GigaOM » Austin Texas

No one agrees what coworking is, academic finds

Jessica Stillman — Mon, 11 Jun 2012 13:04:32 +0000

Clay Spinuzzi, an associate professor of rhetoric (yes, rhetoric) at the University of Texas at Austin, took an interest in the area’s budding coworking movement just as it was getting off the ground in 2008. For three years he immersed himself in the community, speaking with space users and owners, studying written and electronic materials put out by spaces and generally trying to get a sense of what exactly coworkers were up to?

The results of that research were published recently in the Journal of Business and Technical Communication in the form of a long and quite academic article (light reading, it is not) that tackles the seemingly simple question: What is coworking, and what do people get out of it? But, it turns out, the lived reality of coworking is not as tidy as Spinuzzi’s straightforward question. He got a bewildering set of contradictory answers from space owners:

Coworking space as community center. The proprietors of Soma Vida and Space12, mixed use spaces, told Spinuzzi that coworking as they all understood it was all about serving the local community. “The object was to work alongside, but not with, others. Consequently, both had quiet policies in their spaces,” writes Spinuzzi.

Coworking as collaboration space. If some spaces were all about offering community members peace and quiet, others insisted they were focused on creating a buzzy environment. Calling this type “the unoffice,” Spinuzzi notes spaces in this category, which includes Brainstorm, Link, and Perch, “encouraged discussions; interaction between the coworkers.” Spinuzzi summarizes the object of these spaces as recreating “characteristics of the traditional office environment that independent workers may miss.”

Some proprietors in this category even ruled the community center type of space out of the coworking movement entirely. “If a space had a no talking policy, ‘then it’s not coworking,’” Link’s Liz Elam told Spinuzzi.

Coworking as networking hub. Conjunctured, Cospace and GoLab Austin, “saw the mission of their coworking spaces as fostering more active connections between coworkers, connections that could lead to working relationships between businesses—contracts or referrals,” writes Spinuzzi. “Their focus was on entrepreneurship.”

He notes that while these spaces were as buzzy as so-called unoffice spaces, they were more focused on formal collaboration rather than informal connections and saw themselves as catalyzing the shift towards more independent work by allowing independent workers to clump together. “Proprietors saw these spaces as comprising a collocated network of potential contractors,” concludes Spinuzzi.

That’s how proprietors thought of their spaces. What did the actual coworkers within them tell Spinuzzi? “The coworkers I interviewed tended to emphasize the unoffice model, in particular, the combination of space and social interaction,” he says, but notes that they were far from in complete agreement about what they hoped to get out of coworking. “Some coworkers expected to work in parallel whereas others expected to work in cooperation,” he writes, noting different expectations for collaboration at coworking spaces.

The fundamental question, what is coworking then, is far from settled, and Spinuzzi isn’t expecting a single definitin to emerge anytime soon. “As cities become more porous and workers become more mobile, we can expect coworking and variations to multiply,” he writes. With larger companies looking at ways to adapt cowoking to their needs, and more corporate remote workers utilizing the spaces, things in fact may get a whole lot more complicated.

What’s your personal definition of coworking?

Image courtesy of Flickr user torisan3500.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

Once again, SXSW is huge for Airbnb in Austin

Ryan Lawler — Fri, 24 Feb 2012 16:11:52 +0000

If you’re like me and began searching for housing in Austin, Texas, for this year’s SXSW Interactive conference over the last few days or weeks, the first place you looked was probably Airbnb. With hotel lodging more or less booked solid for months, Airbnb has served as a yearly refuge for tens of thousands of visitors from the tech, music and film industry that converge on the city for a week of networking and partying.

Austin at SXSW is a prime example of the kind of flexibility that Airbnb can provide to both residents and visitors during a major event, a benefit that has become necessary during SXSW. Austin’s official hospitality industry saw direct bookings of more than 10,500 individual reservations last year. But with the number of official registrants up more than 40 percent over its previous record, the city was ill-equipped to deal with the influx of people on its own.

As a result, Airbnb saw 3,000 bookings during the 2011 conference, with more than 1,500 guests occupying 1,000 rooms. This year, the startup surpassed those numbers about a month before SXSW kicks off, with more bookings happening every day.

Thankfully for those who registered late for SXSW 2012, Airbnb has seen even more hosts sign up this year. New hosts are appearing every day, and the number of property listings continues to creep up. Since January, Airbnb has seen a 44 percent increase in host signups in Austin. That compares with a 230 percent increase in the same period a year before, but from a much smaller base of hosts before SXSW 2011.

Even so, the demand seemingly continues to outpace supply, and hosts are reacting by drastically increasing the prices they ask for lodging during the festival. It’s not unusual to see listing prices doubled for the week of SXSW — and that’s not just for properties in the center of the action. Some listings as far as three or four miles away from downtown are looking to cash in on the influx of visitors.

That can be good news for Austin residents, who can earn a little extra cash during the week. The question is whether Airbnb can retain those listings even after visitors from around the country leave. Last year, I stayed in an Airbnb location the week after SXSW was over. But it was the listing of a host who had made his home available for months prior to SXSW and had multiple reviews. (Disclosure: I am an avid Airbnb user even when there aren’t any hotel rooms left.) Looking over the landscape of available properties on the site today, few still available were originally listed more than a month ago. How many will remain in the weeks or months following?

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

What's Your Favorite Web App, Guy Kawasaki?

Aliza Sherman — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 18:00:13 +0000

I’ve been at SXSW attending sessions, seeing product demos and interviewing tech company founders. I’ve also been asking anyone who identifies themselves as a web worker about their favorite web app and how it helps them with their work.

Here is the first of a series of short interviews with a variety of web working types, starting with venture capitalist and co-founder of Alltop, Guy Kawasaki, who reveals his favorite web app: the “ultimate marketing tool for Twitter.”

What’s Your Favorite App, Guy Kawasaki? from WebWorkerDaily on Vimeo.

You can find Guy Kawasaki on Twitter: @guykawasaki.
Stay tuned for links to upcoming video sound bites from SXSW by following us at @webworkerdaily.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.