I’m going to quote Jane Jacobs, to give my post a sense of weight it probably doesn’t deserve. “Old ideas can sometimes use new buildings. New ideas must use old buildings.”

I was talking to a friend tonight about Innovation Commons in Toronto. They were totally into the concept and stressed the importance of the place and particularly space, as criteria for deciding if IC might be a place for them “nice building, big windows” were the specified criteria I think.

Of place and space, place is perhaps the easier to specify. We know IC needs to be downtown, on a good transit line etc. Space, in my mind, relates to the feel of the place, it’s more difficult to define, but I think just as important as place.

I can provide a counter example though, what doesn’t feel right to me in terms of space though. In the same conversation The Toronto Writer’s Centre came up. Basically TWC is a space in Yorkville which is an IC for writers, I hadn’t come across it before. To be rather brutally critical, judging by the photos on the site the TWC space is the exact opposite of something I’d want to invest time, money and effort in being part of (which is fine, as I’m not a writer so they wouldn’t want me). Grey cubes and boring lowest common denominator ‘architecture’ were one of the things I was glad to get away from when I left the Ontario government. Now a space like the 401 Richmond Centre, for example, if IC found a space with that feel I’d get my cheque book out in a second.

I realise this stuff is very subjective, and everyone has different priorities and preferences, but it seemed worth throwing into the pot while this thing is bubbling.

Note: probably this belongs on the innovation commons site but 1) It feels rather personal, so posting it to my own blog makes some sense 2) It’s late and I couldn’t figure out how to link and format on the Drupal install (it says you can use HTML, but you can’t).

I’m going to be talking about this stuff further in other posts, but first things first, what are third places and coworking?

Here’s a third place definition via the web referencing Ray Oldenburg’s book The Great Good Place

Third places exist on neutral ground and serve to level their guests to a condition of social equality. Within these places, conversation is the primary activity and the major vehicle for the display and appreciation of human personality and individuality.

My understanding of a third place is that it’s a place not work and not home, literally a third place, where important, but often undervalued, social and community stuff takes place. I’m only a couple of chapters into the book so I may well be wrong.

Now coworking, actually this is more a wish list than a definition, but it’s close enough (from Andy Howard via the coworking wiki),

A natural extension of a cafe, the ideal co-working space has the usual offering of coffee, meals, snacks. In addition, the co-working space has a communal area with wired and unwired internet access, for use with personal laptops or provided desktops. There are group work areas and more private individual workspaces.

There are quiet phone booths for making important calls and bookable meeting rooms for business meetings or creative sessions. There is an ambience of creativity, professionalism, community and ambition. Entrepreneurs, international travel writers, business owners and CEOs all in the same space, making connections, working creatively with as much or as little contact with one another as they desire.

There are some obvious parallels between these two ideas, and they both play strongly into a conversation that seems to be developing in several places right now. More on that conversation in later posts.

For any Toronto locals with a WiFi interest here are two pieces of news. Wireless Toronto will be launching our first outdoor hotspot at Dufferin Grove Park the weekend of May 27th, 28th - just in time for nice weather (I hope).

Also, we’re throwing a party to celebrate one year of our volunteer group working on free WiFi and community stuff in Toronto, that’s Thursday May 25th. So if you’re interested in finding out what we’re up to and enjoying a tasty beverage at the same time then come along. Feel free to RSVP via upcoming.org, but it’s fine to just turn up too.

This is a re-post of a piece I originally posted on the, soon to be defunct, original Wireless Toronto blog. I thought it was worth saving as it plays right into an interesting conversation about third places in Toronto that is taking place right now.

The Aula community describe themselves as ‘a nonprofit cooperative that encourages professionals and enthusiasts from various fields to develop new projects together — for more innovative art, science, and technology, and for a better world, future, and quality of life.’

I came across them through an article about the Hunaja (Finnish for Honey) project. The Aim of this project is to ‘create an access control system for community spaces that enables users to stay aware of others in the space remotely by using the Web or a mobile phone’

What really interested me about this project is that Aula have actually built a real, interesting physical space [pdf] using some of the principles they are researching. The plan calls for public sitting areas, small private cubes for projects, semi-private meeting spaces, multi-purpose event space and even a sauna (these are from the planning document, I’m coming up light on links to what they actually built).

This struck a particular cord, because I have been thinking about interesting public/semi-public spaces in Toronto in the context of possible locations for Wireless Toronto hotspots - and really there aren’t all that many that I find really compelling. The Aula example seems like a Third Place that I could really get behind. Toronto branch of Aula anyone?

This is going to be a quick post (though saying that almost always seems to mean the inverse) as I need some sleep.

This week has definitely been a busy one. Thursday was the first issue of the Eye Weekly newspaper where I was officially listed in the masthead as the ‘Website Administrator’, though actually my Wednesday nights have been given over to getting the new Eye issue online for several months now.

Wednesday was also the first part of the installation of the free WiFi hotspot at Dufferin Grove park, which I’m involved with as a Wireless Toronto volunteer.

Then Thursday night was time to install WiFi in a signal disused, semi-industrial space in Liberty Village, where this weekend’s BarCamp TDot un-conference was being held. This install presented some interesting challenges, not least of which were the fact that there are only 3 working power outlets in the whole space. We got it working though.

Then Today was the first day of BarCamp. Exhausting and with somewhat sub-optimal acoustics (parallel discussions in a single, echoey space are tricky). But overall it was really good, too many cool and inspirational people to list. Though the Unspaced guys stick out in my mind, the more I hear about them the more I like them. Seems like they create out some really cool web software and they do it in a craftsmanlike, ethical and successful way.

OK, now to bed. Tomorrow is day 2 (hopefully quieter) of BarCamp. Then Monday and Tuesday I’m at the Mesh conference. Around Wednesday or so I should probably do some work I can bill for, to pay for the roof over my head and all that.

If you have a website you probably already know about the potential addiction that is checking your visitor logs. Personally I’ve been able to rein in my habit to a couple of times a week for checking the website stats, largely because I’ve got other things to be doing.

For those not familiar with this particular vice, using server logs it’s possible to tell all sorts of things about where your website visitors come from, what they look at when they arrive and how long they stay. Even better Google Analytics gives you pretty graphs, and all for the low price of zero dollars.

Anyway, back to my story. So I was browsing my stats and took a glace through the traffic that was referred to my site by search engines. There at number 10 for this week was a visitor who searched for ‘try to take out a consultant‘. Now I don’t know the context, so I’m not sure if the searcher in that case wanted to ‘take out a consultant’ in a mob sense or maybe just a more benign social way. Neither of those is things I recall writing about recently anyway, so I can only assume that the search continues elsewhere. The person who searched for a definition of ’shaving the yak’ though, them I think I helped.