The Coworking Book A curated look at the history and business of coworking communities

Coworking has captured the workday of thousands of workers around the world, and there’s no sign of a slowdown.

The open nature of the infrastructure that supports coworking, namely a wiki, a blog, and a google group. That open infrastructure is largely responsible for the wildfire-like growth of the coworking concept, the shared brand, and the movement.

The same open infrastructure is arguably coworking’s biggest weakness at this time. Wikis can be confusing for non-techies. Newbies rarely search before posting the same question that’s been asked hundreds of times to the google group. Stubbed out resources are incomplete. And worst of all, the history of coworking is largely lost into an abyss.

My name is Alex Hillman and I am the co-founder of one of the earliest spaces in the movement and a model space for many coworking spaces that have come after it. Independents Hall in Philadelphia is a community coworking space and its conception followed many of the early foundation principals communicated by early founders.

My partner Geoff DiMasi and I have written extensively, sharing our experiences, insights, and ideas. Those writings are scattered around the internet, where they’ve mixed with the experiences, insights, and ideas of others.

My goal with this book is to reclaim those resources and re-bind them into a more comprehensive resource.

This “book” is being published as a living document. I’m using a platform that allows commenting on individual paragraphs with the hope of garnering more thorough input and feedback from readers. I’ll be making it my role to garden that input and distill the ideas into concise resources for the readers.

I’d considered developing this book like open source software, using open source software tools. The ideal workflow of allowing people to fork, and then commit patches, was ideal. However, I would have returned to the weaknesses of the technically dependent workflow that would exclude non-technical people with lots of valuable insight. Instead, I’ve found some middle ground with a platform called “Digress.It” which allows for me to utilize Wordpress, a publishing platform I’m familiar with, and the more detailed comment system mentioned above.

As the resource approaches its first iteration, Version 1.0 will be “frozen”. The contents and all of the comments that got it to its Version 1.0 state will live online forever, for free. A comment-free version for easier reading will also be made available online.

Version 1.0 will then be produced into a self-published e-book and, potentially a physical book.

Version 2.x, and so on, will be continually gardened and developed, keeping the latest version of The Coworking Book clear, concise, and up to date. Hopefully, along the way, I will pick up some more trusted curators to alleviate the pressure from me.