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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.

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Ultra-Lightweight CMS Perch Gets Previews and Multi-Level Undo

Simon Mackie — Mon, 29 Nov 2010 20:00:53 +0000

Perch, an ultra-lightweight CMS perfect for those situations where you’d like to be able to set up a simple web site with some editable content regions, has been updated with some nifty new features, including the ability to preview changes to pages before committing to them, and multi-level undo. These two new features, in particular, should be handy for sites being updated by less tech-savvy users who may not feel very comfortable making changes to live website pages.

The Save as Draft feature allows users to save progress mid-way through editing a longer page, or have a colleague review their changes before they go live. Once a region has been saved as a draft, users can use the new preview feature to check out what the pages will look like on the site before committing to making any changes.

The new undo feature takes a snapshot of the region (including any images and file uploads) every time an edit is made. Hitting the “Undo” button reverts the page to the previous version; 15 undo levels are saved.

Perch 1.6 contains quite a few other updates, too, including support for Google Maps and new icons.

Perch costs £35 ($55 USD) per domain (you can switch between domains as required), with no ongoing fees. You can try out a live demo here. Perch is written in PHP, and you’ll need a server running PHP5 or later. Existing users can find update instructions here.

Let us know what you think of the new version of Perch below.

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Ultra-lightweight CMS Perch Gets an Update: Developer API, Dynamic Pages and More

Simon Mackie — Wed, 02 Jun 2010 22:00:46 +0000

Perch — a lightweight CMS that’s perfect for web designers who’d like to add basic content management features to their clients’ sites — has been updated with some tasty-looking features, among them:

Developer API — The API enables additional features to be added to Perch as apps, without adding bloat and complexity to the original lightweight product.
Dynamic pages — One of the first apps to be made available for Perch is dynamic pages, which allows you to add new pages to a site, an oft-requested feature.
Content filtering and reuse — Itʼs now easy to dynamically ﬁlter a multiple item region to show only items of interest, and content can be pulled from one part of a site and automatically displayed on another.

There’s a few other neat updates as well, like the ability to customize the interface with your own CSS and JavaScript, and improved image management.

Perch costs £35 ($51) per domain (you can switch between domains as required), with no ongoing fees. You can try out a live demo here.

Let us know what you think of Perch 1.5 in the comments.

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Perch: An Ultra-Lightweight CMS

Simon Mackie — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 18:00:42 +0000

This weekend saw the launch of Perch, an easy-to-use lightweight CMS put together by British web development agency edgeofmyseat.com. Perch is perfect for those situations where you would like to be able to set up a web site with some editable content regions for a client, but don’t want to have to install a full-blown CMS or try to hack a blogging system in order to do the job.

Installation is straightforward, although you do need to be a little tech-savvy to get it up and running. You’ll need a server running PHP5 or later. (Check if you’re using a shared host — I found mine was still running PHP4, but could flip to PHP5 easily.) Download the zip from the Perch web site, unzip, and FTP the Perch folder to your host. Run the setup script, insert your license key, and fill out your database login details. Most of the installation legwork is done for you, although you’ll need to FTP a generated configuration file back to the server.

To start using Perch to manage the content on your site, you first need to add some editable content regions into your pages using Perch tags. Once you’ve set up the regions, log in to your Perch control panel.

Perch’s interface is very clean and simple. There are just two tabs at the top of the page, “Content” and “Users”. Under “Content” you’ll find the regions that you added to your pages. Click on a region to initialize it by selecting a content template to use. Perch has templates for many types of content included out of the box (file, image, contact, text block, article and text), but you can create your own templates using simple markup.

If you’re building a site for a client, it’s now just a case of setting up user accounts for your client under the “Users” tab. (There are only two levels of access: “Admin” and “Editor”.) They’ll then be able to log into the control panel and edit the content as required.

Because Perch has a simple, clean and easy-to-use interface, it shouldn’t be too hard to train clients to use it, which makes it a good choice for web sites that have some changeable content but don’t require a full-blown CMS. Perch should also be a great choice if you want to retrofit some editable regions into an existing static web site. However, it is very stripped-down, so if you require, say, an inbuilt WYSIWYG editor, you’re going to need a more heavyweight solution like ExpressionEngine.

Perch costs £35 ($57) per domain (you can switch between domains as required), with no ongoing fees. Unfortunately, there’s no free trial available, but you can download a Compatibility Test Suite to check that it will work on your setup before purchasing.

Have you tried Perch? Let us know what you think in the comments.

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