
Ask HN: Distributed coworking anytime soon? - davnn
As someone raised in a more rural area I wonder if coworking could also be done online.<p>What are the parts that make coworking interesting? The audio-visual atmosphere? The more effective use of space and resources? Socializing? Community? Events? The socializing aspect of coworking would definitely be the emphasis for me.
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wallflower
One way to get started, try a lunch-and-learn virtually. One person
talks/teaches, the others eat. Later, that person may eat and someone else
talks. Round robin. Simple, frictionless.

The closest analogue to coworking online that I can think of is building your
own community. At the most extreme end, Problogger, Zen Habits, or the Art of
Noncomformity. At the lower end, smaller niche communities (e.g. knitting,
parents who travel with their school-age kids to foreign countries).

As a purely anecdotal counterpoint, if you have a distributed team focused on
solving one of the hardest problems in technology, state-of-the-art video
conferencing technology can erase distance and barriers.

> EACH MORNING, WHEN Andrew Fikes sat down at his desk inside Google
> headquarters in Mountain View, California, he turned on the “VC” link to New
> York.

VC is Google shorthand for video conference. Looking up at the screen on his
desk, Fikes could see Wilson Hsieh sitting inside a Google office in
Manhattan, and Hsieh could see him. They also ran VC links to a Google office
in Kirkland, Washington, near Seattle. Their engineering team spanned three
offices in three different parts of the country, but everyone could still chat
and brainstorm and troubleshoot without a moment’s delay, and this is how
Google built Spanner.

“You walk into our cubes, and we’ve got VC on — all the time,” says Fikes, who
joined Google in 2001 and now ranks among the company’s distinguished software
engineers. “We’ve been doing this for years. It lowers all the barriers to
communication that you typically have.”

[http://www.wired.com/2012/11/google-spanner-
time/](http://www.wired.com/2012/11/google-spanner-time/)

~~~
davnn
Lunch-and-learn sounds interesting to try things out. Constantly having a VC
with your co-workers appears to be the closest you can get to actual
coworking. Maybe VR/AR will remove even more distance in the future.

Edit: Maybe the essential part of coworking, however, does not lie in
constantly being connected to your coworkers, but in being able to socialize
in the breaks between work and thus improving productivity (there seems to be
a connection). This type of online coworking could be seen as an online break
hall where you can link yourself in and talk with strangers about life and the
universe.

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asimuvPR
I tried this like 3 years ago. Few people would show up and ultimately it
ended being like another work meeting. Everyone also reported not having
improvements in their socialising.

Try it out. It helps understand the limits in online interactions.

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jasonkester
That seems to nicely combine the disadvantages of a co-working space with the
disadvantages of working from home, without adding any upside whatsoever.

You'd have all the distractions of a co-working space but you're still stuck
working out of your bedroom, with the couch and TV right there and your
partner popping in to ask little favors around the house.

I don't think it's a particularly good idea.

~~~
jon-wood
Working from home doesn't have to be that way. Sorry for jumping on your
comment, but I hear this sort of thing so often!

Long term work from home (as opposed to waiting in for a plumber) only really
works if you have a space to do it, and buy in from people you live with. If
you can, have a specific room which you go to for work, and make sure your
partner knows that when you're in that room you aren't available for little
favours - although one of the nice things about home working is that you can
surface now and again and do those things.

If you can't make those two things happen, commute to the office, or find a
co-working space.

