Third places and coworking, what are they?
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.
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Comments (8)
Comment from Rothko:
[May 21, 2006]
I like the ‘third place’ concept, but man, it needs a better name.
Comment from pdinnen:
[May 21, 2006]
Yep, third place was named by an academic and it shows.
Comment from Boris Mann:
[May 23, 2006]
Great stuff, Patrick. Any way you can create a new category for “third place / coworking / commons related posts? Then I can suck that category feed directly into innovationcommons.ca
Comment from pdinnen:
[May 23, 2006]
Good idea Boris. I’ve added a category, http://www.hogtownconsulting.com/wordpress/archives/category/innovation-commons/
Comment from Rohan Jayasekera:
[June 7, 2006]
I think coworking and the Third Place are different things. A Third Place is somewhere like a bar where you hang out, and isn’t home and isn’t work. Coworking by contrast provides a workplace for those who wouldn’t otherwise have one outside their home.
I think the root of the confusion is that people think of coworking as providing the same social benefits that third places do — which is not true; it provides the same social benefits that a workplace does.
Comment from pdinnen:
[June 8, 2006]
Rohan
I agree, there does seem to be some blurring between the ideas of coworking and third places that maybe isn’t useful, I’ve blurred those concepts a little myself.
I do think though that the Innovation Commons idea, though primariliy one of coworking, can provide a space that has some of the features of a third place. I’m particularly thinking of the plans to incorporate a cafe into the space. Having that part of the space tuned to socialising then introduces some third spacish potential I think.
Pingback from Hogtown Consulting » Indoor Playground, drywall’s in now we wait for the slide:
[January 13, 2007]
[…] Last night was the first open house for Indoor Playground, the new coworking office space that’s opening up on Richmond in the next month or so. Actually, I’m not sure that the Indoor Playground is going to have a slide, though that would be cool. It does look like it will have lots of other good stuff, particularly a really nice space and interesting people doing interesting stuff. […]
Comment from Alexa Butt:
[May 28, 2007]
I think co working is a great idea and this definition sums up the whole concept. As Andy stated in the first post “all in the same space, making connections, working creatively with as much or as little contact with one another as they desire.â€?
I just moved into a co working space in Vancouver called The Network Hub and it is working out really well for me. I have managed to make a lot of contacts that I wouldn’t have had access too without the space.