Written by: Gugu Mthimkhulu
The start of a new year is another chance to get things right and to set the scene for the rest of the year. Speaking to Bernie J Mitchel, we get to learn more about The Coworking Values Podcast, its purpose, and what to look forward to going forward.
What to expect from the European Coworking Assembly
Listeners can expect to have more people from the European Coworking Assembly (ECA) community doing podcasts in the new year.
The ECA will also be exploring doing a few of the podcasts in Spanish because Coworking Spain is a big part of the European Coworking calendar. If that is a success, people can look forward to hearing other languages as well.
So, if you can help with that, please get in touch with us by clicking here.
Onto other exciting news, Jose Antonio Morales has come on board to coordinate the Rural Coworking Project, an initiative by the European Coworking Assembly that intends to map and connect the community of Rural and Suburban Coworking spaces in Europe.
There’s also the What If Everyone Could Walk To Work and Boot The Commute from Town Square, and Jose is the person coordinating those conversations and helping people initiate projects around Rural Coworking.
Jose is going to be doing a regular podcast to bring that alive. The pandemic meant that everyone stopped running into cities to coworking spaces. Coworking spaces and flexible workspaces have moved away from the centre of cities and suburbs, and into rural areas.
The other long-running project is the Coworking Library which is run by Hector Kolonas, Carsten Foertsch, and Johanna Voll.
Jo, Carsten, and Hector set up the Coworking Library where people can send or publish their academic and industry research where people can go for information related to coworking.
The library is an essential part of the Coworking Assembly family.
The next thing is the Coworking Symposium run by Marko Orel from the University of Economics in Prague, back again for a third year. The Coworking Symposium is an interesting collection of industry and academic people.
There’s a centre that researches the future of work at Prague University of Economics and Marko instigated that last year. There’s also the Coworking Values Podcast, which is a key linchpin project of the Coworking Assembly.
The Coworking IDEA Project, which was invented by Ashley Proctor from Coworking Canada is one of the longest-serving coworking evangelists on the face of the planet.
And the Coworking IDEA Project is about inclusion, diversity, equity, and accessibility in the coworking industry.
In the end, the icing on the cake in 2021 was having a session happen at Coworking Europe, where there were 10 people talking about why this is important from all over the European Coworking Assembly.
Also, there’s European Freelancers Week, which is a fortnightly newsletter. In terms of coworking, it creates a link between as many coworking spaces as possible in Europe so that people can connect with the likes of freelancers and independent economic agents.
There are also many who are running their own businesses and their own freelance practices. Many are also now working on their own who used to go to the office, and this project is looking to help all of those there.
Lastly, there is This Week in Coworking which is a weekly newsletter summarizing the coworking celebrations, stories, market moves, tech updates and discussions you may have missed, and is curated by Hector Kolonas.
The cherry on top is that it is an independently run initiative, unlike many things we see online which are sponsored.