Coworking is a verb, and not a noun. It is about a way of working, and not just a defined, static place to work.

Coworking is about a mega-trend that speaks to the emerging, dominant work generations who value workspace as a service, relationship and community.

Coworking is where the 3 Essential CO’s of Coworking converge: COoperation; COllaboration and COmmunity.

And of the three main Categories under the Workspace Umbrella: 1) Business Centering; 2) Virtual Officing; and 3)Touchdown Spacing — Coworking is the most prominent and popular of the many Touchdown Spacing alternatives out there these days, with its highly appealing elements of community, networking, collaboration, social consciousness, work-life balance, flex-agility and fun.

The Touchdown Space category is the largest of the 3 Workspace / Workstyle categories, led by the highly sociable and popular Coworking genre, and occupied by other less interactive Touchdowner cousins such as: Mobile Liquidspacers (for spontaneous hourly or daily usage); Hot Desk space users at BCs; Coffee Shop and Internet Cafe Plop-downers; Airport Biz Lounge, Hotel Cubicled BC, and Hotel Lobby Mobilists; and a slew of other creative workspace Touchdowner offerings on the worldwide landscape, such as at Libraries, Malls, Highway Gas Stations/Rest Stops and Day Care Centers, to name a few.

Every single one of these options are useful and great — not one is inherently better than the other. That’s for the public to decide.

But the one fact that I have found irrefutable over the past 20 years is that to engineer a successful, collaborative, fun, community of workspace users, it doesn’t require a non-walled environment, nor must it have an open-desk space layout.

A sense of community, collaboration, networking, sociability, and warm neighborliness can occur in an enclosed-office BC environment just as easily as it can in an Open-space environment, and in some instances, more effectively. It depends on the goals and standards of the workspace operator.

And if you want to call such collaborative spaces that exist in enclosed office environments ‘Serviced Office BCs’ or ‘CO-BCs’ and not Coworking Spaces, so be it. But I don’t believe that an open-desk environment is automatically a Coworking Space, unless it embraces and promotes the 3 Essential COs of Coworking.

In that case it would be another brand of Touchdown Space — and there’s absolutely nothing wrong with running and offering any other brand of Touchdown Space. Collaboration is great for those that value collaboration, and private/quiet Touchdowning is great for those that want to get down to work and not inter-act, interrupt or be interrupted while they’re working.

A greater value, for the ever-increasing mobile workforce, is the suitable, spontaneous solution for workspace and tech capabilities that Touchdown Space providers offer…and Coworking is the class of the Touchdown Space category.

The whole notion that there should be a standard approach is an idea with its roots in the Industrial Revolution: a central machine, around whose demands the building and the workers had to arrange themselves.

Sorry, the writing is on the wall and that’s over. We don;t have to work in shifts because the machine has to have its maintenance at specific times; we can have teams in different timezones instead. We can work out of a mindset of abundance rather than the current traditinal madel of (often created) scarcity.

But none of this takes away the need for community; it’s a basic human need and at some point workng at home in yor pj’s isn’t fun any more.

The spaces affiliated with Open Coworking (http://www.Coworking.com) share four core values; that’s it. We are spread over several continents and languages and cultures, and if all the approaches are different, the basic values are the same.

My own experience is that if you have a community of earned trust, the collaboration and interaction follows, as does growth and expansion of possibilities.

We don’t say “We’re not coworking.” We say we take some of the elements of coworking – flexible office space, work when you want, support but not emphasize collaboration among members. Where we differ is in offering more of a mix of open space and private offices, and our membership tends to be a little bit older than what I see in coworking spaces in the SF Bay Area.