Notes from the first European Coworking Conference

Last weekend I (Alex) attended the coworking conference in Brussels. The event was held at The Hub over the course of 2 days. Day one consisted of numerous talks from very different kinds of people. From experienced coworking space owners like Jacob Sayles from Office Nomads in Seattle, who talked about how he runs his space, to the German delegation reporting on the state of coworking, the coworking scene and coworking tools (you may guess which) in Germany, to EU representatives talking about policy making in regards to coworking.

Day 2 was reserved for an Open Space, which resulted in a lot of small, barcamp style sessions that concentrated more on discussion/collaboration than one person talking to a crowd. Definitely my preferred way of conferencing. I did two sessions, one on cobot, where I answered prospective users’ questions and also got some nice feedback for improvements.

The second session was together with Trevor from Office Nomads, where we presented and discussed all sorts of software tools related to coworking. Apart from cobot and Nadine this also included things like the Google Tools, the a-plugin-for-everything monster Wordpress, Loosecubes and DeskWanted, generic billing solutions etc.

Most exciting for me we agreed to work together on the CoworkingDB project. Its goal is to create an open data repository for coworking, that enables coworking related web sites and services to sync their data automatically instead of each one of them keeping their own database.

The results of the sessions were documented and scanned, you can download the proceedings here.

In addition I made a few contacts for future deals and collaborations, which I will hopefully be able to present here very soon.

Overall this was a very interesting conference with a lot of potential. I’ve heard rumors there might be another once coming, maybe even in Berlin…