale of the contents if we do end up shutting down and DEFINITELY a big party. I’ll be coming to San Francisco for both.

Thank you for everything over the years. Working there. Supporting us. Coming to the events. Telling others about the space. And generally being amazing ambassadors of the movement that I’m incredibly proud of being a part of from the beginning. I love the community and what has emerged. I know that will live on. I hope you will be able to join me in San Francisco to bid adieu to one beacon of one era and ring in the next!

Equally exciting to me is this second announcement. Yep. We are expanding Citizen Space thanks to an awesome series of fortunate events:

1. Elisabeth Norris – I hired Elisabeth back in November, I think it was, to be my personal assistant. She has demonstrated that she is so amazing and capable that I decided to hire her full-time to become the General Manager of Citizen Space. Say hi. She rocks.
2. EqualityCamp – On January 3, we had EqualityCamp, which got bigger than we expected, so we had to move to a bigger space. I placed a phonecall to my landlord and he donated a space on the 1st floor to us that I totally fell in love with.
3. David Hall – Awesomest landlord ever. Hands down.
4. The overall success of Citizen Space – We’ve been full since month 3, I believe, and have been turning people away for years. We are adding 12 desks (for a total of 20), so we should be able to accommodate everyone now!

The details of the space:

- we are moving downstairs in the same building. We’ll still be at 425 – 2nd Street, but in suite 100 instead of 300 (in the loading dock – used to be a gym).
- the new space is 3500 ft2 (plus a sizeable loft) – 2000+ additional square feet to what we currently have.
- we’re building in a fully loaded kitchen to the space.
- there are two bathrooms in the space.
- there is one large boardroom that we will eventually turn into 2 (convertible to one large one)
- there is more common space
- instead of having a 40 person limit to events, we will have a 100 person limit
- rents stay the same as advertised

We’ll be doing the grande unveiling March 1st, but people that want to see the new space who are interested in a desk when we open can ping either Elisabeth or myself and arrange a tour for closer to the end of February. We’ll be posting photos along the way, tweeting and blogging the transformation, too!

This is super exciting to me and I hope to have my new team working out of the space from time to time!

Collaboration 2.0 from BLANKSPACES on Vimeo.

If you need to work in LA, you need to stop by BLANKSPACES to do so. In fact, I need to get to LA, just to meet these people!

p.s. You can see more of their awesome work HERE.

[Refill your superhero supplies on Flickr by sodapop]

This has been one busy, yet transformational, month for me.

It all started with my participation in TED 2008 in Aspen, Colorado. TED, for those of you who haven’t heard of it, stands for Technology Entertainment Design, and it is an invitation-based conference. It is also, bar-none, the most inspirational conference I’ve ever attended. Inspirational because each and every one of the speakers weren’t just talking about small ideas and weren’t just doing smart, interesting things. Inspirational because each and every one of the speakers were talking about BIG, earth-shattering ideas and doing incredibly world-changing things. And they all had incredible passion. Incredible. This, coupled with the fact that the attendees were hand-chosen as world-changers themselves made for a really transformative experience.

But the one drawback for me was, because of the prohibitive cost ($3000-6000+) of attending, many world-changers I know of weren’t able to be part of it. AND because of that barrier, a smaller group gets moved to the level that I was moved. I sat there wanting to take that energy and spread it to a wider group of people…especially people who may never get to be in that room.

Especially after a talk by Dr. Philip Zimbardo (otherwise known as Dr. Z) on The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil.

Dr. Z’s basic premise is this: There are no ‘bad apples’, only bad barrels. Inside of each of us is the propensity to act like a hero or act like a villian. He has a great deal of amazing research to back this up. He was behind the Stanford Prison Experiment in 1971 that took a healthy, nice group of middle-class kids and put them under conditions that led to the kids playing ‘guards’ treating the kids playing ‘prisoners’ so inhumanely, they had to call the experiment off. The amount of time to the shut-down of the experiment? 6 days. Similarly, Zimbardo discusses Abu Ghraib as a site for creating a similarly ‘evil creation’ environment, leading everyday ‘nice’ soldiers to treat their prisoners with sadism and extreme cruelty and humiliation. The book cites multiple examples around the world, including the awful genocide in Rwanda, where people raped and slaughtered former friends, family members, neighbors and coworkers.

Just writing that paragraph emotionally kills me. But the evidence astoundingly points to the bad barrels theory. Zimbardo does not take the responsibility off of the apples in that barrel, but the evidence that ‘nice’ people can turn evil is compelling. The beauty of this theory is that it gives us a clue as to the conditions for the creation of evil acts, which we can then avoid, and similarly, gives us a clue as to the opposite conditions: the conditions to create heroic acts.

And that is when it dawned on me: what if we had a *camp to create heroes? What if I put together a (super)HeroCamp to not only create heroes, but to create heroes that create MORE heroes? If I could sit down with many of those people I was missing at TED and come up with a plan to build better barrels….what would happen? So, I set up the wiki page and tweeted my intentions, getting alot of instant support.

So, this August in Vancouver, BC, Canada, a legion of Heroes will gather around the idea to create legions of Heroes. We’ve picked a narrow area to start with so that we can really focus a program: education. Over the duration of 4-5 days, we will come up with a plan that is easily executable by legions of others and the materials (website, print materials, etc.) that can help anyone interested to this spread it further.

Or, that’s the hope anyway.

My new goal is to look at creating the conditions in as many places possible to create (super)Heroes and radically subvert those barrels that create villians. Ideas are welcome and your involvement is necessary. I know there are many (super)Heroes that read this blog.

I think it’s coming along nicely. Yay factoryjoe!

For those of you who haven’t been reading long, learn more about coworking here. It totally rawks.

::and for those of you who don’t know the reference to the starfish, you need to read The Starfish and the Spider: The Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Organizations.

Coworking Spaces

Berkeley Coworking, Berkeley, CA

Berkeley finally has it’s own Coworking space! Put together by the ever-awesome Christopher Allen, it is conveniently located at 2930 Shattuck Suite 305 (cross-street Ashby and near Asby BART) in Berkeley.

Grande Opening event here: http://upcoming.yahoo.com/event/225865/ (this Friday…)

cooperBricolage, Manhattan, NY

Talked about here on the Coworking blog, Sanford Dickert, a professor at Cooper Union (amongst many other things), has busted his tail to find an affordable, workable solution to solving a daily hangout for indies in Manhattan. Enter Cafe cooperBricolage! The solution? Use a restaurant that isn’t open during the day! It seems to be humming along with killer bandwidth and plenty of amenities. I’m looking forward to hanging out when we are back in NYC. Finding reliable, free wifi without the pressure of buying endless coffee wasn’t easy.

Hat tip to Nate Westheimer for the name Cafe Bricolage.

…

There are actually several on the brink of opening, but I won’t mention them quite yet…

Events

BarCampBlock, Palo Alto, CA – August 18-19th

Marking the 3rd annual BarCamp (and second year anniversary), this year’s BarCamp anniversary will take place full circle back in the same place it started: SocialText’s offices… and spilling out into the streets! Yep. We will be working with SocialText to get this puppy off the ground with the goal of having a multi-office party starting SocialText’s offices… and maybe looping in nearby neighbors like Facebook, iMeem, IDEO, Edgeio and so on.

SocialNetworkDevCamp, Richmond, CA – September 8-9

SocialNetworkDevCamp will focus on API and Widget development from Facebook, Twitter, Pownce, Linked In and others. The camp will also start the process of identifying open APIs and data structures which would facilitate the creation of open standards for social networking.

Much like the uber popular & successful, iPhoneDevCamp, the SNDC is focused on development…actually making stuff!

Thanks to Ryanne & Jay (co-founders of The Hat Factory) for putting this together! I think they did an awesome job of capturing the essence of what Coworking is.