Hello! First, let me introduce myself.
Stephanie Booth, pink-haired social media thingy and event organiser blogging away at Climb to the Stars and now various other places (http://friendfeed.com/sbooth will give you the best summary). I live in Lausanne, Switzerland, and as a freelance consultant who's often on the road, I came to learn about coworking (mainly during my stay last summer in SF, with Chris and Tara). I'm somebody who enjoys working from home, but suffers a bit from lack of structure in my days/life at times. I've also been through phases of intense work when preparing my conference Going Solo, where I wished I had somewhere else to go and work than home. I'm the kind of person who'd like a place to meet clients, and go and Get Stuff Done 3-4 half-days a week. (And also meet human beings I'm not necessarily interacting with one-on-one during all the time I'm with them.) I've been talking about coworking in my area for some time now, and found some like-minded people, but unfortunately not enough (and not enough solid interest) to actually set up a space. One of the issues that we deal with here (I really think it's a cultural/regional thing) is that people are not ready to commute much (me included). A 30-minute commute to work is usually considered a long way away, here. As far as coworking is concerned, that means we need to find enough interested in a reasonably small geographical area -- and Lausanne, second only to Geneva around here, is about 150'000 people, 200'000 if I'm generous (correct me if I'm wrong). So, not to whine, but the situation here is slightly different than in the middle of a big metropolis. Over the last months, I was approached twice with spaces that could be suitable for coworking, so I started thinking seriously about putting the energy to gather enough people to start a community here. In both cases, the space availability didn't work out (funding issues and lack of existing community to solve them). So, I decided to keep the idea warm, and work on gathering the community "somewhere" so that should a suitable space show up, it would be easy to see if enough potential tenants were interested. Coworking, like BarCamp, is a very local thing. But if your "local" is too small, nothing much happens. I decided to create a mailing-list for interested people in "the area", the latter being loosely defined as "around the lake". (Lake Geneva, or Lac Léman -- its real name.) There is also a blog, but it's in a very embryonic state at the moment. If you're in Switzerland, or neighbouring France, feel free to join our group so you can meet other interested people in your area. <http://groups.google.com/group/coworking-leman/> Just now, it seems the tenants of the office space on the ground floor of my building are going to be heading out by 2009. They've asked me if I was interested in taking over the space. I'm pretty extatic, as it seems quite ideal to me: 116m2, calm, accessible by car and public transport (5 min by bus from city centre), cheap (700$/mo), has a separate room we can turn into a meeting room, and big windows with the garden just outside. So, I'm in the process of trying to figure out if there are enough people in the Lausanne area for me to take the risk of signing the lease :-) If there are coworking efforts taking place elsewhere in Switzerland, I'd be really happy to learn about them! Cheers Steph (follow the links in the signature for more juicy details about myself) -- Sept 12th: http://going-solo.net | newsletter: http://groups.google.com/group/going-solo-news geotag: Lausanne, CH (GMT+1) web: http://stephanie-booth.com blog: http://climbtothestars.org skype: steph-booth | cell: +41 78 625 44 74 | twitter: stephtara MSN: [EMAIL PROTECTED] | AIM: Gummywabbit For the rest... Google me! --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Coworking" group. To post to this group, send email to coworking@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/coworking?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
