Our membership details page, until just now, used to include the line “All membership packages are 6 month contracts, first and last month payable on signup”. Someone mentioned that they felt that meant they had to pay for 6 months in advance. That is not the case so it’s gone. While we would love 6 months in advance and won’t refuse it, we only want to fill our space with people to work with. For dedicated desks, we only need first and last month and then we’ll happily invoice you monthly. I’m not sure we’ll do that for the flex and flex lite, as it makes for a lot of work, but we’re open to it.

Bottom line, if you’re the least bit interested just come meet us. We’ll write some code, we’ll have some coffee, we’ll fall in love and we’ll work out the rest of the details in person.

TEDxWaterloo is coming up on March 3rd and while we’re not the type of folks deemed worthy to actually attend in person, we do like the talks and we like watching them with like minded folks. Heck, we may even be able to carry a conversation about the issues raised. We’re working on finalizing the details but here’s what we know we will be doing…

• livestreaming the event here at ThreeFortyNine.
• have our drop in room up and running for some of you to come spend the day with us.
• coordinate ordering food from somewhere in town.
• get a little work done while listening to some great talks.
• have a pint or two once the ‘day’ ends.
• maybe head downtown afterwards to continue the conversations elsewhere.

Interested in joining us? Please contact us, or comment below, and let us know so we can judge interest in this. We’ll have more details as we figure them out ourselves so keep an eye here….

I’m very excited to announce Microsoft Canada’s commitment to sponsor and participate in our coworking space. A special thanks to John Oxley for working with us to make this happen. Microsoft’s participation @ThreeFortyNine will involve events as well as having Guelph resident Ruth Morton working here when she can.

Yes this means our people will have convenient access to Microsoft and programs such as bizspark, no this doesn’t mean we’re all building on the Microsoft stack.

We are very interested in talking to anyone else who may be interested in sponsoring what we’re up to here. Please contact me directly if we should be talking!

We’re very excited to have the opportunity to sponsor The Guelph Seven here at ThreeFortyNine. In case you didn’t hear about it at the time, 7 Waterloo students built 7 apps in 7 days last November. Inspired by that ambitious/insane challenge, coming out of U of G are “7 Students building 7 Apps in 7 Days, in Guelph, Ontario.”

You can find out more information on the site they launched last night. Here at 349, we’re offering them a space to live and work from March 5th to 11th. More details coming…..

Guelph has a new coworking space to add to the list of exciting things transpiring to kick this year off. We’re excited to open our doors at 349 Woolwich to the community at large but we need some help spreading the word and signing up members.

Currently Brainpark occupies almost half of the space. We already have full time members and we have room for 6 more. If you’re interested in applying to work here with us, please contact us asap.  For the flex and flex lite memberships, we’re going to start by offering 20 of each of those. Once those are taken, we’re going to hold off and see how the space functions with those numbers.

Over the next month or so we’ll be working on transitioning the space from being completely Brainpark‘s domain over to supporting coworking. That won’t happen overnight but we’ll get there quickly.

This site will change a ton as well over the coming days and weeks. The important part is we exist and we need help spreading the word all over Guelph so we can find people who are interested in joining us.

As this question has come up frequently as I’ve discussed what we’re up to here, I figured I’d take a shot at explaining what this whole coworking thing is. It’s easy to get lost thinking about this stuff and forget that most people haven’t heard of coworking, why would they have?

I’ll include some helpful links at the end of this post if you’re curious about coworking in general. Please add other links in the comments if you know of others you’d like to share.

For me personally, I used to work in a ‘normal’ company. That meant I went into an office everyday filled with people working in that company with me. My job included a social component. I liked some of those folks, I couldn’t stand others. I had relationships with them. I’d go for lunch with some.

I also spent almost three years of my life as an independent contractor working out of my home office. Pajamas and a laptop! My job didn’t include a social component. My crew was my wife and our toddlers. While it’s true that my 3 year old’s take on Django’s approach to subclassing was likely as useful as anything I’d have heard from some of my previous coworkers, there were times I needed someone to bitch and moan to who viewed a computer as something more than a webkinz delivery device.

It was the contrast between these two extremes that intrigued me. Most of the social interactions I needed, in both cases, didn’t require someone who was literally working on the same code, same project. It was enough that they knew me and had some idea what my work was about. The fact that you and I weren’t hired by the same company shouldn’t prevent us from working together.

Coworking isn’t just cheap shared office space, the intent is to build and foster a community of independent folks in a workspace. Most people start coworking for the low cost office space, they stick around for everything else. What is that everything else? It’s the collaborating daily to make our ventures successful. It’s creating and hosting highly relevant events. It’s contributing collectively to our community. It’s stumbling on ways to work together.

Interested? Come visit us!

• How Coworking and Community Translate into Dollars
• Redefining Coworking
• Coworking wiki
• The Age of Coworking: Collaborative Consumption for the Creative Community