Thanks a lot for the wealth of information. Very useful. I get it now. Mostly old things under new names but I get it.
I was born in 1963 (age 51). I recall in the 1970's-1980's when most of us, my buddies and I, were students we would do exactly what is now called jellies and hoffices. We would gather and study (which is work) or work in professional projects (I would do this, I was a programmer). Also interesting how you picture the space/community manager(?) as a commercial facilitator, the "middle man": another age-old thing. Personally I envisage one or more of the coworkers playing that role (for the others), not the space manager. I get the idea of "social capital", and I agree it is a thing of immense value, but strikes me as a very hard thing to trade, or market, or monetise. The old way is through commissions, or a commercial margin, but then we fall back in the old ways, and will not progress. I see the "new" way is the intangible notion that increasing the value of the community will entail an increase of (paid) utilization of the space/resources. Maybe that's the trick (also old as such), but very hard to capture as a business model. /* Since I'm rambling so much I shoud explain: I am an infrequent coworker of paid coworking spaces, a more frequent coworker at jellies (some organized by myself), because now I'm on a low income, and a prospective coworking space manager at a small town, which business I find very hard to start, e.g. banks won't fund it. I am an unemployed software engineer, linguist, composer. I am trying to redefine my coworking space business plan. I find coworking very complex, difficult to plan and as a business, difficult to present as a business to stakeholders--they don't know the word or the concept. I have been trying to grow a community--very difficult too in a small town (Vila do Conde, Portugal) */ Thanks a very great lot. -- Visit this forum on the web at http://discuss.coworking.com --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Coworking" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to coworking+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
