I'm inspired a bit by the Creative Commons license widget:

They give you a choice, to require those who re-use your work to:
Attribute you,  the author; (A)
Keep commercial interest out of the picture; (NC)
Preserve the original piece - don't make derivatives; (ND)
Share-alike, thereby making the license viral. (SA)

There are checkboxes, allowing you to choose CC with a combination of flavors. CC-A-NC-ND-SA 3.0 (the license also has versioning)

Maybe our widget would simply walk you through what it means to accept each checkbox, and how others have created the environment that allows these values to be enforced by the community. Almost like a public service announcement: "Reduce, Reuse, Recycle" were the old principles there.

Is it as simple as a page on your site (or in a printed brochure)? "These are our values, and we've taken a few from the global Coworking movement". (no hyphens, please)

If every space could be transparent about how they were putting these into practice, and it were as easy to adopt as the Creative Commons experience, then we may even see an easy way to build a directory of spaces, because of everyone who fills in the widget, and let the people in each city choose for themselves...?

If your personal values are in line with Coworking, lobby your space's stakeholders to adopt at least a few principles and be public about it. Obviously, they have to follow-through. It is an advantage to call attention to these differences as a reason to choose your space and become involved.

Maybe we can even come up with some graphics / branding / micro-site for this? (a possible use for some community funds) Now, one of the efforts of Coworking.com becomes trying to enable, showcase and support people who choose to get involved with a global, distributed movement. However, you need not participate in this campaign explicitly order to be recognized.

Peace,
Ryan Price
rpr...@ryanpricemedia.com
@liberatr
407-484-8528

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On Mar 1, 2010, at 2:03 PM, Tony Bacigalupo wrote:

Re: Jacob:

I would posit that, on the most basic level, we can and should be able to have something universal to represent the core values of coworking without getting stuck in the specifics of implementation.

We could get back into a debate over what those exact core values are (please lordy no), but roughly speaking, if a given thing is all about community, openness, collaboration, accessibility and sustainability, then it tastes like coworking pizza to me.

I like the idea of requiring some sort of a CS/Station C-style manifesto, but that would mean we'd need...

(Re: Alex:)

...A decisionmaking body. What I'm suggesting is that we offer something that requires no decisionmaking whatsoever. People take it and subscribe to it, or they don't. You wouldn't put a Vote Obama bumper sticker on your car if you didn't support Obama, and you don't put a Coworking Core Values badge on your site if you don't support the core values.

Self-enforcing, sticks to the core, strengthens the core, and scalable. If someone wants to open a co-baking space or a co- laundromat, or whatever, and they want to publicly subscribe to our core values, then awesome. If somebody wants to pretend to be coworking when they're not, they're going to run into problems down the line and either adapt or drop it.

So far so good.

T

On Mon, Mar 1, 2010 at 1:27 PM, Alex Hillman <dangerouslyawes...@gmail.com > wrote: To be clear, the badging idea isn't quite what I had in mind, but it does raise some interesting thoughts. The main problem is that there becomes an "issuing" body, which we're trying to avoid. That's the same problem as a license; it comes from an issuing body.

I'd like to see more people seeing, and embracing the values though. And if you go back to my original post, it's more about encouraging people to give back and participate, not just slap the word coworking on it and get some press. Not enforcing, but encouraging. Again, I don't know what that looks like just yet, but I'm all for keeping it far more lightweight than not.

I'd also like to decouple the money raising conversation from this badge/license conversation as while I'm OK with the idea of a way to declare our shared values, I don't want coworking.com to be a money making or money collecting entity.

Completely agreed. I didn't mean to bring them up in the same breath and confuse the issue, but I totally agree that coworking.com is a declaration, not a venture.

-Alex

/ah
indyhall.org
coworking in philadelphia


On Mon, Mar 1, 2010 at 1:21 PM, Jacob Sayles <jsay...@gmail.com> wrote: The biggest take away I've gathered from this discussion is that I'm opposed to any kind of limiting or confining definition at a global level. I've encountered spaces that claim to be coworking that I don't share their values, and I've seen spaces that embody everything I believe in, but either don't consider themselves coworking, or in the case of Think Space in Redmond, they use the term Executive Suite to blend in better with the east side mentality. Rather then focus on false positives and false negatives, I instead choose to relax my need to have a "unifying" definition. This is reenforced by looking at everything that has happened and how we've been able to attract like minded people into our space simply by living our values every day. I don't need words to tell me what that "magic" is and I'd prefer to not muddy the definition by throwing words at it.

So this badge/license idea... Part of me doesn't like it. That's the part that wrote the above paragraph. But then I ask if there is a way to structure something on a global level that doesn't impose a definition on those opting in and doesn't exclude people who want to participate. It's a slippery slope and one I'm reluctant to head down, especially with the recent exchanges that have slashed my confidence that a global consensus can be reached. But I'll entertain the idea further...

Perhaps it could be as simple as if you make a public statement like Citizen Space and Station C have made, you get a badge or something.
   - http://citizenspace.us/about/our-philosophy/
   - http://station-c.com/en/community-manifesto

I'd also like to decouple the money raising conversation from this badge/license conversation as while I'm OK with the idea of a way to declare our shared values, I don't want coworking.com to be a money making or money collecting entity.

Jacob

---
Office Nomads - Individuality without Isolation
http://www.officenomads.com -  (206) 323-6500



On Mon, Mar 1, 2010 at 7:28 AM, Tara Hunt <horsepig...@gmail.com> wrote:
Badges! We don't need no stinking...

Actually I love this idea!

typed choppily on my Nexus One....


On Mar 1, 2010 8:19 AM, "Tony Bacigalupo" <tonybacigal...@gmail.com> wrote:

I'm intrigued by the idea that someone can opt-in to the core values of coworking, in a way that if they didn't embody those core values it wouldn't make sense for them to use the license.

So, for instance, say we had a Coworking Badge that anyone could download and use, and right on that image it says something like "We subscribe to the core values of Community, Openness, Collaboration, Accessibility, Sustainability," and it links back to coworking.com.

That way, it would be difficult for someone to co-opt the term without misrepresenting themselves. If an exec suite wants to do coworking and would like to offer something that legitimately embodies those above values, then wonderful.

Self-enforcement.



>
> On Mar 1, 2010 2:46 AM, "Mike Schinkel" <mikeschin...@newclarity.net > wrote:
>


> Hi Alex,
>
>> I like essence of the idea, but I can't see directly how to apply it.
>>
>> When I l...


-Mike


>
>
>
>
> On Mar 1, 2010, at 1:40 AM, Alex Hillman wrote:
>

>> As you are envisioning it, what exactly would...



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