If you come and visit White October, you’ll see this photo that I took in a restaurant in Wellington, New Zealand. It’s a little wind-up toy that came on the little plastic tray that had the bill on it.

When we moved offices about a year ago, the cobalt blue feature wall in the foyer was crying out for some type of decoration, so I used Rasterbator to produce an enlargement of the Robo Dino photo, printed out on 28 pieces of A4 paper. It was done as an experiment but for some reason it’s still up there. I suppose that dinosaurs are pretty cool, especially wind-up robo ones.

As previously mentioned on this blog, we were thinking of ideas of what to do with the extra office space in the new building. We hit on the idea of coworking, which takes the hot desking concept and adds an extra dimension by emphasising the creation of a community spirit. You can read more about the ethos on our main site.

The first non-White October cohabitant was Gareth. He’s a Flash developer whose desk is up on the first floor, embedded with all the other Octoberists. Later on, our first downstairs coworker was Paul, the head honcho of Perini a “forward-thinking content and media group”.

Since then we’ve had all sorts of folks come and work with us including, a travel writer, an IT support consultant, software developers, technology strategists, healthcare recruiters, a financial advisor, an engineer for Deutsche Bahn and a researcher from Xerox PARC. One or two come in every day, some one or twice a week and some people pop in for a couple of weeks before continuing with their travels. We’re very flexible.

Soon, we will be welcoming the “Head of Online” for an international marine conservation charity, which should be great. We are particularly keen to get more coworkers from non tech fields such as music management, graphic design, journalism and so forth. If you know anyone who fits the bill, they can register their interest online, or they can just give us a call.

We also started to host events in the space. One was the Oxford version of Open Data Day. Another was the inaugural meeting of Agile Oxford (the next meeting is on 9 March 2011). We also recently hosted a meeting of the User Experience Book Club Oxford.

Along the way, we’ve come to call our space “wocowork” for want of a better name. Robo Dino has become the de facto mascot and we have been gradually improving the space with more desks and chairs, shelves and some lockers. We’re still working on some comfy sofas and a meeting room.

It’s been an interesting year. We’ve also recently started Tweeting our 140 character thoughts under the name @wocowork, and we intend to continue blogging about our co-working journey.

UPDATE – Go and check out this page on our main site for more info about our growing co-working space.

Some White October blog-worthiness happened yesterday. The first coworker to use our space setup his netbook on Wednesday morning and had the whole downstairs area to himself. Hope to see you back next week, Paul.

We first blogged about making our surplus office space into a coworking space a few months ago, but we recently upped the ante by putting in some desks and chairs and getting some other bits from a certain Swedish furniture emporium. We’re not approaching Philippe Starck levels of interior design just yet but we plan on gradually improving the space; the plan is to install a meeting room in the near future, and  a couple of sofas for you to hang out on too.

Eventually, we want the space (we really must think of a name for it) to be somewhere for freelancers, two-person start-ups, tele-commuters who crave human contact etc. to drop by for a day or two, do some work, and meet a varied bunch of interesting folks from a variety of fields.

We’re still interested in hearing from interested coworkers. So if you know someone, please let them know that they can register their interest with us.

Here’s some pix of what it looks like at the moment:

The photo at the top of the post is from The Library of Congress on the Flickr Commons.

UPDATE – Go and check out this page on our main site for more info about our growing co-working space.

We moved offices this weekend and over an awesome post-move burger in Atomic Burger on Saturday we started talking about what we were going to do with all the space we’ve now got.

One option that we’re actively looking into is renting out desk space, but a few people have suggested that we provide more flexible desk space via a coworking model where freelancers and individuals can rent desk space by the day.

We’re not sure whether we’d be able to make enough to cover our rent this way, and there are also other legal and insurance considerations we need to look at, but the idea of a creative space for designers, geeks and anyone else to drop into really appeals to us.

The plan…

We’re going to look at the technicalities of this over the next 2 weeks, but hopefully we’ll be able to run a trial during March to see if it’s going to be sustainable.  If it’s a success, then we can keep it going.

Sign-up and register your interest please!

One big question we have is how much demand there is for desks, so it would help us if you could register your interest in desk space now.   Then of course we’ll let you know how our plan progresses and when the desks become available.

Source: Wikipedia

It reads what you are typing and looks for relevant images from flickr and stock photograph libraries and relevant articles. It will also look at what you have typed and suggest words that could be linked to thing and suggest tags. So in this article it has automatically added the links to WordPress, blogger, typepad, and Oxford.

The related articles below have come from Zemanta…