If you’re reading this blog post then you probably already know the story. In an nutshell, we opened our first space in Lowertown St. Paul in January 2010. Then, last July, we opened a space in Minneapolis, on the trading floor of the Minneapolis Grain Exchange.

Looking back, it would have been easier two years ago to open a greasy spoon or a coffee shop, something for which people already had a demonstrated need. But in fact very few people in the Twin Cities woke up on the morning of 1/4/10 with a coworking need. That’s to say that CoCo and The 3rd Place (which opened on the same day) had to create the local market coworking. From day one, we had to do a lot to prime the pump, from meetups to breakfasts, speakers – you name it we tried it. It didn’t help that construction on the Central Corridor light rail began right in front of our building – you guessed it – on 1/4/10.

Fortunately, optimism prevailed. And so did the patience of our early members, who endured ear- and bone-shattering construction without so much as a wince. We clearly benefited in those early days from the good will of so many of our friends, who were strong vocal supporters. Seriously, without the help of so many people, who talked us up, let us come and speak at events, agreed to bring their events to our humble space, helped us brainstorm new ideas – actually put in their hard-earned shekels to become members! – I’d be writing about an interesting experiment that didn’t quite take off.

But take off it has. Today the CoCo community is bustling, with a membership in the hundreds, and it continues to grow every day. If the greatest challenge in 2010 was just getting people to join, today it’s making sure that the CoCo experience remains meaningful for whomever chooses to join. More on that later.

Meanwhile, and at the risk of accidentally forgetting someone, I want to thank some people in particular for their incredible support over the last couple years.

• Jeff Heegaard (one of our partners), who took the leap of faith that got the ball rolling.
• Phil Wilson and Brian Stemmler – Whose “What is Coworking?” video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WZf6NoLOuQ0 was not only funny but really helped us kick off the concept with a punch.
• Mykl Roventine, who brought the first SMBMSP tweet up to CoCo.
• Robert Speer, who signed up on the spot for our first-ever campsite.
• Ernest Grumbles, who bought the first membership – as a symbolic show of support.
• Peter Fleck, Gary Leatherman and Toby Cryns, who have shown themselves to be true coworkers to the core.
• Kyia Downing, who magically conjured up the CoCo name and convinced us to run with it. We’re so glad we followed her advice.
• Miles Mercer of the City of Minneapolis, who saw the potential of the Grain Exchange before we ever did.
• Cem and Casey of Project Skyway, who have been truly great partners.

So, what have we learned in two years?

• Coworking is not about office space - Let’s face it, a room with a bunch of people staring into laptops is not particularly interesting or inspiring. If that’s all there was to this coworking thing, we’d have lost interest long ago. We learned pretty quickly after opening that there was something special going on. We saw people lower their barriers, step out of their social comfort zones and develop meaningful bonds with complete strangers. As one member, a suburbanite who had been working from home prior to becoming a member, said, “this place has changed my life.”
• Coworking is a lousy business model - Only a few weeks into this venture, we knew that there was no way we were going to pay our mortgages and put our kids through school on the backs of a few freelancers. The basic coworking model, or at least as we saw it being executed at other spaces, looked like a break-even venture at best. That forced us to get creative and ask ourselves, who else could benefit (and pay) for the privilege of participating in a creative, collaborative community? That also led us to look beyond individual members and open the community to startups and small businesses and eventually to Project Skyway. We are still asking ourselves, “who else can we invite to this party?”
• Coworking is the beginning of something huge - If the predictions are right, there will be more and more independent workers and entrepreneurs in the coming years. This new generation of independent, entrepreneurial workers have a different set of needs than your average employee-a-day employee and they need a whole support ecosystem that doesn’t yet exist. It seems to us that there’s a great opportunity here!

So, with a little bit of experience under our belts, we’re heading into Year Three with some focus and a game plan: (Please, read on only if you’re a member or a coworking business enthusiast.)

Focusing on the community
As fast as is possible with just three staffers, we’re making all sorts of refinements that have to do with focusing our efforts on reinforcing two things: Members and Community. We want to cram as much value as possible into a membership and also strengthen the CoCo community (the two are related but not necessarily the same thing). So, for example…

• We are no longer renting our event space to people from outside the community. It’s way more work than we anticipated. But more importantly, it’s a distraction from our core purpose. Instead, we are going to create a pool of sponsorship dollars that allows us to say yet to events, meetups and user groups that are member-generated, such as Joseph Rueter’s recent Maker Bot meetup or Garrio Harrison’s WorkLab — in other words, innovative stuff that members feel passionate about. We’ll occasionally host larger cocktail parties that support the larger tech, entrepreneurial and creative communities – but only if they are events that have a strong benefit to our members.
• We’re hiring a host for St. Paul. This has been long overdue.
• In looking at our membership patterns, we realized that people just love the dedicated desk (“single campsite”) option. Just last month, we added 13 more dedicated desks in both locations. And this weekend, we’ll take delivery on 25 additional dedicated desks.
• In Minneapolis, we’re going to rearrange some furniture. What has been our event space in the back of the room will now be used for dedicated desks and focused (read: quiet) coworking. We’ll move the Surly (our meeting tent), the Campfire meeting settings and some new, moveable coworking tables onto what’s currently the coworking deck. This area will be dedicated to more “social” (read: talkative) coworking and will be the place where we hold meetups, user groups, etc.
• Later this year, we will launch an educational program that delivers unique, collaborative classes and workshops in the areas of technology, creative arts, business and personal growth.

Robotic hosts and other forms of automation
Honestly, we had no idea how much work is involved keeping track of things like payments, security, membership usage, room booking, network access, etc. Our goal is to automate or systematize whatever possible, so we can focus our best hours on members and the community.

Additional locations
This can happen only after we’ve gotten our operational ducks in a row. Only then, we’d like to open additional locations in some of the suburbs, with the goal of serving suburban coworkers and giving all members more options in where they work, meet and socialize.

We may be open to doing this through some kind of franchise approach. Or perhaps we’ll call it a “co-franchise” – not to be cute, but because the word “franchise” brings to mind soulless hotels and fast food joints, and we’re not interested in having soulless locations anywhere. Quite the contrary, we want every CoCo location to be anchored by an “owner” wants to nurture the local community as much as we do.

So, what do you think? We’d love to hear your thoughts on this wild ride. Have you had any noteworthy experiences at CoCo? Do you see any opportunities we’re missing? Do you have any words of advice?

If you recall, we announced way back when that we were looking for an “Instigator in Residence.” The goal?

“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.”

After that post, we began to hear from some of the most interesting people you could ever hope to meet. Artists, videographers, strategists, entrepreneurs – you name it.

But the first Instigator is pretty important, we figured. It’s an auspicious appointment that says something about what we’re trying to accomplish in cultivating the culture at CoCo. So, for at least two months we waffled on making a decision. Until we met Stephen Yogi Rueff.

Stephen caught our attention by proposing something we hadn’t considered: interviewing as many members as possible with the goal of creating a “baseline” inventory of our culture (known in some circles as an Asset Map). This inventory will help us understand the CoCo community’s resources — individual capacities and abilities, as well as organizational resources – with the potential for promoting personal and community development. With that knowledge, we can be smart about what we do going forward, including what people, organizations or ideas we need to bring to the party .

We will let Stephen introduce himself below.

He’ll begin working with us in stealth mode in December, to help us better define goals and outcomes for the Instigator program. Then in January he’ll begin his own instigation in earnest. He will spend Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays at CoCo, dividing his weeks between St. Paul and Minneapolis locations.

Dear CoCo Community,

I am thrilled with this appointment as your first  “Instigator in Residence” at CoCo and look forward to meeting you, learning about your work, your passions and what leads you toward happiness.

Our work together will be influenced by my varied and rich life and career. I am a fourth generation Minneapolis native and resident, who has lived in New York City and traveled to over 30 countries on four continents.

I am a business coach, change agent, educator, initiator, connector, fire starter and rainmaker. I listen to stories, feed the fire and fan the flames that drive people’s passion to create meaningful impact in the world. The power of business can be leveraged to foster change and I believe that the 21st century business model has sustainability attributes at its core.

For the first 10 years of my professional career, I was a performing artists (in theatre, film and dance) and worked at First Avenue in the heady days of the 1980s. The next 10 years I lived and worked in NYC, as a performing arts production guru, touring through Europe and Asia with artists as varied as Blue Man Group and MacArthur ‘Genius’ Grant recipient Meredith Monk.

After moving back to Minneapolis in 1994, I spent years working in live event production and producing with Walker Art Center, Ordway Center and innumerable visual and performing artists. From 2004 to 2008 I worked with Fortune 500 companies in corporate communications, managing brands and messaging. I produced video, online content, acted as an Executive Producer and Account Manager leading teams for events held throughout the U.S., Europe and the Middle East.

Throughout my career I have helped individuals, entrepreneurs and businesses refine their purpose, define their potential, assess their progress and connect with partners.

My MBA in Sustainability and Entrepreneurship from the Bainbridge Graduate Institute allows me to feed my passion to guide others in crystallizing their dreams and setting them on a path to realize their potential while shaping a profitable business model. I hope we can find opportunities to explore together.

Attributes

• Change Agent, Educator, Initiator, Connector, Fire Starter and Rainmaker.
• Business and Entrepreneurship Assessment, Strategy and Planning
• Sustainability Business Projects, Programs and Messaging
• International Business Relations
• Leadership Coach
• …and now Instigator.

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.

The next library is a place, still. A place where people come together to do co-working and coordinate and invent projects worth working on together. Aided by a librarian who understands the Mesh, a librarian who can bring domain knowledge and people knowledge and access to information to bear.

Across town, Meg Knodl, a Senior Librarian in Communications and Community Engagement at Hennepin County Library, also noticed Godin’s post.

A quick aside: you may know Meg from UnSummit or Social Media Breakfast. What you may not know (and what Meg is too modest to tell you) is that she’s kind of a rockstar in the world of library science. In fact, as I write this, she’s heading to New Orleans to be recognized by the Library Journal as a 2011 Mover and Shaker.

Last month, Meg approached us with a brilliant idea: could she try to create a coworking librarian position at CoCo?

There was only one possible answer: “How soon can you start?”

So, please join us in welcoming Meg Knodl as the world’s first Coworking Librarian (as far as we know!). She will be helping us to develop a philosophy and approach toward programming, which is the professional word for all the social, cultural and educational events and activities that support our coworking community.

Meg will be coworking at both the St. Paul and Minneapolis locations on Wednesdays. (The other days of the week, she’ll still be at Hennepin County Library). If you have ideas about programs you’d like to participate in, attend or offer, please contact Meg at megknodl@gmail.com. Of course, Meg will also available for research and resource questions.

You might remember the Uptake from the RNC convention in St. Paul or the Franken/Coleman election recount. They practice “citizen-fueled journalism” by enabling volunteers to stream the goings on in government live over the Internet. It’s like C-SPAN, but with unlimited channels.

The Uptake currently livestreams from the Minnesota legislature as well as from the White House and both houses of the United States Congress.

You can learn more about the Uptake at http://theuptake.org.

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.

It is interesting how a simple rethinking of furniture placement can change an environment.

After two days of working in the newly-organized space, I can say for a fact that the space is used differently.

For example, the couches were placed in an area near the kitchen, making for something of a lounge/cafeteria space.  Just today, I met up with Pfhyper over there to chat about some things and fill out an application.  To me, that space says, “It’s okay to be loud here.”  The old space that the couches were in seemed to communicate the aesthetic of a smoking lounge, where prognosticating about the future of weather patterns should take precedent over more grounded discussion.

In the old lounge area, there are now two long tables pushed together, making for a big square workspace with chairs all around it.  Interestingly enough, two tables pushed together are weirdly more inviting than two tables separated.  Tables pushed together makes me want to yell across and ask a question or point out a funny dog video on YouTube, whereas two tables separated says, “I’m working right now, so it better be important.”

Toby Cryns, Peter Fleck, and Dave Allen enjoy the lounge (Photo by Garrio Harrison)

Interestingly enough, I learned yesterday that CoCo co-founder, Kyle Coolbroth has an architectural background.  I already knew that co-co-founder, Don Ball, is the Twin Cities’ go-to guy for usability advice.  Put simply, they are experts on the use of space.  As such, these two gents will hereby and henceforth be known as the “Space Superheroes”.

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.

Now we’ve been asked to host two, possibly three additional unconferences. Which is nothing but good news. What better home for unconferences than CoCo?

So, bring it! Do you have an idea for a unconference? Please let us know. We want to be the home base for unconferences in the Twin Cities. We’re happy to make our space available (on a DIY basis) on weekends or evenings. If your idea needs some development, we can help you think it through. And when your unconference is ready for prime time, we’ll help you get the word out.

We do have some thoughts and questions, however, about the future of the unconference format in Minnesota.

Attending a true unconference takes a bigger leap of faith than many of us are used to. The way it works is that an unconference is organized around a central question, like “What’s the future of public transportation in Minnesota?” But no agenda is determined or published before the event. Instead, the agenda is crowdsourced (often by an experienced facilitator) on the day of the event, as participants identify the discussions they’d like to have in response to the central question. And did we mention, there are no presenters? There are definitely discussions. Lots of energetic discussions. But no presenters.

So, there’s the difference: the whole model of an unconference is based on everyone answering the big questions themselves, whereas a traditional conference model is based on everyone listening, often quite passively, to a few peoples’ conclusions. It’s centralized planning versus democracy.

It’s interesting to note that fontconf, UnSummit and Real Food weren’t true unconferences. They split the difference between conference and unconference formats. They crowdsourced the agenda and then published it beforehand, so that attendees knew what they were getting into. In the case of UnSummit and Real Food Minnesota, this wasn’t the organizers’ first instinct. Both conferences tried going all-out “un.” But as time progressed, they were worried that attendance would be too light if people didn’t know ahead of time what would actually be discussed and who would be leading the discussions.

So, it would appear we haven’t quite embraced “un” yet. To be sure, we all seem to have enjoyed the loosely structured and participatory nature of the unconferences we have had. But most of us are yet to experience the full, democratic power of a true unconference.

If you’re an organizer, part of the trick is to let yourself off the hook for making the meeting what you think will constitute a success. One of the principles of an unconference is that whomever shows up is who was meant to show up. Another one is that whatever is discussed is what was meant to be discussed. This isn’t  just New-Age hippyspeak. It’s about stopping yourself from trying to engineer an outcome (lots of attendees, big-name speakers, etc.). Instead, the goal is to get out of the way so that attendees can create a successful event through their participation. This is one reason why unconferences want to be free (or close to free).

So, who wants to do a full-gonzo, no-holds-barred unconference? It’s certainly not a requirement for holding your conference at CoCo. But it would be great fun, a great learning experience – and potentially a way more powerful experience. Will you be the first one to give it a try?

Don spent a good two hours this morning manning the waffle iron in the CoCo kitchen, keeping a continuous flow of waffles coming for the early morning faithful.

Lacking all of the flair (runny fruit, whipped cream, etc.) that covers up the taste of poorly-cooked waffles at IHOP, Don’s waffles stood on the merits of their highly-delectable flavor and golden personality.  These were the type of waffles that would have made Betty Crocker proud!

Thanks, Don!