Indy Hall co-founder Hillman leads effort for Coworking.com, building broader community

The minds behind coworking often laud it for its organic and authentic growth.
That’s how the country’s more respected communities of shared, collaborative workplaces, like Independents Hall in Old City, differentiate themselves from a growing commercial extension of the concept.
But as those communities continue to grow and its members number in the thousands, there has been something of a push to create a more national — and, indeed, international — cohesion.
Last week, the Coworking Database initiative launched, hoping to, as the site suggests, create “a simple, neutral, extensible database for coworking spaces around the world.”
It was the latest in a series of projects that connected coworking outposts that had, in recent years, focused on building their own local communities.


In February, when Indy Hall co-founder Alex Hillman saw that the domain Coworking.com was to be sold by the pair who had it for a decade, he set into motion the already powerful international Coworking Google Group, hoping to raise $10,000 to purchase the domain to give a central home for the movement. With the help of nearly 20 groups and individuals, they raised enough to cover the eventual cost of more than $7,000, in addition to leftover cash for fees and future technology costs.
“The proposal… was to create a landing page that explained the coworking core values and linked to the three primary coworking community properties: the Google group, the Wiki and the blog,” Hillman told Technically Philly. “The idea was that if somebody heard about coworking and wanted to find out more, coworking.com would point them to the other places to learn more.”
Last month, Indyhall published the first of what organizers intend to be a series of releases containing statistics about the Third Street coworking membership, a move that was followed by Alex Lang from Co-up in Berlin.
“Our hope in doing so is to spur more similar sharing and, as such, have more data and insight to share on coworking.com,” Hillman said.
Coworking.com has served to be a clearer, more central landing page for a movement, that already had an active Google group, Wiki and blog.
Hillman says the energy has further brought together otherwise disparate — if social — coworking scenes.
“An open source software project aimed to help manage data for coworking spaces around the world [has started]. More than just a map of locations,” Hillman says. “The long term hope would be that various coworking spaces’ internal applications and systems could log data to the [database] and we’d be able to track trends across coworking spaces globally.
The coding is voluntary, but the hope is that hosting costs and other recurring fees could be covered from the balance left by the Coworking.com domain-purchase fundraising.
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