Tara blogged about some exciting changes underway at Citizen Space, most notably a move from the 1500 ft² space on the third floor to a 3500 ft² space on the first, giving us much better access to the street and providing ample room for larger events and more coworkers.

The transition to this space will take place over the next several months, with the move-in date right around March 1.

This transition also marks a change in management and ownership at Citizen Space. The new space will be wholly run and jointly owned by Tara, Elisabeth Norris and Hillary Hartley.

Personally, I’m thrilled to see how much Citizen Space has grown, and how much coworking as a movement has evolved (and continues to accelerate its spread) since I blogged about the idea just over three years ago. The community owes its success to its inclusivity and diversity, and to the caliber of the people who contribute to its culture, and with that in mind, I’m even more confident about the future of Citizen Space as I move on to my next venture.

We’re apparently not so good at this blogging thing (but I guess that’s what Twitter is for), but last night we hosted Laughing Squid’s Last Minute Unholiday Party, an intimate and great time, representing many of the things that are great about the Bay Area geek/tech community… in particular the spontaneous nature of what are often constitute the best events.

Scott’s got a list of photos from the event and I can pretty confidently report that a good time was had by all.

It’ll be remarkable if I get this post out, but if I do, this Thursday, Oct 18, we’re having a get-together at Citizen Space to help others do what I’m doing right now: Finish your %#&*@ drafts!

As for myself, I’ve got countless blog posts that I started, worked on and then abandoned or just never got around to finishing. Heck, I even have a category on my blog called Untitled, unfinished, incomplete.

But, no more!

This Thursday the idea is to come together and peer pressure productivity. I’ll be providing some decent coffee (leaded and unleaded) and light munchies… you bring your laptop and a penchant for finishing what you started… ages ago.

I haven’t figured out how we’ll celebrate the work we get done that night, but presuming that it’s a success, you can rest assured that there will be all kinds of epiphanal blog posts making the rounds on Friday.

Plan to show up between 6:30pm and 7:00 and then working until 11 (or until your CTS kicks in. It’ll be a good time, one way or another.

Thanks to the good folks at Right Sleeve, we’ve received our order of sweet mugs (inspired by Wishingline’s original mugs).

The mug design process was captured, where else, but on Flickr?

For now, Citizen Space tenants will be the first recipients of mugs — and a number will replace our janky IKEA mugs that had been serving us in the conversation room. The rest well… would be perfect additions to coworking spaces around the world!

Paul Campbell from Ireland stopped into Citizen Space this past week on a fact-finding mission for CoworkingIreland. Here are his thoughts:

So I stopped into Citzen Space in San Francisco yesterday and I’m coming to the end of my second official day co-working, right where it all began. Chris Messina and Tara Hunt are the remaining occupiers of the office, but the place has been teeming the past two days.

I arrived in and after about 2 minutes of awkwardness I was at a desk, plugged in and good to go. I was more awkward that nobody actually acknowledged my presence – as though they were used to people walking in – and they are!

And so it’s pretty much exactly as you would expect. A couple of regulars, a couple of bedouins and an atmosphere that encourages collaboration and playtime, as well as serious business.

Antoin raised a few issues recently about the viability of co-working, and I got a chance to quiz Chris on some of them. From talking to him I got the impression that it’s important that there’s a ‘home team’ – Citizen Agency are such for Citizen Space and they handle the lease and deal with the landlord. Indeed, it’s important to have the landlord on your side – I feel, however, that co-working is actually an attractive proposition for a landlord – the ‘home team’ will generally be subsidised by the regular deskers and there’s generally a really good atmosphere.

Antoin also raised the point of office conflicts and deskers being protective of their business dealings and projects. Chris’s response to this is: deal with it, or go somewhere else. While I was there, several of the regular deskers were on calls, winning deals on large contracts for their businesses. There was a spirit of comradery and good will, rather than secrecy and remorse.

Regarding actually getting work done, there were often long periods in the office where banter would be high – I noticed Chris had a set of Shure EC3 headphones – headphones were donned by anyone who wanted to get some serious work done, including myself.

All in all, the experience and advice that I received was extremely rewarding. Citizen Space is right in there between the coffee shop and the conventional office, with all the good will and social activity of BarCamp to boot. I’m really pepped and looking forward to some good meetings next week to try and get a space off the ground in Dublin.

Genia and Jim Parker from Tucson, Arizona are in the process of creating a coworking space for creative collaborators utilizing a 1900 square foot building that they own with three distinct work areas.

They’re in the finalization stages and asked for our opinion and experience on the follow six topics:

1. What surprises have you encountered in operating this concept?
2. What are the operational areas of concern today?
3. If you had it to do over again . . . would you?
4. What services are key to attracting the clientele you desire?
5. What kind of turnover do you experience?
6. Who manages the overall space for you? And how are they compensated?

What surprises have you encountered in operating this concept?

Well, first off, starting and running Citizen Space has been tremendously rewarding and gratifying. We spent many, many hours working out of our dining room and out of cafes and while that was fine, it wasn’t the best situation for us, for the cafes, for our health, diet or our sanity.

Finding a space of our own, that we could in turn offer up to other independents like us who felt isolated or uninspired working from home or who were ready to graduate out of cafes and into a space that they had some control and influence over.

That we didn’t really do any advertising (besides a few community-focused events) and still managed to attract four anchors was probably the most surprising; at the same time, we knew that there was a strong desire from many folks for a cafe-like environment in which they could have social interaction but also be productive.

So I’d like to say that I’m surprised by our success so far, and of the growth of the network, though in retrospect, I think we knew that we’d very soon joining and helping to cultivate a rather widespread movement to establish and then network spaces of a like kind.

What are the operational areas of concern today?

For the most part it’s keeping the place clean and tidy; but because we’re very lax on ground rules, we put a lot of trust and faith into the anchors that the space is theirs as much as it is ours and that they should look after it as such. I think we’ve been very fortunate to have the calibre of individuals take the to space as we have; the only real issues that have arisen have had to do with outside groups using the space for meetings and meetups, but even those issues have been minor.

Because of the way that we run the space — where either you have a key and have access or you don’t, we really don’t need to worry about constantly staffing the space, whereas if we charged for use of the coworking area, I think we’d feel something of an obligation to take care and serve those folks. To keep our overhead down and flexibility up, so far we only charge people who have a desk and a key. Everything else is free, except events that charge.

We’re making it up as we go and not trying to guess too much at things we don’t know yet.

My biggest concern is figuring out how we can afford to keep the place going longterm, but I’m not too worried about. These things have ways of working themselves out.

If you had it to do over again . . . would you?

Without a doubt. And y’know, we’ll probably do it again… and again… and again… If not personally, through the many efforts and initiatives of others.

I mean, what’s better than both establishing your own local economy and investing in the place that you live? What’s better than having a startup that hundreds of people around the world care about whether it survives or not?

If we didn’t start at the Hat Factory and then meiosis to Citizen Space, would the network be growing as it is? And really, it’s the network that will be the most interesting thing to see emerge over time.

So yes, definitely, I would do it again.

What services are key to attracting the clientele you desire?

It isn’t much of a service, but the most important thing that a space can offer (I think) is community.

People come back and they stay based on how they feel when they’re in the space. You might offer a lot of fancy things, but if the culture doesn’t feel right, you’ll probably end up back home or at the cafe.

Now, in terms of the basics, you should be prepared to offer high speed wireless internet, water service, trash/recycling/composting… and flower service if you’re particularly ambitious.

We invested in lots of furniture, in power supplies, in cabinets, a projector, cups and a coffee maker, various kinds of seats, whiteboards, a big couch… all on our own dime. But those things are necessary for creating the ambiance and flavor of the space. Our anchors bring themselves, their laptops, an office chair and a positive attitude.

So far it’s seemed to work out well, though it’s not quite sustainable yet at the rates we charge.

What kind of turnover do you experience?

Virtually none so far. We have lots of transitory guests who come and go, but they’re not paying, so we don’t really need to worry too much about that kind of turnover.

We’ve only had one person leave, but that was because of a change in employment.

Who manages the overall space for you? And how are they compensated?

We manage the space! It is certainly a challenge, what with running a consultancy as well, but again, we’ve been conservative in both the number of people we’ve taken in to the space as paying members as well as the services we provide. We don’t have the money to hire anyone but our awesome event planner and assistant, so it all comes down to us and our anchors.

I don’t know how well that works for other spaces, but given our previous experiment with cooperative management, we realized that we needed someone on the lease who could answer questions about the space definitely and take care of issues that the other anchors don’t have time or attention to deal with. That’s part of the attractiveness of the cafe-model — you show up and work and buy coffee — it doesn’t get much simpler. So that’s kind of what we’re competing against, though I think the enticements I mentioned above do give us some advantage.

So, there you go. These are certainly good questions to be asking — and I’d be curious what other spaces think about these topics.

Thanks for asking Genia!

We’ve already had a speaker training event. We’ve held anniversaries and we’ve held client summits.

We’re looking to do more of these events in the coming months and want to get a sense for what events might be worth soliciting speakers and presenters for… here’s a few ideas to get things started (thanks Kitt!):

• Public speaking. Redux. Bring back Lura for regular sessions from beginning to advanced.
• Giving effective demos. So many times I watch a technical person give a demo and it’s just painful.
• CSS for programmers. Intermediate to advanced level, tips, tricks, tactics, setup, tools and process for working with CSS
• Workshops on cools sites/tools. Cool sites and cool shit are happening all around, but, if you’re not in the immediate network, you may be unaware of them. A “here’s the cool shit” workshop showing the different sites, with bells and whistles, and here’s how to use it. Now, this contrasts from the sales demo – the company wouldn’t present it, but rather a fan would present it.
• How to build community. …or at least a discussion about what seems to work. Tips, tricks, tactics, and tools.
• GTD Workshop. Gotta ring up Merlin Mann and see if he’d be down to coming in to chat about tactics for getting stuff done.

So that’s the start of the ideas. We’re happy to entertain others. If you could have any kind of training available to you at a decent rate at Citizen Space, what would you want?