We asked our members: “what do you get out of coming to CoCo?” and this is what they told us.
Thanks to everyone who agreed to talk in front of the cameras. And a huge thanks to Mojo Solo (also members), who artfully edited and stitched the video together.
With the announcement of our new space in Minneapolis, we are introducing new membership plans. Most of these plans are now possible because of the fact that the Grain Exchange trading floor is one big contiguous space. With these new plans we have also increased our pricing to reflect a new level of service and amenities (such as Steelcase furniture).
New plans
We’ve added two new Individual plans:
We’ve added several Group plans for small businesses and work teams:
We’ve also added a Corporate membership for larger organizations that want to send individuals or teams to CoCo.
Until July 5 July 12, 2011 – you can lock in current pricing for 6-months!
We wanted to give new members an incentive to sign up sooner than later and at the same time help current members transition to the new rates.
If you take advantage of this limited time offer, your membership pricing will be as follows:
Please visit our membership pages to learn more about membership types and to register.
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.
A few weeks ago, Kyle and I got wind of an interesting conference taking place in San Francisto. Put on by GigaOm, the conference was called “Net:Work 2010: The Future of Work.” The premise is roughly this: that the emergence of the cloud, combined with the ubiquity of laptops, smart phones and always-on broadband has allowed millions(?) of workers to do their thing anywhere. Some companies have embraced this. But for the most part, it’s the workers on the fringes who are leading the charge. So, the question is whether (and how) companies will come along. What combination of tech, people and policies will enable a virtual, anytime, anywhere work culture?
What follows are some quick highlights – essentially my reconstituted notes – from the conference. I’d certainly recommend GigaOm’s own recaps of the event, starting with Simon Mackie’s recap and then this directory of live blog coverage.
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One of the first noteworthy statistics we heard is that the average mobile worker is 46 years old and lives outside Silicon Valley. This is underscores the need to better understand workers and the scenarios
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In a discussion about how and why people adopt new technology, Sameer Patel, managing director of The Sovos Group used the example of his mother, who when he left India didn’t have computer. Two years later she was happily Skyping. The lesson: people (and employees) won’t and shouldn’t be expected to adopt technology for its own sake. Adoption, however, will naturally follow if new technology offers benefits that end-users can clearly see for themselves.
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Sococo software that gives a virtual company a Second Life type environment in which its workers can collaborate, IM and Web conference. Essentially, what you see is the floor plan of a metaphorical office with many different rooms that have different purposes. And you can choose what room you want to hang out in. It feels like a heavy metaphor, but I suspect that this (and perhaps other metaphors) might be just the crutch that is needed in order for some teams to transition to the cloud.
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Allen Delattre, Global Mng Dir, Technology Practice for Korn/Ferry was the first to call out what became a recurring theme at the conference: that moving to the cloud was no longer a technological issue, but a leadership issue. How do leaders effectively manage and motivate a dispersed and virtual work team?
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One of the highlights for me was a chat with John Seely Brown and John Hagel, from Deloitte’s Center for the Edge. I wasn’t familiar with their concept of the “edge” but it appears they’ve built a whole consulting practice around it. They talked about how in the past companies have tried to innovate by bringing the edge into the center (i.e., developing new tech and then institutionalizing it). They propose that it might make more sense nowadays to try to bring the center out to the edge. One example of this would be a “reverse mentorship,” in which, say, the CEO would be paired with a 20-something who has more access to (and naturally makes more use of) so-called “power tools” than people within the core of the org!
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Some folks were making the case for the “mobilocracy”. Evan Caplan, CEO of iPass said that according to a study they did of 2.5 million users, mobile workers put in 240 more hours per year.
He also discussed what his company refers to as the “device stack,” which is the triumvirate of the laptop, pad and smartphone. The thinking is that this threesome will become the standard mobile worker arsenal in pretty short order. The relationship between each of these items will be come an important consideration for solution designers.
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Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff discussed their new Chatter social collaboration product. In the process, he dropped some neologisms, including “chatterlytics” and “chatterati” (how he refers to heavy Chatter users within the company).
He suggested the very real possibility that future compensation could be based one’s internal social standing (e.g., an internal Klout score).
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Another great term somebody used to describe the mobile worker lifestyle: “live/work arbitrage.”
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Now, the main reason we went to the conference wasn’t to hear about software, but to attend a panel on coworking, which featured owners from New Work City, PariSoma and NextSpace, as well as the founder of Loosecubes, a web site that lets you find an open meeting or work space anywhere in the world.
What became clear in the panel discussion is that coworking is growing up. It has served independent workers and entrepreneurs very well, but the panelists agreed that coworking might be relevant to a larger audience and to bigger organizations.
There definitely is a lot of curiosity about coworking from bigger organizations and people who don’t necessarily work in coworking spaces but are champions of entrepreneurship and innovation. Om Malik himself has been a vocal proponent of coworking (which is evidenced by inclusion of a coworking breakout at his otherwise tech-oriented conference).
Of course, the verdict is out on how the burgeoning coworking movement will intersect the trend of worker mobilit and cloud computing, but we are optimistic that some future incarnation of the “office” will have its roots in the humble coworking space.
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Creative commons photo credit: rsmith179
This is an amazing time to be involved in the coworking movement. Many of us “converts” have suspected that coworking holds great potential for the masses. But we’re just now starting to have productive conversations with futurists, real estate strategists, HR professionals and others about how the concepts and principles behind coworking might influence and dovetail with other workforce trends.
So, like kids with a pair of golden tickets to a tour of Willie Wonka’s factory, we’re excited to be able to attend GigaOm’s Net:Work 2010 conference on Dec. 9 in San Francisco.
As they describe it Net:Work is
“…a new conference that highlights the opportunities that broadband and mobility have created for connecting work and workers and the technology that addresses the way corporations operate and conduct business.”
We hope to connect with like-minded folks who are curious about how the converging forces of technology, mobility and worker free-agency might reshape the way we all get work done in the coming decade. If you’re attending, please reach out and we’ll make plans to connect at the conference!
