Cats know to look up in a down economy.

Hard as it is to believe, all this economic turmoil does have some bright spots. For one, sustainable industries like those I cover for Sustainable Industries will likely thrive because anything “green” that replaces a less-sustainable and necessary product (think clean energy and electric cars) is positioned to do well in a tanking economy. Another bright spot in the economic doom and gloom could very well be coworking spaces such as Office Nomads and other similar “crowd-sourced” ventures.

I caught wind of the possibility from the Launchpad Coworking blog where they wrote about a column at O’Reilly Radar discussing just that. Writer Nat Torkington lays out his thoughts about what kinds of ideas and efforts will succeed because there is an economic crisis. Torington says he thinks cloud computing, open-source software, innovation in general and coworking will flourish during the recession because there is a recession.

People will have more time than money. This is good for open source software, but also for hardware and Make-style reconnection with the objects around us. The low-cost high-impact physical events we’ve created (Ignite, hacker meetups, coworking spaces, foo/bar camps) will thrive even as big-ticket conferences feel the effects of pinched pennies. The killer app in the “web meets world” space may just come from a Maker with spare time who sees a great need.

Covering sustainability, that doesn’t surprise me. As a writer, I talk to people in lots of different sectors. Those in the world of sustainability know what coworking is much more often than those in other industries with the possible exception of software and web developers. Considering that, if you believe the premise, “This recession will be good for innovation because recessions generally are,” as Torkington does, it’s only a short hop to believing that the innovators who tend to populate coworking spaces such as Office Nomads will lead the way to the next economic boom. Here’s hoping that as we do it, we’re all smart enough to build it on a stable infrastructure and not just create the next bubble.

I couldn’t help but use the first image I found when searching Flickr for “Looking Up” since I am a sucker for cats. Thanks to Flickr user ex.libris for putting it there under the Creative Commons license.

This weekend Seattle is having our first BarCamp event at the Adobe Conference Center in Fremont. For those of you unfamiliar with BarCamp it is “an ad-hoc gathering born from the desire for people to share and learn in an open environment. It is an intense event with discussions, demos and interaction from participants”. How it works is we have lined up the venue and the sponsors (free t-shirts & lunch) and the content of the conference comes with the attendees. First thing Saturday morning people who want to give a talk, or facilitate a discussion sign up on the big board in the room/time slot they choose. Throughout the day there will be all sorts of presentations on a wide range of topics. The event is free for everyone and runs Saturday from 10AM-5PM and Sunday from 10AM-1PM. Saturday night there is also a big party at The Red Door. Susan and I are planning on talking about Coworking on Saturday around 2PM and we’ve invited all the regional spaces to join us. It is going to be a great weekend.

Tonight we are having a volunteer meeting at Office Nomads at 7PM. There are plenty of opportunities to volunteer so please come if you would like to help out. For more information on the event visit http://www.barcampseattle.org.

Last night Tara Brown hosted a meeting here at Office Nomads to kick off planning for Seattle’s first Bar Camp. BarCampSeattle is going to be on June 14th and 15th at a location that will soon be determined. The first meeting was mostly to get the ball rolling and see how excited people are. We filled our main conference room and despite the high turn out we actually got a lot done too! Priority #1 is to find a venue and we have some great leads. Next we will focus on sponsorship and promotion. If you are interested in helping plan we are having our next meeting here on May 6th, 7PM. Contact Tara to let us know you are coming. You can also join the Facebook Group.