From coworking to coshoring
Anybody with an experience of coworking spaces knows or intuits the treasure within. That treasure is networking with people, an activity fundamental to our species, and timeless. Whereas service clubs (think Rotary International) rally their members around values of charity, coworking spaces attract theirs on an even simpler premise, that of work. Cultivating and nurturing a healthy, convivial atmosphere is no easy task, but if you succeed in doing so, people will come, and opportunities flourish. Opportunities for everybody involved, almost effortlessly. Sounds like magic, right? But can the recipe fare beyond a physical space?
With the tendency of coworking organizations to expand into networks soon after the home base is established, it seems that founders and administrators already answered that question. Some organizations, like the Hub, perceived themselves very early on as international structures. Others start regionally, but soon expand on a national level, as with La Cantine, in France. All seem to scrutinize the horizon, determined to support and enable the exchange of people, values and services beyond the physical boundaries of the initial hosting space.
This begs a question. Beyond the prestige that such consolidation brings forth, is there more to it than a strategic move? Sure, franchising allows other cities to bootstrap coworking spaces under the same brand name, but is there added value for existing members? Does it enhance the scope of activities on the network level? Let's remember that the reason for the success of coworking might very well lie in the physicality of a shared space. In the way they allow people to engage in in face to face conversations, meeting for appointments, collaborating in front a computer. In the way they are vectors of serendipity, providing the context in which human relationships fold and unfold, like stories do.
So how does one network remotely? What happens when you take away the physical dimension, the immediacy, and introduce distances and timezones? The world of enterprises has been facing a similar conundrum. In a global market, companies often resort to offshoring, i.e. transfer activities to distant places with competitive advantages (more often than not related to labor cost). But timezones and cultural differences proves indeed non trivial to overcome. In some cases, like in the high-tech industry, those hurdles were important enough to displace Indian software service providers in favor of Eastern-European companies, who brandished the marketing term "nearshoring" when arguing that nearby countries with cultural synergies could annul the inconveniences of offshoring while maintaining its advantages.
If coworking networks are not just the result of deterministic forces tied to organisational DNA, if they are indeed more than a glorified franchising scheme, then their value should be measured by the activities they boost globally. And if we can imagine a normalization of such exchanges across coworking spaces, we would achieve a new model that I'd like to coin coshoring. Indeed, coworking spaces share values of openness and collaboration, attract for the most part well educated and skilled people, and already have support structures in place of varying sophistication. They are a natural fit for distributed project management.
I would love to see an entrepreneur from Paris work hand in hand with a development team in Tel Aviv, or an entrepreneur from Tel Aviv hiring media professionals from France. In order to encourage and empower such endeavors, there is a need for tools. By and large, those tools need to be invented. In a talk I gave at La Cantine, I have proposed joint virtual walls to help identifying and synchronizing offer and demand across coworking spaces. Private social networks, like the one in place at the Hub (HubNet), allow for Facebook type interaction between members of the organization.
Furthermore, there is a lot to learn from the open source world, which is championing the whole notion of decentralized, collaborative project management. Open source projects like the linux kernel immediately spring to mind, but savvy, privately funded startups have been chiming in as well. To understand how that works, one needs to look at the processes put in place by the actors. Loose hierarchies, iterative workflows, asynchronous communication between team members… Is this a model that only befits geekdom? Maybe. The point is that some people have figured out how to collaborate efficiently transcending borders, and coworking organizations may want to adapt the lessons learnt to their benefit. This will be, in my opinion, the recipe for future success stories in coshoring.