The Evolution of Coworking
Did you know that the coworking concept was first invented in Germany in 1995 when a group of programmers, Nerds, SciFi-Fans and digital activists gathered themselves in a physical space in order for them to share the same passion?
“The Mother of all Hackspaces”. This is how they call the C Base which is the first coworking space to be found in the center of Berlin. Since that time, the community there reconstructed the space station and used it to share knowledge, interact with other species and provide a space for likeminded groups and individuals.
But, the term “coworking” itself was not used, only until 1999 when the American game designer Bernie De Koven used it to describe places that encourage collaborative work involving the use of computers and ICTs.
Tow years later, the Schraubenfabrik in Vienna, a community center for businesses, became the first space to be managed by Konnex the first coworking network in Austria and one of the largest in Europe.
Year after year, the spread of the coworking culture has became more prominent and visible with the establishment of the first official coworking space in the American continent in the city of San Francisco by the programmer Brad Neuberg. This space was equipped with a wifi network and offered shared lunches and meditation sessions just to provide people with a more sociable business space where they can be more productive.
2006 was the year when Coworking Wikis started to be famous with the foundation of the Hat Factory; the first coworking space open on a full time basis in San Francisco. At that time, there were no more than 30 coworking spaces worldwide, but one year later, coworking started to become the trend, as Google statistics put the term “coworking” in the category of true trends. Without forgetting to mention that this very term had its own page on Wikipedia, in its English version.
Coworking became the norm and people even invented Coworking VISAs, which are agreements between several coworking platforms allowing each of the different members to go freely in any space.
The concept also became popular in Europe thanks to Germany using the term “coworking” for the first time according to Google Trends. Later, the 1st coworking conference in Europe at Hub Brussels was organised in 2010 celebrating the #1stCoworkingDay, which paved the way, in 2011, for the birth of the Jelly Week, a week of events worldwide to create a community of exchange around coworking.
Now, large companies are starting to launch their own space, including Orange, the ING bank. Indeed, between 2010 and 2011, the number of coworking space around the world increased by 100% to become more than 160 worldwide.
