Tag: What is the Coworking Canvas?

Community Leadership, Coworking, Coworking Communities

What is Coworking? Goodman on “The Coworking Canvas”

Cleo Goodman writes for the Coworking Accelerator about “The Coworking Canvas”—a descriptive framework for the things you need to do to develop “a thriving coworking community” [1].

(The Coworking Accelerator aims to help coworking leaders lead coworking communities.  One of their products is “Coworking In A Box”.)

coworking-canvas-worksheet
From [1].
This “Coworking Canvas” has six main areas (links to blog entries):

For readings of my book and this blog, these topics are not new.  In this case, Goodman explains these topics from the perspective of the community of workers and community leaders.

Notably, she breaks out the benefits (to workers) of peer support, networking, learning, and co-location from the “space”.  In fact, the main things she emphasizes about space is really “first impressions”, and appearances in general. If you have co-location, networking, etc. going on, the community will be strong in any space.

A community leader has a role to facilitate all these facets, though “hosting” is all about the specific activities of the community leader—introductions, connections, promulgating the “culture” of the community.

Goodman offers a sort of theoretical description of how “vibrant” coworking communities work.

  • “Belonging: People unleash their potential and become resilient when they develop a true sense of belonging.

  • “Nurturing: People and businesses grow and endure when talent, relationships and opportunities are nurtured.

  • “Place-making: Place-making happens and communities thrive when people, spaces and places create a joined-up ecosystem.”

    (From [1])

This seems to me to be a good summary of the key benefits of a coworking community.  “Belonging” plus “Nurturing” is the opposite of “loneliness and isolation”.   “Place-making” is precisely and exactly what a coworking operation is all about.

These blog entries don’t have footnotes or anything like that, I assume these are based on experience.

I’d say they have their heads screwed on the right way.  This is certainly the right stuff to worry about.

I’m not sure how you put this “in a box”! : – )  I guess you just have to check out their products to see.

  1. Cleo Goodman, What is the Coworking Canvas? 2019. https://www.coworkingaccelerator.network/blog/what-is-the-coworking-canvas