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Coworking is cheaper than renting a solo office or executive suite, and provides access to a tresure trove of benefits that home office dwellers can only dream about. Most coworking spaces are real, profitable businesses (or at least headed in that direction), so there are still costs involved. As we've discussed before, however, the for-profit model isn't a requirement for a coworking space's sustainability or sucess.
Late last year, Deskmag reported on an experiment catching fire in the Netherlands: free coworking. Seats2Meet, the company featured in the article, has been renting meeting rooms to companies that wanted to interact outside of their offices for 20 years.
Four years ago Seats2Meet expanded their concept by creating large open working areas that offered their visitors a buffet lunch and free tea and coffee. All for the grand price of nothing at all. Instead, users are expected to pay with “social capital”: "We offer them (facilities) in exchange for their knowledge and added value,” said Vincent Ariëns from Seats2Meet Utrecht.
Many coworking space owners balk at the idea that mobile workers should be able to access their communities without paying. After all, many of these spaces are truly extraordinary, offering modern aesthetics and sophisticated technologies for their members. But according to Felix Schürholzm, publisher of CoWorking News and self-described "free coworking activist," no-charge access is the next, inevitable evolution of the coworking movement.
Shareable caught up with Schürholzm just after the Global Coworking Unconference Conference in Austin to learn more about his quest for free coworking. Here's what he had to say:
Shareable: When did you first discover coworking?
FS: I discovered coworking around the beginning of 2009. As there was no coworking in Munich at the time, a colleague and I traveled to Berlin to look at the HUB Berlin which unfortunately does not exist anymore. The combination of entrepreneurship and coworking that we found was something that fascinated me.
Shareable: The paid coworking industry is growing rapidly, why do you think it should change?
FS: Paid coworking is fine for people who like to work by themselves. They find encouragement and in some cases valuable feedback. They like paid coworking because it gives them more structure and decreases the number of distractions they might otherwise face when working from home. This is fine! But coworking can easily offer a lot more. And it should, otherwise what would be the difference between a coworking space and a business center?
Shareable: OK, so what can free coworking offer that paid coworking can't?
FS: When you look at the core values of coworking, namely collaboration, openness, community, accessibility, and sustainability, you see that paid coworking actually aims at something else. Working by yourself, for example, does not really have much to do with collaboration. There's a big difference between the way you work on a personal project or a collaborative task. Think about the way you will listen to and participate in the "background noise" in your coworking space. When working by yourself, you tend to close your ears and try to shut the noise out. If you work in a team and on a common project you will open your ears and happily receive all the information because you know everything is valuable and important for you. You will start to interact straight away when you receive a new information or when you can offer assistance. That is true collaboration and openness.
Shareable: You say that free coworking supports collaboration and a "connected economy." What does that mean?
FS: A free economy is a connected economy. Only when you're connected can you receive services for free. Paid coworking on the other hand sets a limit on collaboration and openness. When you practice paid coworking you operate in a totally different mindset and framework. A framework where distrust and scarcity play an important role. Many people believe that good intention is a scarce resource. The contrary is true. Think about it. What is your own intention? This world is just as good or bad as your own intention.
Shareable: But how can coworking spaces be successful if they don't charge a fee?
FS: There are different models of what free coworking can be.One model for example is the Seats2meet model. Here the operator offers the choice between free or paid coworking. If you choose free coworking, you do not just get a free space, but also a free meal. How is that possible? You enter into an exchange of social capital for services or financial capital. From a purely balance sheet point of view, the operator generates the necessary financial income from renting out meeting spaces. According to the operator's experience, sooner or later the free coworker will either personally require this meeting space or will attract a project partner who will pay for the meeting space. The business model I favor is even more project or team oriented. And it is based on a different ownership principle. In this model, the common infrastructure is owned and developed by the coworkers. It is very important to understand this point: While coworking spaces do not charge a fee to the individual coworker to use the space, they still receive "conventional" revenue to pay their bills and to run the space. The difference in free coworking is that the money is generated in a sustainable and connected economy.
Shareable: Well that certainly makes sense! So how can people help expand the concept of free coworking?
FS: It is a question of consciousness and design. The consciousness refers to the individual recognition to posses the power for change. Everybody has this power. And design. By design we can and should do it together. We should build and own the tools together to expand free coworking.
One important process tool is consensus decision making. For common ownership to be effective consensus decision making needs to work well. There are other tools and resources already in place. For example to start there is already a Facebook Group called "Free Coworking" that everybody can join, and a Free Coworking Directory listing participating spaces/events around the world.
Michel Bauwens recently observed something very important concerning peer to peer production: When people create something in common, they create their own infrastructure. But when people link to share their experiences, they tend to use a corporate infrastructure like Facebook or Flickr. Therefore free coworking needs its own infrastructure. We've already set up various other tools that we need to develop on a shared and common basis, like the Free Coworking Skill Sharing list. These tools are there to use now, but we need to make them better.
If you're a coworker, or a peer-to-peer sharing advocate, please join the discussion and visit the free coworking resource page to learn more. Share and design the future of free coworking with us and everybody around you!
What do you think? Is "free coworking" a more literal expression of the coworking movement's core values? Would you like to work in a free coworking space? Share your thoughts in a comment.
Related Reading:
Turn Your Coworking Space Into A Sharing Hub
Comments
Alex Hillman wrote on 04.03.12, 3:09pm:
I'll go one bit further: I think that having Felix less squarely on one side of "free" vs. "paid" and instead, and instead more strongly behind the coworking core values regardless of paid vs. free, everyone would benefit from it.
Felix Schürholz wrote on 04.04.12, 4:46am:
Hi Alex, thank you for making that point! Yes it is about the coworking core values and how we can best put them into practice. I believe that free coworking provides an excellent way to develop each one of those values: collaboration, openness, community, accessibility, and sustainability!
Free coworking to me is an evolution which builds on what has already been achieved by coworking (that includes all aspects paid and free like jellies etc.) by everybody active in and for coworking.
I see this as a collaborative development process and evolution. Paid and free coworking support each other and are both vital for this evolution. I see that many spaces will offer paid and free coworking alongside each other. I believe that this is very important not only as a crucial step in the further development of free coworking but also in bringing together all the resources of the coworking community.
Thanks to many collaborators we have already build a number of tools to further develop free coworking. (See link for resource page for free coworking in interview above.) This is great and we like to build on that, not only for free coworking but also to strengthen our core values: collaboration, openness, community, accessibility, and sustainability!
FreeBeer wrote on 04.04.12, 8:22am:
There is no free coworking like there is no free beer without any hook behind. It doesn't matter to me if I pay or not and it doesn't even influence my way to work. It doesn't matter to me if I pay 15 bucks for a day coworking and 15 bucks for a mettingroom for an hour. But if I pay nothing for coworking and then 50-60 bucks for a meeting-room in an hour, it's a topic for me. If I just go coworking an 5 days / month but I need a meeting-room for 10 h / month, then I pay fot others coworking there. Why should I do that? Somebody will always have to pay and I think it's the most fair way if everybody pays what he uses and shared infrastructure is used by fair use.
The topic collaboration is also funny. It's an often used term at coworking, but if a project reaches a point where money and / or shareholding becomes a topic, you can give a f*ck on talking about collaboration. Collaboration needs real fairness and never forget: homo homini lupus - even at coworking.
Last topic, I think that the term "free coworking" is only abused by Felix for a campaign and keyword-spamming for coworking-news at first.
Anca wrote on 04.04.12, 8:42am:
Every space has to pay rent, property taxes, utilities, etc (unless it's owned by a wealthy altruist), one way to interpret Felix's concept of "free" coworking is as a marketing strategy to rent out the conference rooms and pay the rent on the business. If the group decided that free lunch and shoulder-to-sholder workspace was great, or they felt entitled to everything "free", this concept would fall apart. Or if the paying customers were annoyed by the free workers and stopped coming, like "Free Beer" insinuates above.
Just like for any membership-based (paid) coworking spaces, building a the right community around "free" is very important. You've got to find the right kind of communitarian people who want to contribute, but won't become leeches.
I'd like to see how Felix addresses some of these issues:
- Do people sign an agreement when they join?
- What exactly is the "social capital" they are trading? Are these people working on behalf of the space, taking out the trash, cleaning up, writing web pages, developing apps?
- How do you deal with disruptive people who aren't really contributing but are annoying, loud, or smelly?
I run a coworking space in Oakland, CA, where my members pay, but I do occasionally do trades. I have a "free hacker night" which has been successful at attracting the right kind of daytime paying members. I had free trials, but the people that came in for those were largely looking for free work space, not for community. But this is just me - everyone's experience is different.
Felix Schürholz wrote on 04.11.12, 5:57am:
Hi Anca,
I tried to answer your questions in this article: http://www.coworking-news.de/2012/04/free-coworking-stresses-the-importa...
The main points I like to stress, are the following:
- With free coworking I see the coworkers themselves more responsible for community building than before
- This community building can take various forms
- One form in the coworking space itself can be volunteer services as practiced for example in Gangplank, Arizona
- Another the "anchor" role also practiced in Gangplank, Arizona (see video in article mentioned above)
- And last but not least, community building between coworkers in the internet
As you say, the focus should not be the free work space but the community. But by providing a free work space you have a wonderful basis to build a community that focuses on giving rather than taking. It is by giving that everyone receives.
Greetings, Felix
I like where Felix is headed with this, but I feel like he's wrapped up "paid" and "free" into another problem.
I do agree that many, if not most, of the 1300+ coworking spaces now operating around the world are charging money for desks and are not providing much in line with the coworking core values.
But that's not because they're charging money - it's because they forgot what coworking was about. Indy Hall has been built into a profitable and sustainable model because we don't rent desks, but because we provide membership and buy in BEYOND the desk, deeply embracing the core values.
Yes, there's a disconnect between many paid coworking spaces and the coworking core values, but that's not the fault of "paid" or "free". If anything is to blame, it's the focus on a desk over community.