No Place <<<— here is your local song of the week by The Holler!

Unless you like baseball and see ghosts and live on a farm you are unlikely to find success building a collaborative shared space without a robust community in place. I see coworking spaces struggle when they believe that, “if you build it, they will come.” A better matra for fledgling community efforts would be, “we will build it as we grow (and we don’t really need a physical space right now or ever).”

Removing your attachment to finding a physical space is really, really hard. We’re conditioned to look for A PLACE for ourselves at every turn: your first bedroom, treehouse, dorm room, first apartment, house, office building, coffee shop. People like containers that house things. It’s natural but hella hard to remember when we get a call about every 6 hours from somebody claiming that they’ve been wanting to start a shared rehearsal space and already have a building etc etc.

We could easily fall in to the trap of finding a “great” space that works for US (us being Julie, Ian and me) but as Julie constantly reminds us, “are we putting the musicians first?” Afterall, the space isn’t about US, it’s about THEM and until THEY tell US what THEY need, we have no business looking at buildings for THEM, WITHOUT THEM. I’ll stop shouting at you now. If you want more detail on this please buy the ebook I co-authored about the importance of people before place.

Here are the other less philosophical things that happened this week.

• We continue survey deployment and have already exceeded our goal of 50 respondants! Woohoo. This means we can start analysis sooner than we thought.
• Focus group planning is in the works. Ian is gathering email addresses and checking dates/times.
• We need 10 pizza/beer sponsors to keep everyone lively at the focus groups. If you feel inspired by this project and can spare $20 please email Angel at fccoworking@gmail.com.
• Julie and I haven’t had our zany weekly chat yet but we have pancakes tomorrow so I’ll let you know if any hilarity ensues.

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