Workspace: Vancouver coworking space

According to Coworking Community Blog, coworking is defined as “a movement to create a community of cafe-like collaboration spaces for developers, writers and independents.”

I do love my home office and zero-mile commute (especially in winter), but there’s something about not having people around most of the day that’s starting to bother me again. One of the reasons I decided to take a break from freelancing last time was this. Even on the days I just sit & code all day, being in an office with other team members is different than having a solo home office.

Of course there are many advantages in the current situation too, so I’m still looking for a some kind of hybrid solution. Coworking seems promising – the problem is there’s none available yet in the area I live.

It’s still just a rough collection of links, but here’s a list of what I found from looking around.

General coworking information

• Coworking Wiki
• Coworking Google Group (mailing list)
• Jelly (casual coworking; “semi-weekly work-together”)

Coworking spaces around the country

• Coworking Spaces Google Map
• Citizen Space (San Francisco, CA)
• Social Text (Palo Alto, CA)
• Office Nomad (Seattle, WA)
• IndyHall (Philadelphia, MA)
• Conjunctured (Austin, TX)

Detroit area coworking information

• Coworking wiki / Coworking-Detroit-AnnArbor
• Jelly in Detroit
• Rochester Area Coworking Meetup
• Creative x Co-working x Spaces (Russell Industry Center’s blog post about coworking)
• Coworking: Solo But Not Alone (Story on Ingenex Digital Marketing‘s coworking space in Ann Arbor)

Thanks again to Eric Brown at Urbane Apartments for showing us his really cool Royal Oak office and a rental unit on Center Street. I think his kind of open mind is exactly what we need in today’s Michigan.

Maybe having a coworking space can be a good way to nurture that?

Photo credit: ekai

The turnout was really good (20+ people?) and I got to meet many people who are interested in growing their businesses/interest groups and trying new things in the social media playground. @hajjflemings, @primesuspect, @admore, @snicholson26, @shannonpaul, @kevinbiznet@detroitvoice, @jminni, @charliecurve, @annkucera, @damonhenry… Sorry, I know I’m missing some names!

This meetup gave me a good reason to come back to Twitter a little more often. I just let it slow down for a while (this happens to me on many social network/web services) but following more people in the area should be a good change.

Better yet, new projects and ideas have started sprawling from follow-up calls and messages already. I’m not going to say “I attended a good networking event yesterday”; instead, I’ll say “I went to a Tweetup and it was amazing.”

So what is it that we need to do?

I think it’s pretty simple: To really help people spread the word.

I know it’s not the most novel thing ever… but it’s easy to lose this simple idea. Seen many sites to prove that.

For example, take a look at The Story of Stuff (storyofstuff.com). It’s a SXSW award-winning site that is a “fact-filled tour of our consumer-driven culture“.

You don’t find any “add this to facebook” / “Digg it” / “Subscribe with Google Reader” buttons on this site, yet they know what’s more important.

Instead you will find these.

1. Download page filled with image/flash banners, links to YouTube teasers (like one on this page), printable PDF for posters, and .mov format video
2. Creative Commons license on every page
3. The main video itself is 20 minutes long (not too much for one sitting) and the YouTube teasers are about 1 minute
4. Clear call to action links/url at the end of videos
5. You can even download fact sheets and video script
6. Information for holding screening is very easy to access (they have posters for it too) so organizations and schools can spread the word offline
7. And of course… a (WordPress) blog

Some of the things they did are very particular to this kind (non-profit or social cause) of site, but I don’t think it’s limited to that. A movie site, microsite for a special event, or site for a web service/software can get ideas from their execution.

I think what they did was very successful because they asked the right questions – “how can we make this idea spread?” “how can we lower the fence for people who came to the site and want to share it with others?” “How can we keep the conversation going?”.

They made me write this entry by doing that. So, here you go, please share with your friends too if you like it.

To name a few:

• WordPress.com (they’ve had this system for a while)
• BookMooch
• LibraryThing
• Remember The Milk
• LiveJournal (added – thanks, ephi!)

So far the most successful and complete translation system of all is LibraryThing, I think.

• Page-by-page translation as well as “untranslated” list
• Instead of throwing the whole site’s strings into a pile, priorities are set (for example, they don’t want to have “About” section translated yet)
• Vote system for each translated string
• Language zeitgeist and translation page (has a honor roll too) to encourage participation
• Untranslated text is marked with yellow background color

According to their About Translation page (which has a nice guideline for translators), their translation feature was inspired by BookMooch, Remember The Milk and Google in your Language. I’ve participated in WordPress.com, BookMooch, and LibraryThing online translation, but LibraryThing has the best overall system so far.

I especially like the page-by-page translation. Much easier than searching for the line # of the original text and guessing what the context is. It will be even better or almost perfect if you can use a link from each available string to see which page it is used.

Having a quick vote system for something that need help from people’s common sense (“Which one sounds right?”) is a pretty good idea. It only takes a second to click “yes” or “no” — much easier than debating over who is right.

But in terms of completeness/quality of the project, Remember The Milk is the best. But it’s not quite fair to compare with others, since RTM now has a Japanese team.

I hope soon we will see non-English sites that have this kind of features too (probably there are some already, I guess I need to wait for them to get translated it into Japanese or English?).

translate.wordpress.com sums it up all together (yeah I know I’m partial):

The world is too big a place for WordPress to be English-centric.

Put your service’s name into “WordPress” – do you agree?

hello , my name is [omitted] and I know you get a lot of spammy comments , I can help you with this problem .

I know a lot of spammers and I will ask them not to post on your site. It will reduce the volume of spam by 30-50% .In return Id like to ask you to put a link to my site on the index page of your site. The link will be small and your visitors will hardly notice it , its just done for higher rankings in search engines.

Contact me icq [omitted] or write me [omitted](at)yahoo.com , i will give you my site url and you will give me yours if you are interested. thank you

So, he knows up to half of the spammers that spam my site – besides himself. In exchange for his service, he wants me to participate in SEO spam. Hmm.

No thank you, I’m not interested, i will not give you my site url!

All my worries were wrong, and I actually got to go… and it was even better than I anticipated.

They covered a wide range of topics from hands-on session (with some code samples) to high-level inspirational/work ethic/life lesson-like talk. I enjoyed the variety and change in the pace. No session was very discussion-oriented (no panels. 5-10 minutes average Q&A time) but they were high-quality professional presentations (duh!).

The whole conference was interesting because it somehow “all made sense” in the end. Now, a few days after the event, everything they said on stage and conversations I had with other attendees are coming all together. If you are a front-end developer with interests in visual design like myself, I’m pretty sure you will find with all An Event Apart delivers. Even for others, I think an event like this can give you good understanding of what other members of development team are doing to make it all happen (which will help the whole team a great deal).

If I have to pick, my most favorite one was “Selling Design” by Jeffery Zeldman. Selling designs means understanding what’s the best for your clients, and knowing what it takes to make them agree with you. He talked about exactly how to make those happen. Design doesn’t mean just visual/cosmetic ‘design’. It’s everything from creative ideas, the architecture of the site, and other important decisions. As a front-end developer, it’s easy for me to get caught up in solving immediate technical challenges. Zeldman’s talk was a good reminder of how I should look at my work within a big picture.

Another one of my favorite session was “Best Practices For Form Design” by Luke Wroblewski. Luke said something like “I can talk about forms all day If you let me” – I seriously would love to hear that all day! Just as copy on the web is not paid enough attention, forms need a lot more attention than they get now. In real stores, you can make or break your impression by how you treat customers while receiving payment at register or collecting personal information (just chatting or asking for zip code). Placing a good form on your site is as important as having well-trained & friendly wait staff at a restaurant. During his presentation, Luke showed us great real-life examples of how we can achieve that.
I’m looking forward to his new book “Web Form Design Best Practices” – coming out early next year.

The success and quality of the event itself was a proof of that these guys (and ladies) know what they need to produce good results. I feel so lucky to have been able to experience it first hand.

Links:

• Posts that link to this event’s URL (Technorati)
• Flickr photo pool: “aeachicago07″
• Zeldman has some links to the slides & interesting blog posts on the event.