5 years ago today, Brad Neuberg sparked a movement when he coined the word “coworking” and started Spiral Muse in San Francisco. From the start, coworking was crafted as an open model, and one that required participation in order to succeed.  Since Brad’s initial start with Spiral Muse, a community of coworking advocates has grown and flourished across the globe.  Spaces have opened – each with their own identity and goals – all connecting back to one another through the open-sourced Coworking Wiki.  Theory, practice, and advice has flowed freely at the Coworking Google Group, growing from a small handful of participants to a whopping 2700 voices. Spaces across the globe connect their members by participating in the Coworking Visa Program. And we’ve only just gotten started.

There are more people than I could ever possibly list who have contributed, shared and queried the Coworking Google Group, thus creating the coworking community we now have.  They have contributed selflessly, advised wisely, and questioned thoughtfully throughout the years, enabling each of us to strengthen our work in the coworking world.

These folks have not only contributed to the growth and success of coworking overall, but to the growth and success of our coworking space here in Seattle. It has been over three years since the idea of Office Nomads hatched between Jacob Sayles and I. When we first got talking about what it is we wanted to do, it was discovering the term coworking that enabled us to clarify our goals and to feel a sense of belonging in a business venture that had previously felt uncharted. Coworking became our compass. Being able to identify as a coworking space gave us meaning, a platform to launch from, and a community to provide us with the support we needed.

During those early days of building and then opening Office Nomads, the coworking community was our sounding board, our advisers, and most importantly our great friends. There will never be enough words of thanks to each member of the coworking community.

So here’s to you, coworking. We raise our glasses in true salute. Off to another great year!

Eric Von Blon

Member Since: The beginning

If you have been in Office Nomads, you have met Eric.  It would be near impossible to miss him.  He’s a bit of a favorite around the office.  In the early morning he is the one who comes in and makes Office Nomads presentable for all of you.  He is also known for cooking up some mean waffles which pairs nicely with the hot coffee he gets going for all of you.

Eric came upon us after a long friendship with Jacob and a serious need for a place outside of his home.  Jacob told him about his plan to open Office Nomads and Eric jumped. “I had been working from home for 8 months and was going absolutely mad. It was really serendipitous.”  And so, Eric showed up and has been part of Office Nomads ever since.

In actuality Eric is trained as a Circuit Provisioner.  “I wouldn’t know where to begin to actually explain it,” he confessed.  The quick explanation involved ordering, tracking, and turning-up telecommunication circuits.  Yes, turns out Eric is a complex individual.  He is on the hunt now for a fresh gig in that field and until then he has taken up many activities to fill his time.  He does Quality Assurance work for Ryan Salva and Capitol Media.  That entails reviewing the websites they have designed and making sure nothing is broken.  At the same time he is a rock star in the house cleaning biz.  A number of Nomads have hired him and have welcomed Eric to work shirtless (yup) to make their homes sparkling.

If you haven’t befriended Eric yet, you really should.  He always seems to be involved in interesting stuff.  Many of us have seen the photos of him from the Zombie Walk in Fremont.  The cocollage features him taking a bit of Jacob’s head, it appears.  He acts as Fire Safety for Fire Spinners of Spinnery Arts.  That really means that he makes sure that nobody is lit on fire or hurt in any other way so, in other words, he’s the most important guy to have around when playing with fire.

Next time you’re in Office Nomads, make sure you chat up Eric.  Maybe he’ll make you waffles and tell you about the fancy chickens his mother paints.  Maybe you’ll hear a funny story from Burning Man.  Whatever the topic, it’s sure to be interesting.  That’s just how Eric rolls.

Over the years, we have heard many work-from-home stories from folks who come through our coworking space.  Many start with “I love working from home, but…” followed by a long pause.  It seems everyone has something that makes working from home not work for them.  For some it’s the isolation of being alone all day without enough human interaction. For others it’s being a work-at-home parent with a child who doesn’t understand that “mommy’s working right now.”  And others got tired of waiting for their cat to come up with their next great business idea.

For whatever the reason, many work-from-homers need a break from time to time and that’s where we’re excited to come in and help out. Whether you need to escape the drudgery of the home office once a week or full-time, Office Nomads has some great options you can mix and match to fit into your schedule and budget.  Take a look at our updated membership & pricing page, and then switch back here for an example of what we are talking about.

A real world example

So, you’ve finally got your consulting business up and running, and things are going well.  You’ve got several clients, but are still looking for more.  You started up out of your living room, and occasionally head out to the coffee shop when you want to shake things up.  You are still excited to be your own boss and yet also feel like you’ve plateaued.  While seeking something to break the stalemate you look into coworking.

You don’t need a full-time office, but dropping in a few days a month would really help revive your productivity.  You decide to give things a try and sign up for a Basic membership at Office Nomads ($50/month).  While chatting with Alexandra at the front desk, you learn about Biznik, a Seattle-based networking group for indies just like you.  You whip up your free profile, go to a few events, and soon realize the value of upgrading to a Biznik Pro membership ($10/month).  Now you are gathering clients faster than ever, and more and more people know who you are and what you’re all about.  Realizing that you might want to register your consulting business someplace other than your home, you add a Business Identity Plan to your membership at Office Nomads ($35/month).

One month later, you’ve got an impressive new office to bring your clients to, a vibrant community of coworkers to collaborate with, a wider network of independent entrepreneurs to learn from, and a professional address associated with your business, all for less than $100/month.

Sounds pretty awesome, eh?

Again, check out our updated membership and pricing page, and then mosey on over to our list of friends & partners to see what other opportunities membership at Office Nomads might bring!

Thanks to Flickr user Fayez for use of the beautiful photo above under the Creative Commons license.

• New art! We are incredibly pleased to welcome Youth In Focus to the office walls for the next several months. Youth In Focus is a fantastic Seattle-based nonprofit dedicated to empowering urban teens, through photography, to experience their world in new ways and make positive changes in their lives.  As part of the Blitz! Capitol Hill Art Walk, we’re incredibly excited to host this new round of art!  You can read more about the featured show by clicking over to our Featured Artist page.
• Zipcar in the House! We’re not the only ones in town who think that sharing resources (like offices) is a great idea. We’ve teamed up with Zipcar to offer great discounts to our members, and hope to step forward even more to inspire our Capitol Hill neighbors to share with one another. Sharing resources like cars and offices means that we can each make less of an impact on the planet as an individual. Come and chat with the good folks at Zipcar at our event to learn more about what they’re doing in Seattle and in other great cities across the country!
• Coworking Seattle Meetup! If you’re interested in joining in for a great pre-event, please join us for the Coworking Seattle July meetup. Our group will be talking about great opportunities to share marketing costs, and how our little organization can help to promote coworking throughout our great city. You can RSVP via the Facebook Event if you’re up for joining us!

That’s about it!  If you’d like to join us, you can RSVP to let us know you’re coming (and help us determine how big the keg will be!).  All are most welcome, so bring a few friends along and make us a part of your summer Thursday night.

**Important PS: We’ve got A/C, so if you’re out there sweltering in the new-found Seattle heat, come on in for some relief and a cool refreshing drink.

Tatyana Mishel

Member Since: February 2010

Type of Member: Part-Time 5 but has been known to be a Part-Time 15

Website: http://everydaycreative.net/

Sadly, people don’t often associate the word “fun” with their jobs.  We spend at least 40 hours a week working yet people don’t often jump up and excitedly tell you about how enjoyable their work is.  Tatyana wants to change that.

Tatyana says that she has worked with all sorts of companies and found herself observing the people around her and wondering, “Why are people going to a job and not liking it? Why are they accepting that?”

She found that she loved working with people to help them express themselves.  Following a contract position at Microsoft in which she tried to bring more fun into the workplace while coaching there, she entered a coach training program and became certified.  Tatyana stepped back out into the workforce with her own business, Everyday Creative, and with the goal of helping people put their true creative selves into their jobs.

Well, actually, Tatyana does more than that.  First and foremost, she is a writer and has been a writing coach.   Now she is a coach for professionals who are stuck, in a rut, and burnt out.  “I help them tap into their creative resources and become more engaged and start down the path to work they would love to do.” She knows that we are all creative beings, “we just have our own styles.” For her, the work she does is “about people loving their work and having fun with their work, on their own and with others.”

If you’ve had a conversation with Tatyana, it’s obvious that her line of work suits her.  She lights up when talking about it and was more than excited to share her work at Office nomads in the form of a workshop entitled “The Fun Experiment”.  To say the least, we are really excited to see how she can inspire us.

Besides spending her working hours inspiring people, Tatyana loves to get out and be active.  She loves to swim and most mornings can be found with her Masters Swim group.  Trail running is also a favorite activity which allows her “inner Pocahontas” to shine.  With a 50K run on her resume, she adds to the ranks of super athletes in-house.  At the same time, she shares the passion for travel that many have at Office Nomads.  Past trips to Spain and Ireland left her with wonderful memories and have inspired her to travel more.

Next time you are in Office Nomads, you should make a point to seek out Tatyana for, at the very least, a little inspiration.  Together we are all going to find some fun in our work with her on Tuesday, June 29^th and you should definitely make a point to stop by.

Really? Coworking and climate change? Allow me to start from the top: the Seattle City Council recently announced that it is working towards becoming a carbon neutral city. In order to do this, the city is going to have to address every aspect of how the city runs day to day. Transportation is the single largest contributor to Seattle’s carbon footprint and as such is the logical first place to get started on the grand path of carbon neutrality.

Making a dent in carbon emissions when it comes to transportation requires an incredible toolbox of solutions – from improving public transportation to making our urban neighborhoods pedestrian friendly to enforcing strong emissions standard, and more. The list is endless. There is a lot of work to do, and with a truly strapped city budget, the work gets tougher and tougher each year.

What is the role of coworking in this scenario? Coworking is one tool in the toolbox of solutions to transportation issues. Coworking spaces are neighborhood-based, intentional workspaces (in contrast to workspaces like coffee shops) that enable local workers to work closer to home. Whether that means they trade their longer commute for a walk to the coworking space once a week or ditch their commute completely to become 100% remote, coworking spaces allow modern workers to work closer to home without having to face the isolation, distractions, and productivity challenges of working from home.

Here at Office Nomads we know that 40% of our current members come directly from our neighborhood (Capitol Hill Seattle).  Extend that radius to 3 miles from our office, and you capture 61% of our members. Because of the close proximity of our space for most of our members, that means they tend to arrive at our space by either walking, biking, or taking the bus (we’re currently working on gathering more data on that point – stay tuned). Today’s technology allows these individuals to work for clients from all over the world, but stay in their own neighborhoods while they do it. This method of working keeps local dollars local and builds healthier communities.

Office Nomads believes that coworking enables independent workers to make their work experience better.  Beyond the work environment, we also believe that if the majority of individuals using coworking spaces are doing so because there is a coworking space convenient to where they live, more coworking spaces would allow more workers throughout the city to stay in their neighborhoods to work. That is one of the reasons we started Coworking Seattle, and why we continue to encourage the growth of more coworking spaces in our city. More individuals choosing to telecommute or work within their own neighborhoods means less time wasted commuting (the average American spends 61 minutes behind the wheel each day according to Transporation Choices Coalition), and more productive time working, living, and contributing to local commerce.

So, consider coworking a tool.  Not a one-stop solution, but a great tool to use in the journey to make an impact on our city’s carbon footprint.  Interested in helping out?  Join in the conversations happening at Coworking Seattle via our Google Group.  We’d love to talk to you!

Thanks to flickr user Robert S. Donovan for use of the above photo under the Creative Commons License.

So here’s the deal: Office Nomads members (folks on one of our monthly plans) can now join the Office Nomads affiliate program. This gets members access to discounted annual rates, lower hourly Zipcar rates during the work week, and more.  It’s a fantastic offering for our members that helps to round out great access to shared transportation options.  Now you can walk, bike, take the bus, or grab a Zipcar to get yourself to and fro Office Nomads. As soon as the light rail gets here, we’re going to be unstoppable!

Thanks to Zipcar for sweetening membership at Office Nomads for us. Here’s to true nomadic joy!

What’s more community oriented than trading the skills, products or space you have available for the services and things you need? Well, maybe sharing a meal or helping to raise a kid, but very next on the list is a marketplace where neighbors trade goods and services to everyone’s benefit.

In a strange and round-about way, I just described Dibspace, a relatively new site that fosters community relationships through business. The best part is, in a kind of domino affect, when one member gets “paid” she can use her dibits to buy something from an entirely different member.

Office Nomads recently joined up because we think we have a lot to offer the Dibspace community and we know that the community around us (especially that of Capitol Hill in Seattle, where we are located) has plenty of people who can fill our needs as well.

Almost immediately after signing up, it turned out that the space we’re offering on the site for a mere 25 dibits (Dibspace’s virtual currency) ended up being a boon to the site’s founder, Dominc Canterbury, during his quest to live on nothing but dibits for an entire year.

As I said, we’re relatively new to the whole Dibspace community. We’re just now starting to explore the goods and services available our local Capitol Hill Marketplace to see what might be there that we can use, but it was great that one of our first transactions for dibits was with their founder, and for such a neat project. Now, if we could just find a way to frame and hang one of those first dibits…

Are you on Dibspace? Do you have some mad graphic design skills, carpentry know how, lunch-making lunacy or some other service we might need but no office space? Check out our two offers on the site, sign up (if you haven’t already) and let’s chat!

Holly McHugh

Member Since: October 2009

Type of Member: Basic

Holly makes it to Office Nomads about once a week to be surrounded by a community of like-minded folks.  She will carpool in the 45 minutes from Maple Valley with her boyfriend, Troy, so as to take advantage of the HOV.  Then she settles in at ON while he’s off to OR.   Talking to Holly, it is a bit of a surprise to learn that she lives out in Maple Valley as she exudes the urban green lifestyle many of the folks of Seattle lead.  Instead, she’s a country girl, well, a displaced city girl in the country.

Originally, Holly hails from Portland but left there to work in China for 8 years in the manufacturing capitol of the world.  “I wasn’t living healthy there and my body wasn’t handling it well.” She returned stateside, back to Portland before meeting a lovely man who lived in Maple Valley and, so, she moved up there.  Such a shift from a city of 13 million to a town of 20,000 can be hard.  “People drive to their mailboxes!”  That does sound like the country.  Although living so far from Capitol Hill, Holly is hooked and loves to come to ON on days when there is yoga. “I like a place where I can do yoga and there are ‘Your Mom’ jokes.”  She is lending a helping hand to Sustainable Capitol Hill by giving them some worms for their worm bin projects.  “If there was a Sustainable Maple Valley, I’d be involved.”

Life brought Holly back to the states where she continues to do similar work as she did abroad. “The company I work for works with brands and their importers to help their manufacturing partners, factories or an agent meet the requirements of local labor law in China…For example, let’s say, a women’s clothing brand is our client. We do classroom training for all their suppliers. We also get a select group of their select manufacturing partners and we do training specific to them to help them build compliance capacity.  And, we work directly with individual factories to help them meet requirements of the local labor law.” Turns out, Chinese labor laws are actually stricter that US laws so Holly and the consulting firm for whom she works, advise the companies and factories as to what can be done and what needs to be done so the partnership is beneficial for all.

Her job sounds like it takes a lot so she knows how to have fun.  Holly loves to mountain bike, and the family is a big fan of going bike camping.  With 3 kids in the house, life is busy and it sounds like it’s pretty fun.  “My daughter is a rockin’ guitarist. “  Holly gets a proud look on her face, “She’s learning Enter Sandman.”

With her life full of family, music, yoga, and bikes, it’s easy to understand how Holly always is buzzing with positive energy.  We love having her at Office Nomads and can’t wait for the next Wednesday when we see her again!

“The Garden of Hope” was created as a part of Sustainable Capitol Hill‘s 2008 summer festival – Imagine Capitol Hill.  Much of the festival was planned out of Office Nomads, with weekly volunteer meetings and volunteer trainings happening in the space.  Kuros responded to an RFP we put out for the event for creative, collaborative art pieces.  For his piece, Kuros gathered a group of volunteers the day before the festival to collect trash from around an area of the neighborhood.  After it was all collected, he spent the entire day of the festival putting the trash onto these four doors with the help of any festival attendees who wanted to come.  The result was awesome!

After much time art-sitting this piece, Office Nomads would love to make The Garden of Hope a permanent installment at Office Nomads.  Not only would it be great to know it’s going to stay, but it would support the work of an artist we greatly respect (and who has been a featured artist in the space before!)  Kuros has adjusted the price significantly for our purchase of the art, as he really wants us to have it.  So, we need to raise $2500 to secure these pieces for Office Nomads’ future.

Want to chip in?

We could use the help!  Office Nomads is accepting donations (not tax-deductable, sorry!) of any amount to raise the funds to buy this gorgeous piece.  If you are a regular user of the main conference room, you know how great the panels look in there, and how they brighten the room.  They also tell a great story of the type of projects Office Nomads loves to be a part of.  We’d love to keep the story alive and collectively raise the money to purchase this piece and support an artist we adore.

If you’re interested, head over to the front desk and let us know how much you can contribute.  You can write a check, add on an amount to your monthly bill, or empty your spare change into the jar on the front desk.   Anything helps!

All the love,
Susan, Jacob, Alexandra, and the rest of the ON crew