Coworking, Barcamp and other near death experiences

Intense week indeed.
While the rItaliaCamp meme spreads through the blogosphere, with associated attempted vandalism on the wiki but also all sort of exciting contribution (thank you all), I can’t really say that life in London hasn’t been exciting as well.

Coworking London
Wednesday at the Market Porter we had this first Coworking in London meeting: there were three of us (me, Lars and Simon), who in-between beers shared perspectives and experiences about if/how to setup a coworking space in London.
The Hub appears to be so far the main (but not only) coworking-style experience by the Thames; the space is very trendy (again, have a look at the gallery) and the prices are more or less aligned with the average/high U.S. experiences (if you apply the usual $1 = £1 rule of thumb).
A practice that’s pretty unique of London though is using clubs intead of offices: by subscribing to two/three clubs located strategically around town you can always count upon a convenient space where to meet clients or retire to work a bit.
We also discussed how a coworking space could work and resorted for example that probably finding a company that shares some of its desks with freelancers wouldn’t be that good, neither for the company (that wouldn’t feel totally “free” in its own space) nor for the freelancers, who would probably suffer from the psychological pressure of this sort of us vs. them. One possible solution we came up with is properly separating the “official enterprise space” from the “coworking space” and allowing people from the company to roam freely in the coworking space but on a temporary basis (i.e. not having a permanent desk there).
As for where a coworking space could born in London, a few areas are: Southwark /London Bridge, Angel, Camden. Generally speaking, must be central, lively, not too formal, well connected.
Finally we discussed what to do next. Following a suggestion that Chris gave us last week, we explored the idea of starting a jelly tradition in London just to test the response. Also, we resorted to go to the Minibar4 and evangelize the coworking there…

Minibar4
I arrived at the minibar at the Corbet Place (cool venue, by the way) pretty late, and most of the presentation were already gone.
Luckily, I managed to make it in time for the TrustedPlaces presentation, that I was quite looking forward to. Obviously in the five minutes allowed to the speakers they couldn’t really tell anything that I didn’t already know, but at least I got some “face to face” impressions and a mental note to get in touch with the guys soon. We didn’t have the coworking speech, and I lost Simon in the crowd pretty soon, but managed to spend most of the night in nice conversation with Francesca, Rob and Lars.
At some point Rob went in a cool effort of Drupal advocacy, that was kindly appeciated. Made a mental note to invest some time in drupal tinkering, especially as it seems it could become a central tool in the rItaliaCamp.
Also on the geeky side, we shared some considerations about Stikipad, which is a lovely piece of codeservice. The only problem is I still can’t easily accept to outsource my wiki…