Digital Tools for Coworking Spaces

[Zoe Fox]

Hi everyone,

I am working on a story for Mashable.com about digital tools for
coworking spaces and I'd love to hear people's favorites. Feel free to
either reply to this post or if you'd like to speak with me in person,
just let me know.

Much appreciation,
Zoe

[Angel Kwiatkowski]

Here is the reply I sent to Zoe. Thought maybe people could benefit
from reading it...Also, Cohere is probably one of the "lower-tech"
spaces in terms of how we run ourselves. I'm a big fan of simplicity
first. I hope that you'll find what you need for your article below.

Community Manager to Members & Member to Member Communication
When we want to make sure that everyone gets the same message, we'll
email it to all members. For daily/casual member to member
communication we use 2 different digital tools. The first is Internet
Relay Chat (IRC). This "technology" is a relic from the past but it
works like a charm and since so many of the developers are already on
there chatting with their tech groups, it was an easy solution to make
a #CohereLLC channel on Freenode. Often, IRC gets used to blow off
steam and circulate the latest "lol website/video." The second is
Facebook Groups. Any Cohere member or alumni who has a Facebook
account is included in the group. Members primarily use this group to
seek advice on client questions or issues. For example, the writers
often get pricing advice from other writers in the group.

How Community Managers run their spaces (as a business)
There are some great digital tools coming out to help space owners
manage the daily details like reservations, billing, payment and wifi
access. One notable one to watch is Cobot. It was developed by space
managers and it's sleek and easy to use. There are other open source
management solutions like Nadine, used by Office Nomads, and Seltzer
which just hit the scene recently. Cohere doesn't use any of these yet
but instead uses a combination of Google documents and calendar with
Quickbooks online payment solutions like recurring credit card
processing, cell phone credit card swiper and online payments via a
checking account. These easy payment methods allow members to focus on
just being a member instead of figuring out how to pay. It also
minimizes the time that space owners spend tracking down money. Also
notable is that Cohere doesn't use any type of reservation system for
desks like many spaces do. We leave it to chance and we've never run
out of room yet! We do use a shared Google calendar to manage our
conference room reservations.

How Community Managers collaborate with other Community Managers
The primary tool that coworking community managers use is our
Coworking Google Group. This is where new coworking enthusiasts and
coworking veterans converge to share best practices and lend a helping
hand. To date, there are nearly 3,500 members who have posted 13,697
messages!

Area where the global coworking community needs help...
As a giant worldwide community of ~1,000 coworking spaces with an
estimated 50,000 members (likely many more) we need help finding or
developing a tool that allows for members of different coworking
communities in far away states and countries to find one another and
collaborate. I'm hoping that in the next year, we'll have a great
digital tool at our disposal that would allow a member of Cohere in
Colorado to easily search out another coworker in say Pakistan who
might be able to help with a problem or share ideas on a project. I
think overcoming this logistical challenge will take the coworking
movement to the next level.

[john....@gmail.com]

To echo Angel,

Internally we use IRC for member-member and uncubed-member chatting. So far it's proven really great, and since our members are all techies to one degree or another, they get IRC.

We're still working on the back end systems, but likely it'll be google docs for tracking, etc and fresh books for invoicing, bookkeeping. Square and paypal are how we're handling payments.

We're also using Facebook a lot for events, and things like that.

John Wilker
Founder, 360|Conferences
twitter: jwilker
johnwilker.com | Ignite Denver| Denwhere | 360|Flex | 360|iDev

“A goal is not always meant to be reached, it often serves simply as something to aim at.”
~ Bruce Lee

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Coworking" group.
To post to this group, send email to cowo...@googlegroups.com.
To unsubscribe from this group, send email to coworking+...@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/coworking?hl=en.

[Alex Hillman]

Agreed with everything in here, awesome notes. On the chat tip, we've started using Hipchat and it's been really popular and a great way for people to stay connected even when you're offsite. Hipchat is the easiest to get people started, which is important for us because we're not limited to just tech-savvy folks.

-Alex

/ah
indyhall.org
coworking in philadelphia

[Angel Kwiatkowski]

re: IRC, one of the members wrote this instructional blog post for
IRC. It's also been neat to watch the techies help the non-techies get
on IRC and learn something new!
http://coherecommunity.com/?p=1031

Angel

On Aug 17, 9:05 am, Alex Hillman <dangerouslyawes...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Agreed with everything in here, awesome notes. On the chat tip, we've
> started using Hipchat and it's been really popular and a great way for
> people to stay connected even when you're offsite. Hipchat is the easiest to
> get people started, which is important for us because we're not limited to
> just tech-savvy folks.
>
> -Alex
>
> /ah
> indyhall.org
> coworking in philadelphia
>

> On Wed, Aug 17, 2011 at 10:42 AM, john.wil...@gmail.com <

>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> john.wil...@gmail.com> wrote:
> > To echo Angel,
>
> > Internally we use IRC for member-member and uncubed-member chatting. So far
> > it's proven really great, and since our members are all techies to one
> > degree or another, they get IRC.
>
> > We're still working on the back end systems, but likely it'll be google
> > docs for tracking, etc and fresh books for invoicing, bookkeeping. Square
> > and paypal are how we're handling payments.
>
> > We're also using Facebook a lot for events, and things like that.
>
> > John Wilker
> > Founder, 360|Conferences

> > twitter: jwilker <http://twitter.com/jwilker>
> > johnwilker.com | Ignite Denver <http://ignitedenver.org>| Denwhere<http://denwhere.com>|
> > 360|Flex <http://360flex.com> | 360|iDev <http://360idev.com>

>
> > “A goal is not always meant to be reached, it often serves simply as
> > something to aim at.”
> > ~ Bruce Lee
>

[gerard sychay]

Has anyone tried using Google+ Hangouts for this purpose?  I haven't, but this thread made me think of Hangouts as a potential.

Gerard
http://cincycoworks.com

[Alex Hillman]

We played with Google+ Hangouts on Coworking day, I was in a room with Jonathan Yankovich and Jacob Sayles. 

It's cool tech, but...

I don't think we're evolved to really take advantage of video chat just yet, or the tech isn't quite human enough. As much as I tried to enjoy it, the awkwardness of not being able to look into the eyes of the person and the camera at the same time makes for a very strange face to face interaction.

There's something cool about ambient background noise coming from a "sister coworking space". But I found it to be more distracting after the first 5 minutes than not. It was charming, but not really useful, to watch Jacob take a call from Susan. 

Text chat (Campfire, Hipchat, IRC) is sweetest because it's asynchronous and opt-in broadcast. That is, you don't need to be paying attention when something happens to get benefit from it, and you don't broadcast EVERYTHING you say and do to the other chatters like you do in video chat. It also promotes sharing of fun things, like links, photos, videos, etc. 

Video chatting with one or many other people, even with Google+'s new easy-to-use Hangouts, is too awkward for me to crave it.

-Alex

/ah
indyhall.org
coworking in philadelphia

--

You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Coworking" group.

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msg/coworking/-/-pHd_InnAoAJ.

[Sari Gordon]

I was reading OfficeNomads and somehow ended up on BizNik. I don't
know a thing about it, but I like the way it looks.

Sari

[Susan Evans]

Hey Sari -

Yep, Office Nomads has had a long-standing relationship with Biznik. They are a Seattle-based (but nationwide) networking group for small business. Their former tagline is notable: "Business networking that doesn't suck." :) They've since moved on to "going it alone, together" which should sound pretty familiar to us coworking space. We have often talked about how Office Nomads is almost an in-person, every-day Biznik to some extent. They're worth checking out for sure, and seeing whether or not they have meetups in your city: http://www.biznik.com/

S

__
Office Nomads         
officenomads.com  
206-484-5859

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Coworking" group.

[Hillary Hartley]

The Biznik crew has also been to Citizen Space a few times when in San Francisco. Great people and a very cool product. As Susan said, definitely take a look to see if it would work for your peeps.

Hillary