We are back from #COWORK2025 (Hey, Tegel is quite far away from our office!) after a long and exciting weekend of coworking (28-31.03.25). Seeing a lot of old friends and customers, meeting new participants, and having a lot of coworking fun: That’s what #COWORK is all about, and always has been.
This year, we were hosted by BEYDES New Working Culture 🏡, a two-floor space in Tegel, hosting solo entrepreneurs, small companies, and offices of large corporations (as well as a fully equipped podcast studio!)
The most important news from the German Coworking Federation e.V. – Bundesverband Coworking is their new board. Congratulations to Christopher J. Schmidhofer, Dr. Alexandra Bernhardt, Steffen Richter, and Manuela Wehrle. We're excited to see your work in the next months and years!
DAY 1 - Introduction, Keynote, World-Café 🥳
After a couple of welcome sessions from Silke Roggermann 🎤,Staatssekretär Michael Biel, and Birgit Steindorf, we jumped into the Keynote session by Leonie Müller 🚐, who explored how we can improve our coworking by taking a minute to arrive before meetings, as well as exploring the 4 Player Model, Team-Phases by Tuckman, and physical zonations of coworking spaces (and camping sites 🤓)
Following that, Carsten from Deskmag took the stage and presented us with his newest coworking statistics and numbers. In short, his numbers reflected an increase of trust in the future and continuous COVID recovery in German and European coworking spaces.
Results from Deskmag's Coworking Trends 2025 Survey
World-Café ☕️
After the lunch break, we were broken into 6 tables, with 6 different topics. Each discussion lasted 15 minutes, after which participants were asked to rotate to another table of their choice. Some of our takeaways from this session are coworking spaces in rural areas and small towns collaborating with already established local institutions (such as churches) and offering them their space to host events, as well as involving participants in events, instead of organising everything for them, so they feel a greater sense of community.
The event topics and suggestions strongly aligned with our interview with Stefania Pasquarelli, who gave us her tips on how they host amazing coworking events at Toolbox, Torino 🇮🇹. Read more here.
All the topics of the World-Café were: New work & Coworking, Engagement in Local Communities, Are Local Spaces a Profitable Model, Together for Sustainability, Coworking in Communities, and Target Groups in Coworking Spaces.
DAY 2 - BarCamp, Coworking Quiz 💡
You already know the deal, Doris and Beate hosted their trademark BarCamp sessions, which were, as usual, full of great learnings and discussions.
Here is part of what we participated in:
Georgi hosted his first Barcamp session, "Coworking Marketing for Independent Spaces", where we discussed how to promote small spaces and find new members. 🥳
Some notable points were Janek Panneitz suggesting to use Meetup event organisers and allow them to host their events for free, so your space can get free exposure; Centralizing event efforts through EventBride; or exploring untraditional methods like creating treasure hunts throughout your town (Suggested by Vicki Lichtenegger and her great space ToBe work&care, which has a pool available for members 🏊 and is a Cobot customer.)
If you want to learn more about independent coworking space marketing, subscribe to our newsletter - Coworking Marketing Weekly, both on email and LinkedIn. ☺️
Christian Cordes and Thilo hosted a session on Legal challenges and tips for coworking spaces. 🧑⚖️
Did you know that there are special laws when registering employees for virtual offices? Stay tuned, we will create a separate blog resource with more information on this! Until then, you can check out our article “Legal Requirements to Open a Coworking Space (+ Free PDF checklist)"
Kriesse and Alex hosted a session on Online Accessibility, where we discussed what online accessibility is (Learn more here) or how to create a Web Accessibility Statement (Learn more here). Thilo also helped host a session about Coworking Festival 2025 with Stefan and Katja Evertz from elbelab.
Other notable sessions included Payment Pain Points (led by Matthias from PayActive), learning more about the LEGO Serious Play method from Michael Barsakidis, and "Cooperation vs Collaboration", hosted by Janek Panneitz.
After the sessions, we moved to COCO - Coworking & Community, located in a market hall in the heart of Berlin, Kreuzberg. This lovely new space, which is also a Cobot customer 🤓, hosted the yearly Coworking Quiz:
- The quiz had over 60 participants, and was Berlin-tailored: Do you know which Berlin space was founded in the house of its founder’s parents? It’s our friends from Engelnest :)
- The winning team (CoCoCoCoCo) included two Cobot members - Kriesse & Thilo. The second place team also included two coboters - Laura & Georgi, while Alex got bronze! 🥉
DAY 3 - “THINKING WITHOUT BOXES” Seminar
Although we were all a bit tired from quizzing late the night before, this event kept us more than engaged in the early Sunday hours. Janek Panneitz presented his “3D Worlds Method”, a truly amazing way to visualize problems, identify stakeholder interest, and align solutions.
The topic of the session was “What makes a coworking space great?”. We came to a lot of good conclusions, and the 3D visualization helped many coworking spaces that participated understand that sometimes their best intentions in building a community don’t fully align with stakeholder interest, helping them adapt and improve their strategy.
The 3-hour session passed by like it was less than an hour long and left us with many great conclusions. It was one of our highlights of the event.
You can read more about Janek’s method here.
And that’s it! Thank you to everyone who came, and we are looking forward to seeing you next year in… well, we don’t know yet! But the new board promised to tell us soon, so we are looking forward to that!
Happy coworking! 🥳
