Collaboration, community, sustainability, openness, and accessibility…these are the fundamentals of coworking.
During my first year of telecommuting for Planet Discover (2007), I quickly learned that although remote work offered flexibility and independence, it was accompanied by a slight feeling of isolation. I learned that although conference calls and emails can be just as effective when building and supporting software solutions, it was not fulfilling my own desire to be around like-minded folks throughout the day. So off to the coffee shops I went. But the background noise was unacceptable when speaking with clients so I began searching for desk space. In 2009 I found a desk at a mortgage firm that had just let half of their team go, but after a few months they folded and I was back at home (not that the mortgage brokers were necessarily “like-minded folks”, but they were human and I was desperate).
All hail the coworking movement! In 2010, The White Table Foundation coworking space opened in Fort Lauderdale. I was the first person to sign up and it was the happiest I had been since I started telecommuting. No two days in the space were the same. Someone new was always popping in, brainstorming sessions were held, events were planned. It was exactly the type of collaboration and sense of community that had been lacking in my life.
After six months at The White Table Foundation, I was hungry for more coworking experience. So as a young, single woman with a love for travel I made the decision to leave Florida for a spell and check out a few progressive coworking cities. This was the turning point from simply telecommuting into becoming a digital nomad.
On New Year’s Day 2011 I left for Austin, TX where I landed at Perch Coworking, an intimate space on E. Sixth Street. Until Perch, my assumption was that coworking spaces would be populated with techies. This held true at Perch, but I was also pleased to find that I was working side by side with two women running a jewelry company and another woman writing a fiction novel!
Austin was getting hot by the end of May and Colorado sounded like a great place to spend the summer so I relocated to Boulder and found the Boulder Digital Arts space. BDA is an impressive space offering endless resources for technology and creative professionals. Workshops and events were plenty here and it was impossible not to feed off the creativity from the folks I met. My most memorable coworker at BDA was a paraglider who considered himself “the local self-appointed ambassador of foot-launched flying.” One day he sent an email to the group about a new “wing” he wanted to test and would anyone be interested in running and jumping off of Lookout Mountain. Yes please! That evening I was soaring above beautiful Golden, CO.
Since my coworking adventure out West, I now call two coworking spaces home. CoLab Workspaces in Fort Lauderdale, FL and Athensworks in Athens, OH. I feel incredibly lucky to be able to experience living and working from different cities, and for the opportunity to work next to so many talented people, if only for a few months here and there. There is much to be learned in these hubs of independent creativity. I follow the coworking movement closely and am intrigued and excited by how it is changing the way we work, and I will forever be proud of my generation for busting through the traditional office mold.