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Ask HN: Distributed coworking anytime soon?

6 points by davnn ↗ HN
As someone raised in a more rural area I wonder if coworking could also be done online.

What are the parts that make coworking interesting? The audio-visual atmosphere? The more effective use of space and resources? Socializing? Community? Events? The socializing aspect of coworking would definitely be the emphasis for me.

5 comments

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asimuvPR
I tried this like 3 years ago. Few people would show up and ultimately it ended being like another work meeting. Everyone also reported not having improvements in their socialising.

Try it out. It helps understand the limits in online interactions.

wallflower
One way to get started, try a lunch-and-learn virtually. One person talks/teaches, the others eat. Later, that person may eat and someone else talks. Round robin. Simple, frictionless.

The closest analogue to coworking online that I can think of is building your own community. At the most extreme end, Problogger, Zen Habits, or the Art of Noncomformity. At the lower end, smaller niche communities (e.g. knitting, parents who travel with their school-age kids to foreign countries).

As a purely anecdotal counterpoint, if you have a distributed team focused on solving one of the hardest problems in technology, state-of-the-art video conferencing technology can erase distance and barriers.

> EACH MORNING, WHEN Andrew Fikes sat down at his desk inside Google headquarters in Mountain View, California, he turned on the “VC” link to New York.

VC is Google shorthand for video conference. Looking up at the screen on his desk, Fikes could see Wilson Hsieh sitting inside a Google office in Manhattan, and Hsieh could see him. They also ran VC links to a Google office in Kirkland, Washington, near Seattle. Their engineering team spanned three offices in three different parts of the country, but everyone could still chat and brainstorm and troubleshoot without a moment’s delay, and this is how Google built Spanner.

“You walk into our cubes, and we’ve got VC on — all the time,” says Fikes, who joined Google in 2001 and now ranks among the company’s distinguished software engineers. “We’ve been doing this for years. It lowers all the barriers to communication that you typically have.”

http://www.wired.com/2012/11/google-spanner-time/

davnn
Lunch-and-learn sounds interesting to try things out. Constantly having a VC with your co-workers appears to be the closest you can get to actual coworking. Maybe VR/AR will remove even more distance in the future.

Edit: Maybe the essential part of coworking, however, does not lie in constantly being connected to your coworkers, but in being able to socialize in the breaks between work and thus improving productivity (there seems to be a connection). This type of online coworking could be seen as an online break hall where you can link yourself in and talk with strangers about life and the universe.

jasonkester
That seems to nicely combine the disadvantages of a co-working space with the disadvantages of working from home, without adding any upside whatsoever.

You'd have all the distractions of a co-working space but you're still stuck working out of your bedroom, with the couch and TV right there and your partner popping in to ask little favors around the house.

I don't think it's a particularly good idea.

jon-wood
Working from home doesn't have to be that way. Sorry for jumping on your comment, but I hear this sort of thing so often!

Long term work from home (as opposed to waiting in for a plumber) only really works if you have a space to do it, and buy in from people you live with. If you can, have a specific room which you go to for work, and make sure your partner knows that when you're in that room you aren't available for little favours - although one of the nice things about home working is that you can surface now and again and do those things.

If you can't make those two things happen, commute to the office, or find a co-working space.