Strategies for showing which members are on-site on a given day?

[Eli Malinsky]

Hey all

Wonder if anyone has novel ways of showing which members are in the space on a given day. Do you use table signs? flags? Pictures? Anything? I'd love to hear any creative ideas.

We've tried a few things in the past but nothing's really stuck. I'd love to hear your experiences, see pics, etc.

thanks!

Eli Malinsky
Centre for Social Innovation
New York // Toronto

[Alex Hillman]

I've found that the faces on the people who are in the space are the best way to see who's in the space. ;)

-Alex

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[Jacob Sayles]

We have done this in a few different ways but both rely on tech (Nadine).  We have an iPad at the front desk that shows who is "Here Today" and I setup a screen that shows the same information but bigger and continuously.  But I mucked up the works that drove the screen so it's not up anymore.  Nadine can also email alert when you and someone you want to meet are both in the space.  Fun stuff but both require the tech and going to a machine which less interesting since it's not at the table, with the people when they are working.  That would be more exciting and more in line with your question I believe.  

Jacob

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[Alex Linsker]

I agree with Alex, it's true. At Collective Agency the most important signage we have is a wall of member bios: name, photo, some questions and answers.

People can then match a name to a face, find a skillset, or start a conversation. Most importantly, the member bios on the wall are a sign of appreciation: people like being valued here not for the work they do, but for who they are as people. Their info on the wall is a sign they belong to the community: it's next to the Community Guidelines sheet (the limits of how we are here).

The inspiration for member bios on the wall was a company I worked at that had a bulletin board with photos of employees on fishing trips, with friends and family and each other, with names written below the employees.

We've found any online info about people is not what members and meetings are paying for here; they are paying to be in a cozy place working alongside people doing a variety of work they're passionate about and committed to, where 80% of people say hi.

Alex
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[Samir Madi]

Here at Coletivo Labs the house is too big to see who's in, so we are using a a metal board on the wall. Each coworker have a magnet (just like those refrigerator magnets, very cheap) with their pic, info, etc.

On the metal board, there's two columns, who is on the house, who is not... who walks in, moves the magnet to the right column.

-Samir

[Elise Colcord]

Hey All, 

I'm fairly new to the coworking world, been involved since Oct. 2013. Jacob, that sounds really interesting and an organic way for members to "team-up" for projects or answer questions. What kind of system were/are your using when you refer to tech ? 

Thanks, 

-Elise

www.thincsavannah.com 

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[Eli Malinsky]

Interesting. Samir - do people consistently move their magnets in and out? i.e., is it working?

We also have a magnetic board with pictures and project/org names, but i'm not sure people would consistently use it to indicate their attendance.

And, while I agree with Alex Hillman, our philosophy is to use multiple modes - technical, social, interpersonal, physical artifacts, etc - to reinforce community. Different people engage in different ways and we try to create a multiplicity of options that suit different personalities, etc.

I'd love to hear any other ideas!!

Eli 

[Jacob Sayles]

Elise,

We use Nadine to manage our space. It's an open source system we developed here at Office Nomads.  The points that Alex and Alex made are really important to keep in mind though when considering technical "solutions" since they don't really work for the majority of cases they are relied on for.  People come for the people first and foremost.  The main reason Nadine works for us is that everyone gets a profile (entered by us) since this is how we track membership.  The member facing sided of it is a perk most people don't care about.  

Jacob

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[Elise Colcord]

Ah, I understand better now. Love the conversations y'all have and as I grow more here, I hope to contribute more as well! 

Thanks for your response! 

-Elise

[Samir Madi]

Eli,

at first, they were forgetting. But now it's working just fine. 

It's the first thing you see after the front door.

[Sam Rosen]

For what it's worth Desktime has a member directory built into the app so it shows members the folks that are in the space today and those that are part of the community, but aren't booked in the space. Since it's the same system that managing billing and scheduling we've had great success at the member directory being up-to-date and utilized.

https://www.desktimeapp.com/features/members

At NextSpace we have a member's also have wall that stays current with folks pictures. They add a little "new" symbol so folks can quickly see new members of the community.

Sam 

Desktime powers Coworking.

http://desktimeapp.com

[Justin Harley]

Sam

Sounds great - but how do you track who is in the space today - I guess they have to check in somehow but what works for you ?

Justin

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[Will Bennis, Locus Workspace]

Nice to see this discussion. 

I've had several requests from members for a way to see who's in each space, who is sitting where, and whether they could reserve seats next to each other for the day, so I'm curious if there are good available (and affordable) online solutions. Although I would prefer the low-tech solution of members just looking to see who's there, here's why I'd like an Internet tool (that can be accessed away from the space):

 

Challenge 1: Allowing members to choose who to work alongside across multiple floors and multiple locations. We have two coworking spaces about 15 minutes away from each other (by public transport). All members are free to work at either location and some of them mix it up moving between locations on a regular basis. Some members have preferences about who they work with (or who they don't work with), and often it's an overall view they want to decide where to go. I don't want to reinforce cliques, but on the other hand, I do want to make it easier for members to choose the environment they'd prefer without having to visit both spaces to decide. If they could log themselves into the website and get a sense of who's where (especially if they know there friends will be doing it, too), it would help them decide where to work. 

Challenge 2: Allowing members and the coworking space to manage capacity across multiple locations. Almost all of our desks are hot desks, and there is amazing variatiability in how full (or empty) a floor or coworking space is. Some members prefer a busier space and some prefer a quieter space. If they could look to see how crowded the different locations are, it would again help them to decide where to work that day (and help us manage our resources more efficiently so we don't have to worry about a space being completely full while the other one is half empty). (This part doesn't require any kind of identity or seat-specific tracking, just a space use/availability counter that could be visible to members off site.)

Challenge 3: Allowing members to reserve spaces to be sure they can find a desk next to each other on a given day. Sometimes a group of three or four members wants to work alongside each other on a project for the day. Usually this isn't a problem since we they can usually find a spot with four available seats side-by-side. But we've had larger teams (off three or four people) who decided not to join our coworking space because they were worried about being able to find free tables to work together reliably. We always have plenty of available space, but not always four spaces next to each other, so I've had to tell them that that won't always be possible. Members have there own keys and often there isn't a manager at the space to reserve a desk if we wanted to offer that option. I'd love a system where members could reserve seats online (with a map of the space, so they could be sure to reserve seats alongside people they want to collaborate with).  

My ideal would be some kind of 2-D space layout tool (like the many online tools for seating planning for weddings or other one-off events, but instead for a permanent seating layout) with the ability for members to log in to a seat but only once they're connected to the onsite Internet. I'd like it to have a reservation system, so you'd have both current users and an ability to see future reservations. And I'd like the ability to set fees for reservations (so people only reserve seats when they need them), and to set automatic cancellations of reservations if people don't log in to their seat from within the space within a certain specified time (to minimize seats being reserved that aren't actually used). My thought was a good tool like this would have great general use (movie theaters, restaurants, any place with fixed seating where groups might want to be able to choose where they sit or who they sit near without having to first show up and see what's available. You could have an option to log in through google+, facebook, linkedin, foursquare, etc., and either make your identity "public" or just make it visible to your "friends", etc. But even without the mass social media tool designed for multiple purposes, I'd love a solution that just worked for my coworking space and our members. Does anything like this exist already? (Or anyone want to build it? :)

[Angel Kwiatkowski]

One of our members designed a simple check-in page from our website so you can be at home and see who's in the space on a given day. It also flows over into my google analytics so I can see what kind of use we're getting and if any patterns are emerging. This helps with knowing how many of what types of memberships I can continue to sell. Here's a link http://coherecommunity.com/checkin-form

Angel

[Alex Hillman]

Hey Angel, how consistently do people use this form? Any tips? 

We've played with something like this and found that it's really, really hard to help people create this habit. 

-Alex

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[Glen Ferguson]

Hi Alex,

We've got that part covered. Like at a hotel or coffee shop, our members have to log in on a splash screen before they get access to the internet. So, no problem getting them into the habit and it helps me log attendance data.

My current challenge is taking that info and having it published on the website. Thanks Angel for sharing how you're doing it. You've given me some ideas.

[Anca Mosoiu]

Hi Glen,

What are you using to meter the internet access? I'm in the midst of upgrading our network and this would be a very useful thing to set up.

Anca.

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[Glen Ferguson]

Hi Anca,

We're using Meraki managed access points and they've been pretty flexible for our needs.

[Kyle McLaren]

Hi all,

I'm in the process of implementing a technical solution to this for my new coworking space (Engineroom). 

We have a Ubiquity UniFi WLAN from which I'm able to get a list of users (through a 3rd party API) who are currently active on the network. This list is then published to a Firebase database and users can then view (in realtime) who is active on the network via a web app that pulls data from Firebase.

Kyle McLaren

Founder

@EngineroomHQ

[Alex Hillman]

Those UniFi AP's look pretty great, but are surprisingly cheap to me compared to the other enterprise options I've tested. It says "up to 100 concurrent connections" in the traffic management part, but I've learned the hard way that those numbers are usually theoretical :) How many people do actually you have distributed across each one?

-Alex 

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[Kyle McLaren]

Hey Alex,

They are cheap, Ubiquity is famous for disruptive pricing. At maximum capacity we hope to have 100 members with 2 AP's running (may add a third). The AP's have some nice features like automatic load balancing of traffic and zero-handoff for seamless roaming between AP's. 

The nice thing about UniFi is they have a software controller (as opposed to hardware) that can even run on a cloud server, it's free as well whereas Cisco etc charge licensing fees for their software.

Time will tell how they perform but reviews have been great. Many people reccomend them over Ruckus for instance and for a coworking facility, you probably don't need much more.

(I have no affiliation with them :)

Kyle McLaren

Founder

@EngineroomHQ

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[Sam Rosen]

We ran a couple Ubiquity routers at The Coop. They were our saving grace after a bunch of trials with other hardware. We've got two AP's and we have no issues on average managing 200+ connections.

Sam

Desktime powers Coworking.
http://desktimeapp.com

[Alex Hillman]

Thanks Kyle!

Do you (or does anyone else on the list) know about a specific place where these APs are in production with 100+ devices connected? One of the things that we learned to account for is that 100 members usually equals 200+ devices (count in mobile phones, tablets, etc. 

We did trials with a bunch of options - with an emphasis on the cloud controllers - and found that nobody performed as well as the Ruckus devices in spite of the promises on their websites and from their sales people. We have two Ruckus 7962's that outperform every other device we tried in production (including Meraki & Cisco hardware, at opposite ends of the price spectrum). 

Mind you, the cloud controllers are WAY better than what we have, and man, do I want some of those features. But they don't matter much when people can't consistently connect to the AP in the first place. ;) With all of that in mind, I'd replace our Ruckus hardware in a heartbeat if I knew for a fact that we'd get equal or better performance. 

So you'll have to forgive me for being suspicious of the theoretical performance capabilities, and why I'm hungry for more data. 

You mentioned reviews - could you point me towards them?

-Alex

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[Jonathan Markwell]

I've not got hard data but since we got our UniFi AP Pros I've not had to think about WiFi. It's the only networking hardware I've ever had that gets close to an Apple-like Just Works experience.

We regularly have 90+ devices without a problem but we've got 3 APs sharing the load - I've never stress tested one by itself. They're such good value and play so well with each other that I get the impression we'd be fine adding more APs if we needed to scale. I understand that among other things regulate their own signal strength so they don't interfere with each other. They even continued to work without complaint when the controller (an old Mac Mini) was accidentally turned off for a few days.

Jon

Jonathan Markwell

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[Alex Hillman]

Awesome feedback guys - thank you!

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[Jacob Sayles]

This is great information!  We are pushing our two Airport Extremes and are starting to look for a more enterprise solution.  They have been great, but these days we are averaging 120 devices a day and if I don't reboot them once a week they stop accepting new connections about Wednesday or Thursday.   

I wonder if we could get away with only having two of these or if we should get more.  Currently we have an Airport on each 5000sqft floor and have plenty of coverage.  

Jacob

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[Melissa Mesku]

Wish I had a more technically helpful answer, but as a coworking member, the most impressive solution I've seen is at the Grind in NYC. Members there use a card to tap themselves in every day, and photo profiles of all checked-in members appear in a private online directory and elegantly on a large screen in the space. I asked whether they could tell me what they use, but no dice. I might have to challenge one of their people to an arm wrestle. 

Melissa 

(coworker at New Work City in NYC) 

[Thilo Utke]

Hi Jakob,

yes that's sounds like a lot of load for the stations :)
it's a shot in the dark but maybe you have a to small subnet and the station runs out of IP addresses to assign, that's usally the case when you choose a subnet mask of 255.255.255.0.

Cheers
Thilo

[Thilo Utke]

Hi all,

as the subject about getting the wifi right was bought up I like to share my post about getting the wifi right in high density situations that in parts applies to coworking spaces too. http://thilo.me/post/62067077735/the-conference-wifi-checklist

TL,DR: Unifi is great, use the 5GHz Band :)

Cheers
Thilo

co.up coworking / cobot.me

[Angel Kwiatkowski]

Pretty consistently. We obviously don't have a perfect record, that would be unrealistic. I got a used 1st gen ipad for $50. It's "vintage" and it's propped up on a table that you can see as you come in the door. The ipad never rests/sleeps/gets turned off so it's ALWAYS displayed and visible as people come in. After a few weeks of gentle reminders as people walk in it seems to have stuck.

Angel

[Angel Kwiatkowski]

OH! And I explain that their checkins help me figure out how many more memberships I can sell which seems to be motivating because if they don't check in, I don't have the right data which can lead to TOO many members and not enough chairs for everyone. That would be a catastrophe! :)

On Saturday, February 8, 2014 1:53:56 PM UTC-7, Alex Hillman wrote:

[Craig Plunkett]

At New Work City, we're using a Meru Networks system ( I'm the territory Sales Engineer ) with a Peplink Balance 300 router and two TWC cable modems.  I'm finding that the device to person ratio here is 2+.  Over the past year we've been peaking at over 110 devices per day.  We'll be adding a couple of 802.11ac access points soon.  Now if we could only get fiber in the building.  We haven't implemented a captive portal yet, but without that, it's tough to get a user count.

[Alex Linsker]

For wifi and AP's: we have 4 AP's and sometimes more than 100 devices. We have a second wifi network for members when desired, it's rarely used but great to have. Stephouse Networks is great, they do full service install and maintenance in Portland Oregon.

Reading the comments above, I was reminded of the old workatjelly.com wiki -- back before New Work City was called that and was Cooper Bricolage, and for Amit Gupta and Luke and other's Jelly coworking, people writing their name, estimated time of arrival and departure, and what we'd each be working on that day, often with a link to a website, was a great way for people to attract other people, a day or a week in advance.

We do that in person now at weekly Lightning Talks: your name, and in 10 seconds or less what are you working on today. (We do that before the talks, it is amazing for bonding.)

Alex Linsker, Collective Agency, Portland Oregon

[Adrian Palacios]

We usually tackle this in two different steps, one to know who is in and out of the space and another to communicate this to everyone.

In most cases, we rely on members having to check in and out *somehow* so the system knows they are in the space and for how long. This "somehow" is the tricky bit and we find that having several options resulting on a check-in and keeping these as close as possible to the normal use of the space works best. As it was mentioned in this thread, it is no possible to get a 100% accurate number of who was in the space, but you can try to maximize your chances. There are some practices we found to have different degree of success in different spaces depending on how they are run:

• If there is a card system to open the entry door(s), hook this to the checking system, so accessing the space results in the member being checked in. For safety reasons, the members should not be forced to check out to leave the space, but the system can remind members who didn't check out every midnight. We know of some spaces where this technique has been quite effective. 
  
  
• If you use a WiFi router supporting Captive Portal, pfSense or RADIUS, hook it to the check-in system, so members are asked for their member login details and checked-in when they connect to the internet. This method also can assume somebody is no longer in the space after they disconnect for a period of time.
  
  
• If you have manned front-desk provide a RFID card reader connected to the check-in system, so members can check in and out from there too. Reminders can also be sent to members who checked-in but didn't check out.

In general the less intrusive the better results you should get but assume there will be a bit of an education process at first.

The second issue is how to display who in the space. For this case we merged this info with the members directory. The home page of the space website shows a random selection of who is the space, the picture of each person and access to their profile and social and contact details. The full directory of members can also be filtered to show just who is in the space at that moment and checked-in members are highlighted in the list in case you just want to browse around the directory and find someone to talk to :)

If you want to go a step further, there is also the option to access that data using an public API, which will let you display the images and/or profiles of each member checked in in a TV screen, tablet or any device able to make a request over the internet, so that opens up a good range of options.

The idea is basically to have a range of options for members to check in, but all resulting in a single system knowing if the member is in the space or not. You can then use this to show who is in the space, run occupancy reports, billing, etc... 

Adrian

[te...@mail.hubud.org]

I was doing other research here and came across these Unifi posts... We've been using Unifi APs for a while now with good results. But we're only using them for 5ghz. We had issues running them on both 2+5 simultaneously so left the old 2ghz APs running. But I think those issues were more related to a couple misbehaving 2ghz devices. We have 3 APs running on 5ghz sharing a load of no more than 30 devices each AP. The central management interface is nice - basic, but nice to see all the wireless activity from different APs in one screen.

If you run 5ghz and 2ghz, I would suggest having a separate SSID for 5ghz. Letting devices and APs try to negotiate which freq to use doesn't produce the best results. Essentially all of our members with Macs are on the 5G (75%) while the PCs and other devices are all on 2G (separate APs).

For the techies, they do run linux and you can get access to the command line (minimally). Usually one AP does need a hard reboot every other week. But that's probably because we're running the beta software (and/or we have a lot of weird client devices that sometimes cause issues for us). 

Zero handoff feature was mentioned in another post. Note that you probably won't be able to use it in a complex, busy, or high capacity environment due to serious limitations in how zero handoff works (all APs must operate on the same channel, etc). Too bad because it sounded cool. But our testing showed it didn't work very well yet and had those significant implementation restrictions. I will say though that regular handoff with unifi works pretty well - certainly better than our other APs.

In our case the APs are only APs. All other network management tricks are done in the core routers/firewalls.

Cheers, m.

-Alex 

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