Open Tech Collaborative. Irish Export Cooperative Irish Export Cooperative - Reducing Costs for Irish SME's Exporting. Coworking - How coworking is changing how and where we work. Coworking, Childcare, Cubes & Crayons. Coworking continues to evolve and mold to the increasingly blurred boundaries between domestic and professional life. An area often overlooked is that of childcare for remote workers and home workers. I have colleagues and collaborators who, despite the fact they’re self-employed and work largely from a home office, still need to employ childcare.
Some may see this as an unnecessary overhead, but it’s actually desperately needed in order to provide focus whilst working from home. Enter Cubes & Crayons in Menlo Park, CA, self-described as ‘full-time childcare and office space’; think of it as coworking + creche! Cube & Crayons was profiled recently (along with New York’s TwoRooms) in a Springwise article exploring emerging trends in ‘More Work Spaces for Parents‘.
At Cubes & Crayons, the usual connectivity, office equipment, conference rooms and work spaces exist alongside facilities for kids ranging from just a few months old to pre-schoolers.
Shared Machine Shops: Beyond Local Prototyping and Manufacturing. Editors: Maxigas (Universitat Oberta de Catalunya), Peter Troxler (International Fab Lab Association, Rotterdam University of Applied Sciences) In the last years we have witnessed an incredible proliferation of shared machine shops in a confusing number of genres: hackerspaces, makerspaces, Fab Labs and their more commercial counterparts such as TechShops, co-working spaces, accelerators and incubators. These are currently “fringe phenomena” because they play a minor role in the production of wealth, knowledge, political consensus and the social organisation of life. Interestingly, however, they also experience the same core transformations as contemporary capitalism. That is, for the individual: the convergence of work, labour and other aspects of life.
On a systemic level: the rapid development of algorithmically driven technical systems and their intensifying role in social organisation. Some of the questions we are interested in exploring: Final submission deadline is June 1st, 2014. Tech entrepreneurs revive communal living. Jessy Kate Schingler left her job at NASA, moved to San Francisco, and helped turn a 7,500-square-foot, eight-bedroom mansion near Alamo Square into a creatives' residence called the Embassy.
In the Mission District, Jordan Aleja Grader and her partner, early Facebook engineer Justin Rosenstein, did the same thing with a 6,825-square-foot mansion, calling it Agape - Greek for love, appropriate since Rosenstein was the technical lead on the Facebook "like" button. Tom Currier, a 22-year-old who dropped out of Stanford's computer science program when he earned a $100,000 Thiel fellowship, runs four large tech houses in the Bay Area - Dragon Stone, the Lodge, Olympus and Founder's Nest - and is talking about getting a similar place in Tahoe. Across San Francisco and the region, young technocrats are taking over the leases of grand estates and transforming them into modern-day communes. High-end houses "You know, I've been in this business a while, and this isn't entirely a new thing. Collaborative Housing | Our Approach. A key feature of Collaborative Housing that facilitates us being able to achieve our development goals is the implementation of an Enhanced Mobility System for residents.
This innovative transportation program creates better mobility for less cost, and eliminates the need for car ownership and parking garages. This allows us to build minimal parking – and in some cases eliminate it entirely – from our sites. Image from Capitalbikeshare.com The program is a system of bike and vehicle sharing, bike parking, as well as access to public transportation, which allows residents to use a wide spectrum of easily accessible transportation methods to get around – the way they want to and when they want to. We call this system an enhanced sharing platform because it provides two things that are universally desired; lower cost and increased access and choice.
The car-share vehicles will be parked on the street and in neighboring underutilized lots. Image from Zipcar.com. Medialab Prado. 10 Years of Social Innovation. The following article, written by our good friend Bernardo Gutiérrez, looks at MediaLab Prado, a very special hybrid space in our hometown, Madrid. This translation features additional original content by the author (not originally published in the Spanish media article), citing MediaLab as one of the spaces where the initial gestalt of the early 15M movement was collaboratively created. It has subsequently been republished in Shareable magazine, and the website for The 2013 Economics and the Commons Conference.
It seems that “lab” is the word making the rounds amongst innovation buffs these days . Maybe the term “laboratory” isn’t the most appropriate analog, given that its dictionary definition, “a facility that provides controlled conditions in which scientific research, experiments, and measurement may be performed”, falls short in describing the present day use of “lab”, and what these spaces are about. So, what is a lab, exactly? Edible Forests: The Next Step in the Local Food Movement? | KVNF Public Radio. Community gardens dole out small plots of land and encourage people with limited access to fresh produce to grow their own.
Now, there’s a new twist on that model springing up across the country: edible food forests. Imagine turning a public park into a free-for-all of community plants – and snacks. Food forests have been likened to Garden of Eden revelry, or the blissful sampling in Willy Wonka’s chocolate waterfall room. It’s like a community garden on steroids. The concept is pretty simple: planners recreate a forest ecosystem with edible plants and trees in a public space. Then, in a deviation from most community garden models, they open it up and allow people to forage for food for free. “It is a forest. There are only a few food forests already up and running in the country, with the highest profile projects in Seattle, Wash. andWestern Massachusetts. Basalt’s food forest is the brainchild of Syson, a plant expert at CRMPI, and the town’s Parks Department staff.
Access to land for Community-Connected Farming. How to Start a Community Land Trust. The land trust movement in the United States has gained notoriety over the past 20 years mainly for its role in environmental conservation. Known as land conservancies, these non-profit organizations, such as the Nature Conservancy, acquire development rights or land in fee simple, in order to conserve natural resources by protecting land from development. A lesser-known type of organization, a community land trust (CLT), uses similar legal tools in a very different way to accomplish very different objectives: the preservation of affordable housing, avoidance of gentrification and building of community wealth.
The CLT movement began in the early 1970s According to community-wealth.org, there were 242 community land trusts in the United States in 2011 with about 10,000 housing units serving over 12,000 residents. A majority (82%) of those residents had incomes below 50% of area median, had 31% were non-white. Steps for Establishing a Community Land Trust 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. Coliving Takes Coworking to the Next Level in Rural Italy. Coworking is a great way to make friends, get ideas, and collaborate. But coworking spaces are also places where startups and freelancers are busy working on their projects, finding clients, and securing funding. This often leaves serendipity to the space between the work: at the coffee maker, passing in the hallway, or at mixers.
But what if coworking was a slower, more spacious affair that offered a respite from the everyday grind and included meals, walks and intentional collaboration? What if, rather than being in an urban setting, the coworking space was in a small, rural town? And what if you lived, temporarily at least, in the space? Would your work benefit? Co-founder, along with Mariella Stella, of Casa Netural, a coworking and coliving space in Matera, Italy, Paoletti says that coliving is an essential element of rural coworking and without it there is no coworking in rural Italy.
Sharing a meal at Casa Netural coliving There are two benefits to rural coliving. Cuba's DIY Inventions from 30 Years of Isolation.