On a sunny afternoon in 2016, Johanna, Carsten, and Akki – the famous coworking dog – sat on the green fields of a park in Berlin. There we developed a form for collecting submissions of publications for what would become known as the Coworking Library – a place online to collect and browse all the coworking research from around the world.
We’d love to pretend that we then quickly developed the database and a super great website; and that this project launched from that picturesque green park in Berlin back in 2016.
But the truth is even more remarkable.
That day started a journey that would lead to conversations, collaborations and sharing of insights with many great minds across the coworking movement.
The Coworking Library as it exists today is truly a community-powered project having received a lot of support from so many amazing people.
Today, we’ve added the ability for you, our community, to accelerate the project even further through contributions. Not only will these contributions help keep the lights on, and the servers running, but also enable us to ensure that the library is sustainable and curated service for the coworking community.
The Coworking Library will always provide its service – gathering all coworking research in a searchable database – for free to those who are looking for in depth answers to any (research) question about coworking. We have huge plans around how to further improve existing features and adding more.
We look forward to working on that – with a great team and with your help.
Here is our story:
- Countless hours of sketching ideas with Thilo from Cobot to figure out if this could be a cool learning project for coding beginners, with Kati & Martin on the basics of databases, with Gerit on the UX design process behind tech projects like this and many more people were involved in the process.
- constant support from the German Coworking Federation
- Alexandra as a great contributor with feedback and ideas
- Weekend Workshops with students from the European University Viadrina at St. Oberholz, Berlin – entering a hundred entries at a time.
- Endless lists on googledocs/excel that were revised and revised and revised
- Feedback loops through our facebook community
- The team of Cowork7/24 joined the journey for a bit to finally get the first website up on its feet.
- Skype Calls between Turkey and Germany
- Hector joined the core team as a developer and third partner
- Skype Calls shifted to NYC
- Launch of the Coworking Library in November 2018 during Researchers’ Meetup at Coworking Europe, Amsterdam
- presentation of new features at the RGCS Symposium Jan 2019 Barcelona
- Summer 2019: reached 200 entries
- Launch of the Newsletter
- we added European Coworking Assembly (ECA) as the fourth partner in crime who has been supporting us for a long time already
- 4th annual Researchers’ Meetup at Coworking Europe, Warsaw
…and the journey continues.
