Coworking and Coliving is Changing
I’ve started a coliving travel company, worked for many coworking and coliving spaces as a consultant, and travel full time myself as what a lot of people call a digital nomad.
Those of us doing this are spearheading a new way of living, creating new industries and have the power to change the communities we travel through in a positive way.
Who are the stakeholders here? Are we making the most of this shift in the industry? Together, can we find better ways of navigating it?
Coliving
This one can mean a varied amount of things, depending on whom you’re speaking with. Mostly, I’ve seen it mean people living in the same house/mansion/complex with private rooms and bathrooms and a shared common area of kitchen, living area, etc.
There are also traveling coliving groups and stationary coliving locations. A stationary coliving space is set up in one location and people come through it. Traveling coliving groups have locations around the world and the group travels together through them, staying from one month up to six months in each location.
I helped start a coliving travel company where we would take over mansions in beautiful locations for a month at a time around the world. The houses usually had 10–12 rooms and could elect to share a room or pay a little extra and have a suite to themselves.
On the other end of that, I’m on the team of a coliving traveling group (Wanderist Life), where we try to get everyone their own apartments in the locations we travel to. They “co-live” in the the sense of traveling together to each location, exploring the city together, but more importantly they share support and knowledge resources. They are a traveling community that eventually feel like a traveling family.
Coworking
On the surface level, it’s sharing office space with other people. There’s “flex space” where you pay a monthly membership and work from any of the available desks in the space’s common area. Or you and your team can have your own office and share the common area and kitchen with everyone else there. The space organizes educational talks, town halls about local issues, and tons of tons of networking events.
Below the surface, coworking allows a safe space for startups, entrepreneurs, creatives, freelancers and everyone else to come together in a work environment and create collective intelligence. It’s the intentional coming together of people who want to learn from each other and support each other, with the goal to all be braver in our own ways. These “members” could have worked from home, a coffee shop or even rented their own space.
Coworking at home versus coworking abroad
Usually, people in the Impact Hub Oakland (where I station myself when I’m home) plan to live in Oakland for the foreseeable future, want to make a change in their community and are very connected to/love the city they live in.
They roll through the space on a 9–5ish basis and have their support networks very solidified outside the space. There’s also the element of employees who end up at the space just because their bosses bought a membership for them and they don’t really know what a coworking space is or how they can impact it.
This was all very different from my normal coworking experience while outside my home country. Coworking spaces in foreign countries become the place where you work, make friends, and even meet travel buddies. Everyone is there temporarily, so there’s always someone up to go on a hike to the nearest temple, go surfing before a work session or just hang out and have some local food.
People are working weird hours to align with their home country’s timezone, which creates a constant flow of work and play all rolling together and happening simultaneously throughout the space.
At Dojo Bali, I would come into the space with some girls I just gone surfing with, have a team meeting (I was consulting for the space), go to lunch with someone else I’d just met, hop in the pool for an afternoon swim, do some Skype calls with Europe because they’d just woken up, run an educational event at 5pm for the members at the space, and head out for sunset drinks with others I saw who’d just finished their day on their laptops (whew, that was a long sentence. haha).
It all flowed together in a beautiful way and everyone was on the same page in their lifestyle. You didn’t have to explain why you were working and playing as hard as you could, everyone else around you was doing the same thing.
Digital Nomad: Simply means being able to work and travel. People can disagree with me on this, but I don’t think it only means making your money purely off an online business. I think it means using technology and our global community to create opportunities all around the world (and the freedom to travel to them).
Can We Do This Better?
I love jumping in and out of all three of these areas, speaking to and working with all three stakeholders. I’ve consulted for coworking and coliving spaces all around the world and am constantly learning from each one and passing it onto the next.
But why am I the only one doing this?
We could be banding together and collaborating to push the industry further, have more negotiating power with governments for grants/visa allowances, etc.
We could be pushing for a collective and borderless society. A co-sharing society.
It would make me sad if we missed out on these opportunities to look at the big picture and just do things more collaboratively and better. More strategically. Will we stay in our silos, with pure hearts, and yet a full head of blinders to the Weworks of the world coming in, sterilizing and making it commercial (and profitable)?
Is there a way we could be doing all of this better?
I think so. Let’s partner on something.
Contact me through my website below:
