As you probably know, CoCo draws all kinds of creative and resourceful folks from across different professions. But, save for a few outliers, we’re fairly well entrenched in the software, startup and marketing/advertising realms.

As our coworking librarian Meg Knodl has been helping us consider what it means to curate our culture, one of our realizations has been that we need to work actively to introduce “outside elements” – catalysts, flies in the ointments, irritants in the oyster, or to use one of my favorite words, instigators. The goal is to make sure that we are actively introducing new strains of thought that keep us all aware of new and different ways of looking at things.

So, we’re going to try a little experiment here. For the foreseeable future, we’re going to be inviting someone into the CoCo community as our “Instigator in Residence.” It’ll be someone who has a point of view, a line of work or a skill set that is not typical and whose presence promises to prompt some interesting conversations and insights.

Here are the rules of the game:

• As an Instigator in Residence, you’ll have free access to both CoCo locations for three months.
• We’ll ask you to observe the Woody Allen rule, which is to say that you’ll agree to being a regular presence at CoCo. But while you’re here, you’re certainly free to work on your own stuff.
• We will actively introduce you to our members and generally talk you up.
• We will ask you to staff the Smart Bar at least once during your stay.
• You’ll agree to tell members about your line of work, your POV or whatever it is that makes you an instigator.
• Finally, you’ll agree to post periodic updates to the CoCo blog about your experience.

So, what do you say?

If you think you’d make a good instigator, please drop us a line and tell us about yourself! We’re open minded and even open to trying some crazy stuff, so don’t be afraid to throw us a curve ball.

In his State of the City address today, Minneapolis Mayor R.T. Rybak announced that CoCo and Project Skyway will be teaming up in Minneapolis.

CoCo and Project Skyway have been looking separately for locations in Minneapolis. At the urging of the city, the two groups decided to operate out of the same space. A final space has not been selected, but the teams are considering buildings in downtown Minneapolis, near-Northeast, Loring Park and North Loop.

For CoCo, this will be its second location and will feature specially designed collaborative settings designed by the commercial furniture maker Steelcase. The new space will also feature several meeting locations for use by members for everyday meetings and by visiting organizations for off-site meetings.

About Project Skyway
Project Skyway is Minnesota’s first seed-stage tech startup accelerator program for motivated entrepreneurs. The program will build connections among entrepreneurs, mentors, investors, and other innovation hubs, and bring them together both online and in physical space. The vision places emphasis on building companies with long-term, sustainable value, ethical practices, mentorship, and strong networks.

Project Skyway, Launch.MN and CoCo members pose with Minneapolis Mayor R.T. Rybak after his State of the City address. (l-r) Jeff Heegaard, Kyle Coolbroth, Judy Grundstrom, John Montague, Darren Cox, R.T. Rybak and Don Ball.

With that in mind, I am announcing my plans to create a music unconference.  What does this mean, exactly?  I don’t know.  What I do know is that I am curious to know what happens when we attend a conference with no expectations.  This means no expectations in terms of attendance, content, schedule of events, food, beverages, etc.

So, some time this fall, there will be the first (ever?) music unconference right here in St. Paul, MN.

As Don states in his post, unconferences begin with a question.  For example,

“What’s the future of public transportation in Minnesota?”

In our case, it will be a music-related question.  Maybe “What does it mean to be a musician in Minnesota?” or “How can I make music a part of my life from birth till death?” or “What is the state of music in Minnesota?”

We need a question to organize this thing around.  Have any ideas?  Want to volunteer?  If so, let me know in the comments of this blog post or hit me up on Twitter – @themightymo.

Did you know that Steelcase owns the industrial design consultancy IDEO? Well, neither did we until recently. And as it turns out, IDEO’s human-centered design process has had quite effect, not only on Steelcase’s product line, but its prognosis for the future of work, a future in which cubicles and corner will give way to open, flexible floor plans where workers can work, meet and socialize freely. This is being driven by pressure to reduce real estate costs (the 2nd largest cost for most organizations, after payroll) as well as increased mobility among workers, thanks to laptops, mobile phones and even increased acceptance of telecommuting.

What does it all mean? That someday most corporate offices will look like coworking spaces! Only, from what we saw on our field trip, the work environments and collaborative technologies that Steelcase has developed are light years ahead of the humble Ikea sticks we’ve been able to assemble at CoCo.

Below are some highlights from our trip, in which we visited Workspring, a collaborative offsite meeting center in Chicago’s River North neighborhood, followed by Steelcase University and Steelcase headquarters, both in Grand Rapids Michigan. Enjoy!

Workspring

Entrance.

Meeting space with a media:scape unit, which allows meeting participants to share one or more laptop screens.

Meeting room with a double media:scape setting. Notably, this table has an unusual bowed shape that ensures good peer-to-peer communication as well as screen visibility.

The hallways at Workspring are designed with seating/standing areas that allow meeting participants to have ad-hoc conversations, which research shows is just as important to the collaborative process as the meeting itself.

More casual seating areas in the hallways.

The view from Workspring. A private courtyard? This is a rare setting in Chicago’s Loop!

Steelcase University and headquarters

Steelcase University is a former manufacturing plant that is now a training center for the company’s employees, customers and dealers. Just as importantly, the university serves as a living laboratory, where Steelcase can try out new work and meeting settings using its product lines and prototypes.

First, a note on the lost art of hospitality…

Coming to Steelcase University, we didn’t know what to expect. Perhaps we’d get to look around, sit on some furniture…who knows. But to our astonishment, the whole day had been thoroughly planned out, including chef-catered meals and a meeting with the company’s SVP in charge of new ventures.

They even took the time to put our website up on the big screen!

This was the dining room where we were served a killer two-course breakfast. The chef was personally on hand to tell us what he had prepared.

Debra Shrontz, a 30-plus-year Steelcase veteran, was our guide for the entire day. She personally made sure that we had a great experience.

The first course included steel-cut oatmeal with cranberries. At about this time, we had to ask: had Steelcase mistaken us for a couple of Fortune-100 procurement managers with multimillion-dollar budgets? Nope. They hadn’t. This is just how Steelcase treats visitors: by attending to all the details that add up to a great experience.

After breakfast, we progressed through different areas at Steelcase University and the nearby headquarters.

Diner-booth-like seating is a common sight at Steelcase. The high seat backs help enclose the space and make the setting less like a lounge and more like a workspace.

Same story in the company’s executive suite, where a large kitchen/coffee area provides ample room for impromptu information exchange and casual meetings.

Another type of furniture system we saw is called “Post and Beam.” As the name implies, it’s a series of posts with crossbeams that together help define areas, which can then be used or formal or casual meeting spaces, work enclaves or whatever. In the picture above, you can see two meeting areas. To the left, a perforated curtain serves as a visual “wall” that provides a subtle sense of privacy.

Another Post and Beam setting.

Partway through the day, we were lucky enough to talk to Frank Graziano, who, as the head of Steelcase’s Futures group, is the company’s resident futurist. He sought us out in a far corner of the building, where we proceeded to have an hour-long chalk talk about collaborative work trends, social networks and lots more!

Finally, we toured one of Steelcase’s office buildings where they were in the midst of performing an experiment on themselves. This looks like a coffee lounge, but it’s actually a mobile work area that once held cubicles for some 70 employees. Now, the same number of workers use these and other seating areas to work on their laptops, drink coffee, socialize and have meetings. Sound familiar? See, like I said earlier, eventually everyone will work in a coworking space!

Another view of the same space. Note the countertop in the background, which was full-up with focused workers typing away on their laptops.

So, all in all, a pretty inspiring trip. While we don’t have corporate offices, we learned a number of lessons that are applicable to our own collaborative space, including the importance of hospitality and customer experience. What’s more, before going, we were pretty firm in the opinion that the people side (community, networking, etc.) of the equation was far more important than environmental factors, such as decor or furniture. Now, I’d say that we’re looking at both sides as equally important.

Finally, a huge thanks to the folks at Steelcase, including Darren Shavor, Debra Shrontz, John Malnor and Frank Graziano for their tremendous hospitality. And last, but not least, thanks to Kris Hansen of Target Commercial Interiors for having made the initial introduction!

But as it turns out, we might not have been too far off the mark. Within the next week, we’ll have a corporate department actually take up residence with us for a couple months while their office digs get shuffled around. Meanwhile, another major corporation in town has asked us about conducting offsites and coworking – apparently in hopes of getting a boost of creativity and insights into our work culture. So, perhaps there are some cubicle dwellers who see benefits in getting out of the office.

But what about the many corporate workers who don‘t work in cubicles? Telecommuters? Sales reps? ROWE workers? A USA Today article about coworking suggests that the benefits of coworking – namely working with adults – might hold some promise for corporate nomads as well:

A new study of 3,600 telecommuters commissioned by Microsoft revealed their No. 1 complaint was lack of face-to-face interaction.

So, tell us please: If you are a corporate denizen or a telecommuter, do you see value in occasionally taking the team in a different environment (different than a hotel ballroom, for example) for ideation, problem solving or other creative meetings?  Or for individual employees to occasionally work offsite? How useful would it be to make connections with other smart people from outside your organization? Honestly, we’d love to hear from you – particularly about what ideas you have for bringing coworking and the cubicle closer together.

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We would also appreciate any feedback on some of the new services we’re thinking of offering:

• Team coworking – where a department, workgroup or project team could visit CoCo for meetings and collaborative work sessions. These meetings could be facilitated (we know a few good facilitators of various stripes!) or not.
• Corporate daycamps -  an invitation-only event* that includes breakfast, a morning lecture/discussion on a hot topic, followed by a day of coworking (and very likely some good conversation and cross-pollination.)
• Private offsites – like the above, an organization could have its own daycamp, in which we would provide breakfast, a lecture/discussion and an afternoon of coworking in a private room, or in our open areas.
• Speaker’s Bureau – we’ve already had some great speakers at CoCo. The topics they’ve covered include social media, IP law, blogging, marketing strategy and GTD, to name a few. We want to formalize this somewhat by creating a stable of speakers in different domains, who are available to speak authoritatively to visiting corporate groups.**

* Why invite-only? One of the issues we anticipate is that corporate employees might have trouble (or perceive too great a risk) mixing it up with the competition. So, our idea would be to invite employees from like departments at non-competing companies (e.g., Target, UHC, 3M and Ameriprise).

**If you are an expert in your domain and would like to be part of our Speaker’s Bureau, please contact us. Our goal would be to have a short list of 10-15 experts who are visible and credible and would bring value to our guests. (In case you’re wondering, yes, it would be a paying gig.)

Weekly lunchtime chats*
The idea here is to offer a free, low-key discussion on a favorite topic. Patrick Rhone piloted our first chat last week with a discussion on all things Mac. We had about eight people show up and it was perfect. We’re aiming to have one of these a week, usually on a Friday. Next one: A discussion on GTD (Getting Things Done), with Meghan Wilker of Clockwork and the Geekgirls Guide. Beyond that? We’re looking for people who want to host discussions on:

• Copywriting
• Web design
• Mobile app marketing
• Usability
• Information architecture
• Typography
• Python
• Joomla
• Ruby

Got any topics you’d like to suggest (and possibly host)? Please let us know in the comments.

*We’re not currently offering lunch, but if there’s enough interest we’d be happy to bring in a tasty lunch for, say, $5?

Daycamps
Our friends at The 3rd Place have tried an interesting idea: to have themed days (e.g., Tech Thursdays), so that like-minded people can plan on showing up on the same day. Building on that concept, we want to offer day-long evens in which different communities can enjoy breakfast, participate in a facilitated conversation (or listen to a speaker) and then spend the rest of the day coworking and collaborating.

Our first Daycamp, on Wed., Jan. 27, will be for current and future entrepreneurs and will kick off with a talk by attorney Ernest Grumbles III on “IP for Startups.”

We’re lining up future DayCamps and will try to schedule a couple of them per month, usually on Wednesdays. Potential topics include:

• Public relations
• Digital job hunting
• Blogging
• Microblogging (Posterous vs. Tumblr)
• Potcasting
• Launching a freelance biz
• Launching a tech startup
• WordPress
• Mobile app development

Same offer: if you want to suggest a worthy topic (and an appropriate speaker/discussion facilitator), please drop us a comment!

CoCoMSP.ning.com

We’ll use this site for posting:

• Events
• Booking conference rooms and shared facilities
• Community notices
• Member blogs
• Community forums
• Photos & videos
• Polls

CoCoMSP.com (the site you’re currently on) will continue to be our public-facing tool for marketing, social media and public relations efforts.