Impact Report 2016

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Dear Open Coworking supporter,

My first year helping to run and grow Open Coworking has been an educational experience to say the least. I knew that I wanted to focus on supporting the global movement in the wake of closing my space in NYC, but I wasn’t sure where to start.

When the opportunity to take the reins emerged, I realized that there wasn’t anything I wanted more than to work directly for coworking itself.

Open Coworking had established itself as an organization that could secure and nurture the movement’s future, but it needed a proper foundation to realize that potential.

Over the past year, I’ve worked with Jeannine and other intrepid volunteers to establish that foundation. Along the way, we achieved some critical victories, learned some valuable lessons, and now have a clear sense of where we would like to go from here to continue making the progress that I believe the movement needs us to make.

We’ve come a long way, but we have a long way to go. I still deeply believe that this movement is still only beginning to realize its potential to shape the world for the better.

Thank you for supporting me and this organization as we work to help this movement continue to blossom.

Keep being awesome!

Tony Bacigalupo Director, Open Coworking

9/17/16

The missionSupport and advocate for the healthy growth of the global

coworking movement

As millions of people make the inevitable migration away from traditional employment and towards increasingly

independent work lives, the need for new support systems only continues to grow.

Coworking is emerging as a unique and critical piece of infrastructure to support this new workforce’s needs.

Without active maintenance and guidance, however, this decentralized movement runs the risk of going adrift.

The organizationFounded in 2012 by Jacob Sayles of Office Nomads

in Seattle, Open Coworking was established at a time when coworking was starting to mature from a nascent

movement to an increasingly established industry. 

Concerned that the core values that make coworking the incredibly special and impactful thing that it is could get lost in

the increasingly business-focused conversations, the newly formed organization resolved to do whatever it could to preserve the

original spirit of the movement as it continued to grow and evolve. 

To date, Open Coworking has worked to achieve this mission by ensuring that the decentralized online resources powering the

movement remain online and in working condition.

Now, Open Coworking seeks to go much further to not just maintain but improve these resources and to develop active campaigns to more fully realize the movement’s potential.

What we didWe gave several of our platforms a

much-needed refresh, learned where our biggest challenges lie, and identified

where the biggest opportunities for impact await.

We redesigned coworking.com.

A critical entry point for people interested in learning more about the movement, coworking.com (and coworking.org) were previously very basic sites with outdated designs.

• Modern design • Clear links to the main resources • Information about the core values • An introduction to the history of the movement • Links to new pages outlining core details about the

movement

We cleaned up the Coworking Wiki.

• Collapsed sidebar on mobile • Ensured site didn’t exceed a maximum width

(it looks a lot better) • Aligned the branding with our other sites • Updated the home page content • Updated sidebar links • Removed outdated pages • Approved access for new editors • Created a template for city pages • Conducted wiki spruce-up sessions, where local

volunteers updated their city’s pages

We redesigned and reengineered the Coworking Blog.

• Using a more modern, cleaner design, the new Coworking Blog theme is easier to use, more visually pleasant, and ready to become a content platform for the movement.

• Overhauled navigation makes it easier to find the most important resources

• New introductory pages give people critical background into the movement’s origins and foundations

• Multi-Language support means pages, posts, and

eventually directory pages can be created in any dialect. • A new directory plugin paves the way for a data-driven

directory of spaces and communities

We built a site for our organization.

Previously, we had a single page text-only site that

provided little information.

Now, we’ve got a fully functional site that introduces people to the movement and shows them how to get involved.

We raised some money.

$5,600 in annual pledged contributions from 28 sup-porters is a big jump from what we’d had previously.

While it’s not enough for us to hire dedicated staff, it

has been a critical lifeline that’s helped make it possible for us to do all the work you see here and more.

Our hope is to build on this support, so we can grow our impact moving forward.

Where we’re headedThe next generation of coworkers are in comm-unities of all shapes and sizes, all over the world. We want to make our movement easy for them to find, regardless of where they are or what

language they understand.

We also want to make the Coworking Visa, one of the movement’s greatest assets, more accessible

to hosts and travelers alike.

Refresh the Coworking Visa

program.The Coworking Visa is being used informally by hundreds of coworking spaces around the world to facilitate connections between coworkers everywhere.

It helps to reinforce and perpetuate the collaborative and open sharing spirit that originally made the movement so special.

Right now, however, joining and administering it is painful and confusing.

With just the right amount of thought and effort, we can build on what exists to make a Visa program that will make it even easier for others to join and participate in.

Reach the next billion coworkers.

All of the resources we’ve developed have been tremendously valuable in reaching and helping the many who have been curious to learn more about coworking and the roots of the movement behind it.

Now, as we look ahead to those who will be discovering coworking in the years to come, one thing becomes very obvious: they’re not all English speakers!

To that end, we’ll continue the steps we’ve taken to connect people to resources in their native language, so the movement can connect with those already doing good work in areas where English isn’t the way people communicate. In the past 5 years, the Coworking Wiki has been visited by people whose

browsers identify them as speaking over 200 different languages.

Currently, however, nearly all content is written in English.

Reimagine a global coworking directory.

The Coworking Wiki is home to a directory of thousands of spaces in hundreds of cities, making it one of the most comprehensive compendiums of coworking anywhere.

By virtue of being a wiki that’s evolved organically without much supervision for so many years, however, it’s also also unfortunately one of the most outdated and messy such directories you can find.

Overhauling it is a daunting task. To abandon it altogether would be to give up a resource that still reaches thousands of people every month, so a clever new approach must be forged.

We’ve worked to lay the foundation for this shift, and hope in the coming year to crack the formula to finally help this directory take the generational step it must.

A new approach to the directory, using the Coworking Blog’s existing WordPress platform, could provide easier administration and visual

consistency, as well as multi-language support.

We can also emphasize not just coworking spaces, but Meetup groups, alliances, events, and other ways of accessing the movement.

The coworking movement is here to stay.

If you’re reading this, then chances are good that coworking has already changed your life in a deeply meaningful way.

As coworking continues to transform industries, the extent to which the spirit of the original movement lives on to inspire new leaders will depend on the ability of groups like ours to

make what we and those who have come before us have done visible to others.

We’re here to ensure the story keeps getting told.

Thank you for your support.

Let’s keep doing good work together!

Where is goes from here is up to us to shape.

Thanks to you, our supporters.Institutional Supporters

Alex Hillman, Indy Hall • Jonathan Markwell, The Skiff • Seats2meet

Supporters

Ali Usman • Angel Kwiatkowski • Anne Zannos • Argentina Flores • Ashley Proctor • Carly Nix • David Brühlmeier • Etincelle Coworking • Jacob Sayles • Jonathan Wegener • Kali Mincy • Kaylyn Gelata • Matthia Weimann • Melissa Saubers • Melissa Geissinger • Michael Stingl • Miguel Wong • Mike LaRosa • My Office & more • Paige Calvert •

Paul Gould • Perttu Salovaara • Oren Salomon • Ramon Suarez • Scott Tillitt • Susan Dorsch • Ten Thousand Things

Founding Supporters – 2012 to 2015

All Systems Grow! Corp. • Andrew Cole • Andrew Jones • Anthony Bacigalupo •Ariel Tiger • Aurelio Balestra • Brilliant Fantastic • Bull City Coworking • The Centre for Social Innovation • Daria Siegel • Doug Marinaro • Envato Pty Ltd • Geoff Mamlet • Green Spaces, LLC • Hub Seattle LLC • Jennifer Mincar • Jennifer Moon • Jennifer Vincent •

Joel Bennett • Kaan Aksay • Kido Technologies Pte Ltd • Laura Koehn • Loren Tripp • Matthias Wiemann • Neal Gorenflo • NextSpace • Not Bad Design LLC • Patricio Victorica • Stephen Franks • Steven King • Susan Evans • The Roosevelt Center for Working Parents • Thilo Utke • Union Square Main Streets • UnitCase LLC • William Jacobson

Not a supporter yet? Help us out!http://patreon.com/coworking

Or contact Tony Bacigalupo attony@opencoworking.org