Also part of that thread was Eirepreneur, aka James Corbett, who adds:
I think there’s a bit of confusion going on between the Jelly ‘movement’ and Coworking. As far as I understand it Chris Messina and Tara Hunt were the prime drivers behind the Coworking phenomenon and that it started in Silicon Valley. But like many of these things it’s rather difficult to tie down the facts,.. and I’d love to know the exact genesis.
I suppose it depends if we’re talking about co-working or “coworking (TM) (CC)”. I first came across the Jelly thing from this NPR story from ‘07, which claims Jelly’d been up since 2006. This Business Week story from Feb 07 certainly suggests “HotFactory” as the genesis of that idea. But then again, the need’d been around for much longer - the dotcom era BW (so you know the peak had passed a long time earlier) had a story in 2000. But who owns the idea and its origin isn’t something I’m going to get involved in - one look at the coworking wiki suggests it’d be like picking a fight with that guy offering you a “personality test” on Middle Abbey Street and you wind up arguing about aliens, freeing Katie Holmes and getting “clear”. Whatever. If it works for you, mazel tov.
Even then, it’s San Francisco, not the Valley. Coffee shops, not drive-through.
But the idea of creative types finding that they were more productive through serendipitous encounters with other people not working on exactly the same stuff isn’t exactly new. My favourite example is Summer 1816 on Lake Geneva, Byron and the Shelleys wind up flinting off of each other to the point we get Frankenstein and “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty”*. All thanks to co-working.
So not much to live up to there, lads. Good luck.
* how this whole setup hasn’t been made into a screenplay for a Colin Firth-as-Byron pic I don’t get at all
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2 responses so far ↓
1 Bernie Goldbach // Jul 1, 2008 at 11:19 am
You might remember SEISS exploring this co-working hotdesk concept years ago during a government-funded exploration of how knowledge workers prefer something slightly more accommodating than a latop on kness.
James Corbett’s evangelising of co-working is several years old now. It’s good to see the idea percolating into other OpenCoffee sessions outside of Limerick.
2 James Corbett // Jul 3, 2008 at 2:46 pm
Aha! Clear as mud now Richard ;-p
Seriously though, I take your point…. and anyway I’m more interested in the future of coworking than the history.
PS. Cheers Bernie, but I have to point out that while I’ve been doing plenty ‘talking’ the lads in Dublin, like Jason Roe, Eoghan McCabe and Paul Campbell, have been doing the walking. They’re the coworking gurus ’round these parts. While Matt Johnstonn and some of the Belfast OpenCoffeeClubbers seem to be getting the scene off the ground in up north.
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