Coworking (no hyphen) has become a new social phenomenon that are emerging across the country. It is where someone creates an office and rents out desks to professionals who have different jobs but who share the same values. Coworking sites are not only meant to be a solutions for professionals who work independently like entrepreneurs, contractors, or designers, it is also meant as an intellectual commune for networking. Coworking sites are usually equipped with internet access, conference rooms, and work stations. While sites are popping up all over the world, there is a common ideal that these sites are for collaboration and not necessarily profit from desk rents.
This type of social networking is unique in that it brings together many interesting relationships. Since coworking brings individuals who have their own networks together into one working space, local bridges are formed. However, when it is clear that someone inhibits the openness the space is intended for like “aggressively recruit employees for [their] own startup” or professionals fail to “respect their space and leave it clean” then they are asked to leave. The discussion of the theory of structural holes is particularly apparent in this type of environment because someone can be introduced to an entirely different network that he would not have encountered otherwise. The idea of coworking relies on the flourishing of individuals with different structural advantages.
Ronald S. Burt’s paper Structural Holes and Good Ideas stresses that one advantage of a social network like that in coworking is the creativity that can occur from standing at one end of these local bridges. He suggests that innovations often occur of the synergy of ideas that are distinct and unrelated. It can be noted that coworking can bring success to its participants despite how embedded these individuals are if you compare them to their original situation. It also caters to the goal of all participants as well: to spur the success of their businesses by sharing ideas with similarly-minded strangers.
Fascinating. If coworking gets popular, I wonder if they’ll naturally start clustering people based on the work they’re doing — perhaps they would physically cluster people according to an efficient graph clustering algorithm.