Traditionally, society forces us to choose between working at home for ourselves or working at an office for a company. If we work at a traditional 9 to 5 company job, we get community and structure, but lose freedom and the ability to control our own lives. If we work for ourselves at home, we gain independence but suffer loneliness and bad habits from not being surrounded by a work community.
Coworking is a solution to this problem. In coworking, independent writers, programmers, and creators come together in a community…
-– Brad Neuberg, August 9, 2005
May 4th is Locus Workspace’s 15th birthday. I haven’t owned or managed Locus for about 4.5 years, but this is a fitting time to reflect on Locus’s history, and so I was asked to write a blog post about its origins and how it has changed. I’m fond of the above quotation from a blog post commonly credited with first naming and framing the coworking concept. It is the most efficient expression I know of that describes the idea behind coworking that resonates with me. It also goes a long way toward explaining why I originally wanted to open a coworking space: that tension between the desire for (a) independence and freedom associated with working for oneself rather than for someone else, and (b) the common psychological need for workplace community, structure, and accountability that often comes with working independently. That tension is what gave coworking its original momentum, and what many of us were looking for even before a name was given to the concept.
That original meaning was also ignored or forgotten by many founders of newer coworking spaces that target company teams more than individual freelancers or remote workers, and that give little more than lip service to the value of community and the importance of facilitating a healthy workplace, social and physical environment specifically for remote or freelance workers. Don’t get me wrong: there are a LOT of amazing coworking spaces. They are just often hard to find in cities as large as Prague, given the marketing money behind the serviced office industry.
Locus retains that commitment to creating a healthy work environment and a strong community to this day–better than ever, in my opinion–and I believe it is a big part of the reason it has lasted so long (the longest-running coworking space in the Czech Republic) and continues to thrive.
So why did I want to open that kind of coworking space? The short answer is this:
- I had been been working to become a research scientist and I was burned out on that
career path and looking do something more entrepreneurial; - I wanted it to be a “good” business, in the sense of both being financially sustainable and leaving behind something I could be proud of;
- I thought a coworking business would be a good solution given those goals:
a. I felt like I needed a workspace like Locus myself,
b. I felt sure that a lot of other people out there needed it, too;
c. and, as far as I could tell, there wasn’t anything like it at the time,
There is a lot of context missing from that short answer, though. This blog post aims to fill out some of it.