I was speaking with a friend this morning who is a freelancer and considering moving into a dedicated desk with us at 349. He mentioned having to take some time to think about the associated costs to make sure he could take on the expense.

My immediate response was that a dedicated desk costs $250/month, if after a year working with us here you haven’t found a few thousand dollars in work because of working in our space then we’re not really coworking and we should close the doors.

This article speaks to this in a little more detail. While I wouldn’t suggest you bank on it, it’s worth considering that you may find new business opportunities, new leads, new partners etc because of coworking. Approached from the right angle, it quite possibly could be the exact opposite of an expense.

I’m excited to start talking about something new a group of us are working on, that being a coworking space here in Guelph. It’s barely in it’s infancy so we’ll be announcing more as we get rolling with events, new members etc.

Help us spread the word and find new members who want to be part of this. We have no idea what we’re doing but we’re going to have fun and figure it out. Hell, we have a beer tap so what could go wrong?

The date is set for DemoCampGuelph16 so spread the word and join us Feb 9. As always, http://next.DemoCampGuelph.com is where you can sign up to attend.

While you’re here, I wanted to clarify what DemoCampGuelph is about, while making a pitch for demos. I often find myself in conversations where someone explains to me why DemoCamp doesn’t apply to them. Typically it’s because they’re in services based work, not startups or products.

I’m biased but, in my opinion, if you work anywhere near technology in the Guelph area then DemoCampGuelph has something for you. Ultimately it’s a chance to mingle with like minded folks and strengthen our connections, ie do more bidness together!

Now to the startup stuff. DemoCampGuelph is not startup focused or a pitch event. StartupCamp is startup focused. While we certainly have events where the demo’s are predominately startups, that isn’t our focus. When we select who gets to demo, the main qualification is benefit to our crowd. We want tools, frameworks, interesting applications, hacks etc. So we want to see a demo showing me why I should root this crappy android phone. We want to see why we should be writing code with emacs. We want to see that new plugin that writes our code for us in firefox.

While it’s certainly interesting to see that fancy new app you’ve built that allows me to track my golf score without even needing to golf, we love learning that we can apply tomorrow and use to work better, faster, smarter. So, as always, spread the word, let’s get lot’s of great applications for our limited demo spots at 16!

I realized last night as I pitched this idea once again that I’ve been pitching it privately for years but never in public. This is completely made this up so I have no idea if it’s practical and could be pulled off. So part of posting this is to seek out examples of anything similar we can learn from.

The inspiration for this idea came from various places:

• Thinking about what we truly need here in Guelph. That got me thinking about how our local music scene works. It’s highly incestuous, distributed and clearly bootstrapped. They share spaces, instruments, bands, project, musicians, etc.
• Thinking about why a business would get involved and participate in coworking. What does a business need and how could coworking deliver real value to it.

One issue most businesses, especially small, struggle with is what size of space to have. Most don’t have the capital to have larger spaces they can grow into. On the other side, taking just the right sized space can put you into an endless cycle of relocating, which is itself expensive and distracting.

What if you built a distributed coworking network? Or has anyone already built it? The benefit to a business being they can subsidize their office space by making some of it available for coworking. In doing so, they’re paid $x per square foot or $x per desk. Now as a business you can move into a larger space, knowing you can keep the costs down while having space to grow into when you need it.

On the coworking side, you now have individuals handling the non-trivial community work of cross pollination. You could have an individual literally working out of the offices of many different companies each week. As well, some spaces are more suited to particular tasks than others, so you may want to use Brainpark‘s boardroom today but well.ca‘s next week. Or maybe one boardroom isn’t available at the time you need but another is.

As well, in my opinion coworking works best when a space has a core tenant. It brings stability as you know people will be there working everyday. In this scenario, each space clearly has a core tenant.

Ideas? Thoughts? Feedback? Has this been attempted anywhere before?

It’s been a while since I’ve talked about coworking here. If you’re not sure what coworking is, Dusty has a great post on redefining it here:

“Coworking is two or more individuals working independently or collaboratively who are socially interacting while they work.”

For various reasons I’m back considering the demand for a coworking space here in Guelph. The space I’m considering is the current Brainpark offices at 349 Woolwich St. We have a core tenant in Brainpark and already have a few friends sharing the space with us. What I’m curious about is if Guelph needs a coworking/incubation space? A place for independents and small startups collaborating to help each other be more successful.

What I’m not interested in is just offering cheap office space. This would be participatory where we’re working with each other at some level. The goal being that our various projects and companies are better because of this space. My personal goal will be to have our members some day saying that they were successful in part because they worked in our space with us. Kumbaya!

What would the space include?

• 10 to 15 dedicated desks with 24/7 access
• Power, desks, heat and all that along with wireless and access to our Atria fibre
• Shared use of our boardroom
• I would actively build an advisory board, if our members felt this was needed.
• Events and lot’s of them based on what our members need.
• A shared communal work area for part timers, friends, and drop ins.
• We have great coffee and a beer tap!

What I need to move forward on something like this?
This would be a private venture and no one’s offered to lower my risk by bank rolling a couple of years of operation so I need to know there’s demand. If I knew there were 30+ people in Guelph who would commit tomorrow, ie we’d have a waiting list, then it’d be a no brainer. So, are you interested, or know of someone who may be? If so, please contact me asap or just comment on this post. As well, what’s this worth to you? What would you pay monthly for the above offering here in Guelph?

It’s been moved once, we’ve had to swap out speakers last minute, the fifteenth installment of DemoCampGuelph has faced adversity like no other DCG before it. Yet it triumphs, it perseveres, it is alive!

Ok, here’s hoping I clean up my act before someone puts a mic in my hand tonight. We’re on tonight, remind people, spread the words and the loves and we’ll see you all tonight! I’m excited to have Ilya Grigorik joining us as our invited speaker this evening. Make sure to arrive on time as we open with our speaker and then get into the demos. We’ll make sure there are pints around early so show up and meet some other folks in town you may not know.

If you haven’t already, sign up so we have a feel for numbers tonight.

Earlier this fall I asked if anyone wanted to share our offices here at Brainpark. We’re very lucky to have had some great folks take us up on the offer. We’ve managed to grow our tribe here with little added expense. I’m not sure they know but we’re not paying them a cent.

Andrew wrote today about a similar effort at Jet Cooper. I encourage you to think of ways you can grow your tribe and our community. While we certainly need bigger scale, longer term plans with projects like the hub and accelerator centre, there are loads of smaller simple things we can do today.

It doesn’t have to be formal, it need not be complicated, you don’t need a formal program. If you have a business, office, or just a project, open your doors. Invite people in to work in your space, share your fancy boardroom, host a happy hour. Really, most of us don’t bite and who knows, maybe we can help?

We recently started the process of shooting yet another Brainpark video. This time around, we’re working with our friend Mark Rabo. In working with Mark I started dreaming of a video about Guelph and what’s happening in our Technology scene here. If you spend your days in Guelph tech, it’s easy to become deluded in thinking that we have a tech scene. The reality is that until outsiders think that, we’re still just cows, vets, and music.

There’s a simple battle of the minds that needs to happen. It requires an external focus, ie focusing on what people outside of Guelph answer when you ask “What do you think of when you think of Guelph?” Until technology is mentioned in a large portion of those answers, we all still have work to do. While no one’s asked me to, I’d love to build a simple Guelph tech ambassador program to attack this. In every talk I’m able to give outside of Guelph, I make sure to promote and mention Guelph.

If you ever catch guys like David Cohen speak, you’ll find yourself thinking “hang on, is he pitching Boulder Colorado to me?” The answer’s yes! David and his crew are focused externally on marketing to the world that Boulder is the tech city to be in. That’s what it takes, it won’t happen by focusing internally.

Back to Mark Rabo, check out the Hillside video he shot this summer. I’ve been collaborating with Mark on how we could produce a similar video to promote Guelph tech. We would use a DemoCampGuelph event as a medium for the video but the message would be about Guelph tech. I noticed today that Vancouver produced a similar video. With respect, ours will be better!

Our video will be web length, two to three minutes covering three topics. If I’m a business owner considering Guelph for my company, I’m probably thinking about these three:

1. How big is the knowledge pool (will I find talent to fuel my business in Guelph? Is there a support structure of other tech businesses to work with?)

2. What is the growth trend of the tech industry in Guelph?
3. What are the afterwork activities (nightlife, culture, family-friendly)?

The video will consist mainly of interviews with people at DemoCampGuelph, ideally 5-7 people from different companies ranging from established household names (wow, they’re in Guelph!) to brand new start-ups (they’re small like us). We will likely mix interviews with DemoCampGuelph footage and shots from around town.

In order to do this, I need to raise the money required to produce this video. We will likely need in the $3000 to $4000 range. If you are interested in sponsoring this project, or help raise the funds, please let me know. Or if you know who I should be talking to, City of Guelph, let me know? Or if you think I’m wasting my time, let me know that as well.

I’m very excited to be speaking at the upcoming Ignite Waterloo event. You can get tickets now! I’d hurry as the tickets just showed up today and they’ve already sold over 50, which is insane.

If you haven’t attended an Ignite before, you should. The tagline for these events is “enlighten us, but make it quick”. Have a peek here for videos from previous Waterloo events for a taste.

I’m asked occasionally what the City of Guelph needs to do to better support Guelph technology. I’ve even tried to answer that the odd time. An idea I’ve considered often is how the city can help our companies both recruit new people to relocate to our city and help people already here stop commuting elsewhere to work. Over the years I’ve hired a fair number of people who have moved to Guelph. In that process, I’m forced to compete against larger companies in Toronto and Kitchener/Waterloo with significantly deeper pockets. Their job offers typically include significant reimbursements related to relocation costs. This can cover anything from the cost of movers to lawyer and real estate fees.

Smaller companies are rarely in the position to offer this as part of a job offer. How can the city help me with that? I’m helping to sell Guelph. I’m creating jobs in the city and then recruiting people to move to our city. Why can’t the city help me with some of this? Find a way to empower our smaller tech companies to recruit people to move to our city.

What if the city, or some other organization, offered a relocation package? If a person has a job offer in Guelph that requires them to move then they can apply for this package. That would be a powerful tool I could use today to attract talented people to our city. I’m sure the city could partner with local businesses to make this happen as it could represent a significant amount of work for a moving company or lawyer. I’m sure people in real estate or home builders would be interested in sponsoring a program like this and seeing it thrive.

Insane? Likely but you asked what you could do to help…