Today marks a big day in coworking history: it’s the 5 year anniversary of coworking!

5 years ago today, Brad Neuberg sparked a movement when he coined the word “coworking” and started Spiral Muse in San Francisco. From the start, coworking was crafted as an open model, and one that required participation in order to succeed.  Since Brad’s initial start with Spiral Muse, a community of coworking advocates has grown and flourished across the globe.  Spaces have opened – each with their own identity and goals – all connecting back to one another through the open-sourced Coworking Wiki.  Theory, practice, and advice has flowed freely at the Coworking Google Group, growing from a small handful of participants to a whopping 2700 voices. Spaces across the globe connect their members by participating in the Coworking Visa Program. And we’ve only just gotten started.

There are more people than I could ever possibly list who have contributed, shared and queried the Coworking Google Group, thus creating the coworking community we now have.  They have contributed selflessly, advised wisely, and questioned thoughtfully throughout the years, enabling each of us to strengthen our work in the coworking world.

These folks have not only contributed to the growth and success of coworking overall, but to the growth and success of our coworking space here in Seattle. It has been over three years since the idea of Office Nomads hatched between Jacob Sayles and I. When we first got talking about what it is we wanted to do, it was discovering the term coworking that enabled us to clarify our goals and to feel a sense of belonging in a business venture that had previously felt uncharted. Coworking became our compass. Being able to identify as a coworking space gave us meaning, a platform to launch from, and a community to provide us with the support we needed.

During those early days of building and then opening Office Nomads, the coworking community was our sounding board, our advisers, and most importantly our great friends. There will never be enough words of thanks to each member of the coworking community.

So here’s to you, coworking. We raise our glasses in true salute. Off to another great year!

Eric Von Blon

Member Since: The beginning

If you have been in Office Nomads, you have met Eric.  It would be near impossible to miss him.  He’s a bit of a favorite around the office.  In the early morning he is the one who comes in and makes Office Nomads presentable for all of you.  He is also known for cooking up some mean waffles which pairs nicely with the hot coffee he gets going for all of you.

Eric came upon us after a long friendship with Jacob and a serious need for a place outside of his home.  Jacob told him about his plan to open Office Nomads and Eric jumped. “I had been working from home for 8 months and was going absolutely mad. It was really serendipitous.”  And so, Eric showed up and has been part of Office Nomads ever since.

In actuality Eric is trained as a Circuit Provisioner.  “I wouldn’t know where to begin to actually explain it,” he confessed.  The quick explanation involved ordering, tracking, and turning-up telecommunication circuits.  Yes, turns out Eric is a complex individual.  He is on the hunt now for a fresh gig in that field and until then he has taken up many activities to fill his time.  He does Quality Assurance work for Ryan Salva and Capitol Media.  That entails reviewing the websites they have designed and making sure nothing is broken.  At the same time he is a rock star in the house cleaning biz.  A number of Nomads have hired him and have welcomed Eric to work shirtless (yup) to make their homes sparkling.

If you haven’t befriended Eric yet, you really should.  He always seems to be involved in interesting stuff.  Many of us have seen the photos of him from the Zombie Walk in Fremont.  The cocollage features him taking a bit of Jacob’s head, it appears.  He acts as Fire Safety for Fire Spinners of Spinnery Arts.  That really means that he makes sure that nobody is lit on fire or hurt in any other way so, in other words, he’s the most important guy to have around when playing with fire.

Next time you’re in Office Nomads, make sure you chat up Eric.  Maybe he’ll make you waffles and tell you about the fancy chickens his mother paints.  Maybe you’ll hear a funny story from Burning Man.  Whatever the topic, it’s sure to be interesting.  That’s just how Eric rolls.

Over the years, we have heard many work-from-home stories from folks who come through our coworking space.  Many start with “I love working from home, but…” followed by a long pause.  It seems everyone has something that makes working from home not work for them.  For some it’s the isolation of being alone all day without enough human interaction. For others it’s being a work-at-home parent with a child who doesn’t understand that “mommy’s working right now.”  And others got tired of waiting for their cat to come up with their next great business idea.

For whatever the reason, many work-from-homers need a break from time to time and that’s where we’re excited to come in and help out. Whether you need to escape the drudgery of the home office once a week or full-time, Office Nomads has some great options you can mix and match to fit into your schedule and budget.  Take a look at our updated membership & pricing page, and then switch back here for an example of what we are talking about.

A real world example

So, you’ve finally got your consulting business up and running, and things are going well.  You’ve got several clients, but are still looking for more.  You started up out of your living room, and occasionally head out to the coffee shop when you want to shake things up.  You are still excited to be your own boss and yet also feel like you’ve plateaued.  While seeking something to break the stalemate you look into coworking.

You don’t need a full-time office, but dropping in a few days a month would really help revive your productivity.  You decide to give things a try and sign up for a Basic membership at Office Nomads ($50/month).  While chatting with Alexandra at the front desk, you learn about Biznik, a Seattle-based networking group for indies just like you.  You whip up your free profile, go to a few events, and soon realize the value of upgrading to a Biznik Pro membership ($10/month).  Now you are gathering clients faster than ever, and more and more people know who you are and what you’re all about.  Realizing that you might want to register your consulting business someplace other than your home, you add a Business Identity Plan to your membership at Office Nomads ($35/month).

One month later, you’ve got an impressive new office to bring your clients to, a vibrant community of coworkers to collaborate with, a wider network of independent entrepreneurs to learn from, and a professional address associated with your business, all for less than $100/month.

Sounds pretty awesome, eh?

Again, check out our updated membership and pricing page, and then mosey on over to our list of friends & partners to see what other opportunities membership at Office Nomads might bring!

Thanks to Flickr user Fayez for use of the beautiful photo above under the Creative Commons license.

Holly McHugh

Member Since: October 2009

Type of Member: Basic

Holly makes it to Office Nomads about once a week to be surrounded by a community of like-minded folks.  She will carpool in the 45 minutes from Maple Valley with her boyfriend, Troy, so as to take advantage of the HOV.  Then she settles in at ON while he’s off to OR.   Talking to Holly, it is a bit of a surprise to learn that she lives out in Maple Valley as she exudes the urban green lifestyle many of the folks of Seattle lead.  Instead, she’s a country girl, well, a displaced city girl in the country.

Originally, Holly hails from Portland but left there to work in China for 8 years in the manufacturing capitol of the world.  “I wasn’t living healthy there and my body wasn’t handling it well.” She returned stateside, back to Portland before meeting a lovely man who lived in Maple Valley and, so, she moved up there.  Such a shift from a city of 13 million to a town of 20,000 can be hard.  “People drive to their mailboxes!”  That does sound like the country.  Although living so far from Capitol Hill, Holly is hooked and loves to come to ON on days when there is yoga. “I like a place where I can do yoga and there are ‘Your Mom’ jokes.”  She is lending a helping hand to Sustainable Capitol Hill by giving them some worms for their worm bin projects.  “If there was a Sustainable Maple Valley, I’d be involved.”

Life brought Holly back to the states where she continues to do similar work as she did abroad. “The company I work for works with brands and their importers to help their manufacturing partners, factories or an agent meet the requirements of local labor law in China…For example, let’s say, a women’s clothing brand is our client. We do classroom training for all their suppliers. We also get a select group of their select manufacturing partners and we do training specific to them to help them build compliance capacity.  And, we work directly with individual factories to help them meet requirements of the local labor law.” Turns out, Chinese labor laws are actually stricter that US laws so Holly and the consulting firm for whom she works, advise the companies and factories as to what can be done and what needs to be done so the partnership is beneficial for all.

Her job sounds like it takes a lot so she knows how to have fun.  Holly loves to mountain bike, and the family is a big fan of going bike camping.  With 3 kids in the house, life is busy and it sounds like it’s pretty fun.  “My daughter is a rockin’ guitarist. “  Holly gets a proud look on her face, “She’s learning Enter Sandman.”

With her life full of family, music, yoga, and bikes, it’s easy to understand how Holly always is buzzing with positive energy.  We love having her at Office Nomads and can’t wait for the next Wednesday when we see her again!

Office Nomads started the process of removing a troublesome wall in our space. For us, this is not just the removal of a physical wall, but a social barrier that has been perplexing us for some time now. Check out the video below on the first step we took towards taking walls down in our space.

No more walls from Office Nomads on Vimeo.

Again, taking this wall down is more than just to complete another successful construction project at the office.  We’re taking this wall down because:

1. Coworking spaces are not about walls. In fact, most coworking spaces, ours included, have as few walls as possible. Walls (cubicle or otherwise) separate us from one another and create barriers to meeting each other. This wall had only served to separate some of our members from one another, so we took it down.
2. Walls = isolation. The majority of our members come to our space to get away from walls that isolate them from the rest of their community. We found that even on days where the rest of our space was brimming with coworkers, the closed-door room in our space rarely saw much traffic. No one wanted to be isolated back there, as it meant they missed out on the buzz and energy happening in the rest of the space.  Watching people sardine themselves next to one another while there was plenty of available space in the back room only encouraged us to take that sucker out.
3. Natural light is awesome! This separated room didn’t get nearly as much natural light as the rest of our office, making it a much less desirable area to work in. So we knocked that sucker down and let the light flood in!

We are only partway finished the project and are excited to take the next step (reframing, finishing, etc.).  We’ll keep you posted!

Jacob Sayles

Member Since: Inception

Type of Member: Co-Owner

Website: http://www.officenomads.com

We’ve started seeing Jacob at Office Nomads a lot more.  In the past he had perfected the juggling act of a full time job elsewhere in the city and being a co-owner of Office Nomads.  It was all fairly impressive.  But January saw an end to the back and forth and he has taken up at Office Nomads full time.  “How cool is it that I can walk away from 15 years in software and have this community around me?  I didn’t even bat an eye about it,” he said.  When Office Nomads started in 2007, building a community he could count on was not the plan.  “[Starting Office Nomads] seemed like the right thing to do.  I just wanted to jump into a big project I believed in.”

Jacob is all about big projects, and that is one of the reasons we love having him around. Big ideas come to him and he strolls to the front and informs us he wants to build a Wall of Achievement, tear down the wall in the Green Room, install new lighting, make a Big Idea Board, or make a trebuchet out of office supplies.  His great energy inspires the rest of us and, just maybe, we’ll harness all of it and take down that big green wall.

Jacob is a bit of a Swiss Army Knife of talents.  No tech problem is too big for him.  Every construction or maintenance project is something he can easily tackle, as is evidence by his awesome house.  Apparently he has ‘mad yo-yo skills’ and holds Steve Brown up as his hero.   At the same time, he has mastered the title of Nomad.  Starting at the age of 17 with a trip to Japan, he has hopped around to all different parts of the world.  Most recently he found himself in Brazil for two weeks enjoy sun and paradise while the rest of us put on our rain jackets and galoshes to fight the Seattle rain.

Come on by the space and see if you can notice the positive changes that have occurred since Jacob came back full time.  If you can find them all, you get a free cup of coffee!  Wait, coffee is always free?  Eh…

The next time you come into Office Nomads, make sure you make a beeline to Susan’s desk.  You lift an eyebrow and ask me why.  Well, it’s not her wit or her thoughtful commentary (although those are pretty great, too) that makes me suggest you stop by there, but more for Buckley.

Buckley is Susan’s 5-month-old black lab.  He is a solid 35 pounds of cuteness.  Now, don’t think of a stereotypical bouncing black lab when you picture this guy. Mellow is an excellent way to describe him.  ‘Adorable’ works, too.  He likes to laze about the office, taking full advantage of Office Nomad’s open napping policy. Usually he happily wanders up when called, plops down on his bottom and shows off his big brown eyes until people give in and scratch his head.  He’s a pro and will reduce you in no time into one of those people whose voice jumps a couple octaves and makes funny faces as you pet him.  Great entertainment is tossing a tennis ball for him and watching him prance and pounce his way to the ball until he scoops it up and trots back.  A true lab, this one.

It’s easy to see that this is a budding puppy food model we have here.  If that job doesn’t pan out then he is open to being a food tester, mainly for the meat industry.  Young Buckley, or Buck if you’re comfortable, is a major outdoor enthusiast.  He enjoys long walks along the waterfront and weekends at his country home in the North Cascades.  This young stud is single but isn’t looking for anything serious.  If you want to stop by and shower him with love for only a short period of time, he would be thrilled.

And that, everyone, is our new adorably fantastic Nomad.  His full name is Sir Buckley Danger Dog, but you can call him Buckley.

Kevin Moore

Website: www.kevinmooreconsulting.com

Member Since: January 2010

Type of Member: Resident

When most people are nine, they are mastering the early squiggles of cursive writing and are confident that their urges to eat paste are well gone in their past. At the wee age of nine, Kevin Moore was already tapping away at a keyboard in the early stages of his programming career.  By the time he was in high school he was doing professional web development. A visit to a career fair in college led to an internship at Microsoft, which blossomed to a career, which was a step along the way to his current freelance software consulting.  He was lucky enough to figure out what he liked doing early on and has been able to make a career out of it.

Kevin is a new addition to Office Nomads and he is fitting in perfectly. He became familiar with ON after participating in Green Drinks and Sustainable Capitol Hill. Every entrance and exit he makes in the space involves a fist pound with other Nomads. He’s a positive addition to the space, sharing his James Brown with everyone and enthusiastically joining in on the fun when we’ve gone to Happy Hour or had other events.  There are rumors that he has a singing and music background and we are eagerly anticipating the day when he decided to share that with us.

Like many other Nomads, Kevin is a bit of a world traveler.   This summer he is off to explore Argentina and Peru.  Lucky for him, his business is mobile so in between the tango dancing and exploration of ruins he can continue his freelance software consulting business, Kevin Moore Consulting.  We all are eagerly anticipating his reports on eating cuy (guinea pig) and drinking chicha (corn beer).

We are thrilled to have Kevin at Office Nomads.  Not just because he has the magically ability of fixing our computers just by looking at them, but because he is a pretty stellar individual.

Wow! The January Open House was a great time!  Thanks to everyone who stopped by.  It was great to see everyone and catch up.

For those of you who missed out, I understand the weather was rather terrible that evening.  But, you missed out on some pretty spectacular fun.  Josh, from Bluebird Ice Cream, scooped out some incredible ice cream for everyone to try.  He very quickly ran out of the vegan coconut mint chocolate chip and there was a good reason why.  I had no idea vegan ice cream could be so fantastic!  The Stumptown ice cream and the snickerdoodle were also really delicious and it was all finished off by the time the night came to a close.    Mychal Richardson’s photography was a great conversation piece and had many people quietly going from one photo to the next reading about how each individual pictured fought for their rights.  I think we all came away inspired.  See more of his work on his website or stop by and check them out!

A big thanks must also go to Andy Aupperlee of Explosion 5000.  He took over the Green Room and shot portraits of our Open House attendees and their New Years Resolutions.  The results are rather amazing and you should make sure to read about it on his website and look at his Flickr page.

A big thanks to all of you who could come out.  Hopefully see you all at our next Open House!

Thanks to Flickr user Sukanto Debnath for use of the above photo through the Creative Commons License

It’s January so that means it’s time for our January Open House!  Fitting, right?  Well, we are really excited for this month’s open house on January 14th from 6 PM to 9 PM when we’ll open our doors to the wholecommunity to celebrate art, coworking and each other.

What: January Open House

When: Thursday, January 14th from 6 PM-9 PM

Where: Office Nomads- 1617 Boylston Ave, Second Floor

Food and Drink: We’ve got the goods, just bring your pint glass!

We are proud to be part of Capitol Hill Art Walk again this month and are featuring the beautiful photography of Mychal Richardson of Lost Photography.  His show, “Faces of Washington” was created for the ACLU and includes seventeen 36″ by 36″ black and white portraits of courageous individuals from all across Washington State who fought for their rights and the rights of others.  It is an inspiring show and one not to be missed.

Something we are very excited about is the opportunity to be part of the art!  Andy Aupperlee of Explosion 5000 will be here taking photos of you and your New Years Resolutions.  Andy is really excited to have some fun with these photography so bring a big smile and your creativity to be expressed in the photobooth.  At the same time, we have partnered with a couple local businesses in an effort to tempt you away from some of those New Years Resolutions. Ice cream from Bluebird Ice Cream and beer from Elysian Brewing always are incredibly delicious and will both be here.  Make sure your bring a sweet tooth and your pint glass!

The only thing that could make the Open House any greater would be you!  We hope you can join us and bring along your great friends and family.  What better way to celebrate winter, photography and the neighborhood than with our community?  We look forward to seeing you!