Mapping NZ’s co-working spaces
And so, I return once again to playing with maps.
[Note: the map is live, and constantly being updated]
The last time I did it, I was sandboxing with Mapbox. That was 3 years ago and, auspiciously, the last post on my old science/tech blog.
Mapping things I: dogs and kids (see image below)
I’ve recently started mapping dog walks in Whangarei (a post for the very near future), but in the meantime…co-working spaces!
It all started a couple of months ago, with an hypothesis of mine that NZ’s co-working spaces could provide a better metric for innovation than patents.
In order to test this hypothesis, though, I needed data. I contacted people in the measuring-innovation and co-working spaces, and nobody had a complete list.
So, a bunch of elbow grease later, here’s the initial cut.
Of the 59* spaces I’ve found so far, these 54 are those for which I could find addresses. It’s possible they’re not all going concerns anymore, but that — and getting addresses for the shy/not-yet-open ones is part of Phase 2 :)
Next steps — some already begun — are:
- design metrics against which to start measuring co-working spaces, and pilot initial metrics with a few co-working spaces
- iterate and improve metrics
- send out to wider co-working community
- collect oodles of tasty data and start analysing for tonnes of brilliant insights.
If you’re involved in a co-working space and it’s not here, please give me a shout! Likewise, if you’d like to be involved in the metrics pilot, or in any other way, do get in touch. This is, after all, all about co-creation :)
Huge thanks to Pascale Hyboud-Peron of Basestation in Tauranga, who very kindly saved me a few hours by sharing with me a list she’s been keeping. I then added to it, finding addresses and more co-working spaces with the help of Google and a Facebook post on the NZ Tech Startups Eco-system group asking people which ones they knew of.
* This number will keep going up with time. It was correct at original time of publishing.
Update: I’ve updated the map and changed the link to and picture of it (the blog post above carries the currently correct link). The number of spaces keeps growing, hooray!
Further update: this is a live project, so I’m just going to keep updating it on an ongoing basis :)
