co.up blog

co.up is growing!

2012-05-09T00:00:00-07:00

All systems are go - the contract for the space two floors down will be signed soon & co.up will double in size. There still is quite a bit of work to be done, but we hope to have everything ready for coworking in early June. Since the layout of the space downstairs is bit different, we will now also have more space for the bigger user groups. Of course this means that we’re looking for more great coworkers to join us, so drop us a line if you or someone you know would make a good fit. :) By the way we are going to completely overhaul the place – it will look completely different from what you see here.

Basic memberships

2012-04-27T00:00:00-07:00

After receiving plenty of helpful feedback from our coworkers about the support membership idea, it has been decided to approach the issue from a different angle.

Having reworked our ideas, we wanted to put the emphasis on meeting the needs of our community & having it grow without losing the personal connections that make it strong, which means providing an opportunity for those people who perhaps can’t cowork with us on a daily basis to be more involved & take part in what we feel is the best part about coworking: creating relationships with people.

Basic Memberships

The basic membership costs 20€ a month & includes 3 days of coworking, as well as access to discounted day passes, providing more flexibility & encouraging basic members to come by as often as they can. Day passes will still be available, but they will now cost 15€, since we would rather have you return & get to know you than just have you drop by once & disappear!

Just like our part-time & full-time plans in cobot, the basic membership includes access to our newsletter, the members area of co-up.de, & internal events, a combination of fun & ever important networking.

Drinks without the coins

Other improvements to co.up include new extras on cobot that let you add 10 or 20 (or in combination - 30!) drinks to your current plan, including the charge on your monthly invoice rather than making you carry around plenty of change for the money bowl. As with the “Matekasse”, we’re providing this added convenience on good faith, meaning that we expect you to be trustworthy & consume only as many drinks as you’ve paid for. Let’s try it out for a few months & then see if we need to make any changes!

As always, you as coworkers are encouraged to share your ideas with us for further improvements of the space and everything connected to it. It’s important that you feel at home & welcome to get involved. We hope the basic membership will provide this chance to more & more of you!

RailsGirls in co.up!

2012-04-23T00:00:00-07:00

Over the weekend, we had the chance to host the RailsGirls followup workshop, which was not only a great learning experience for everyone involved, but also a fun day filled with great energy & yummy cake. :) Read more about it on the RailsGirls Berlin Tumblr, and watch the short documentary on the April 13-14th event, made by Alex!

Rails Girls Berlin 2012 from Alexander Lang on Vimeo.

Many thanks to everyone who was involved, whether as coaches or participants. Here’s to many more equally successful workshops in the future! If you’d like to get connected & involved in creating more opportunities for women & beginners of all genders to learn to code, join the Google group.

Support Memberships

2012-03-19T00:00:00-07:00

As you surely know by now, co.up very successfully crowdfunded a refrigerator big enough to cool the hundreds of drinks our user group participants go through each time they come to a meet up. The quick response was amazing & encouraging, especially since we have been spending a fair bit of time trying to figure out how to make co.up sustainable as well as allow for those who want to show their appreciation & support to have a way to do so.

This is why, in addition to our (currently fully booked) full- & part-time plans, we’ll be now offering support memberships. A monthly contribution of 20€ shows us that you love what co.up does & want it to get better. Beyond that, there are a few bonuses, too: a day of coworking, including an hour in the meeting room (to be scheduled & reserved in our cobot booking calendar) & access to the brand-new member area of our website (coming soon!), which will include member profiles, classifieds, job offers, & the space’s newsletter.

The money will be used to improve the space both for our coworkers & guests, as well as the user groups. For example, due to the large volume of attendees, we’ve had several requests to find a way for those who didn’t make it into the main room to be able to listen to & watch talks in the lounge as they take place. Possible solutions to this problem are ceiling-mounted projectors & speakers. Another request was for a way to document user group presentations, which would require a video recording system that would be simple to set up & make transferring material to the net easy, thereby making it possible for whoever couldn’t make it in the evening to benefit from the talks anyway.

We also want to be able to provide more & a wider range of fun & informal community events, like relaxed evenings of beer, movies, games, & other kinds of get-togethers. As always, we’re open to yet other ideas & suggestions that would make the space better for everyone.

Companies will have an opportunity to support the space, too, while receiving different benefits: posting job offers in the member section of the website as well as on an on-site job board in the space, sending employees to cowork with us & meet our coworkers for a chance to form new collaborations, as well as appearing on the website as a sponsor. Please get in touch with us via hello [at] co-up.de if you would like for your company to become a supporter of the space.

Here’s a simplified rundown of what you get:

Individual support membership	Company support membership
20€ per month	200€ per month
1 free day pass	3 free day passes for your team members
1 hour in meeting room
Access to website member area (coming soon!), including classifieds, job ads, member profiles, space newsletter	Access to job boards, online & in space
	Sponsor logo on co-up.de

If you would like to contribute to co.up’s improvement & future as the meeting place for tech-minded people of all kinds, we would be very grateful! You can sign up as an individual support member on our cobot site (company reps, please contact us). If you have any questions, get in touch!

Fridge christening!

2012-01-30T00:00:00-08:00

In case you didn’t hear about it, we had a very successful fundraiser for a gigantic new refrigerator. We would like to celebrate its arrival by testing out its ability to cool beers (& non-alcoholic beverages, to any teetotallers out there) for a large number of people. Anyone who contributed is invited to bring something to liven up the boring, white side of the refrigerator - postcards, pictures, comics, anything! Magnets will be provided. :)

Please join us this Friday, February 3rd at 20:00, & pass on the invitation!

CoHackDay#2

2012-01-26T00:00:00-08:00

A big thanks to everyone who came to Coworking Hack Day #2! It was great hanging out with our friends, but especially nice to see some new faces, too.

Chris, Ana, & Ishmael heard about CoHackDay through our participation in Jellyweek 2012, & decided to come by & have a look, as well as let us know about the upcoming Kfé Innovación, taking place for the first time in Berlin this Friday. We were happy to offer a venue for the event, which you can read more about here.

Pavlik also heard about us through Jellyweek, and wanted to share his ideas about creating alternative, money-free economic systems. He spent a great deal of time charting out co.up’s benefits, wishes, & abilities with Thilo, providing structure for brainstorming about the space’s growth & future.

Thilo had hoped to create some 8-bit art cutting boards, but was unfortunately unable to secure the necessary materials. He writes, “First I discussed with Pavlik how alternative economic systems could be employed in a coworking space and then applied to wishes for co.up, but I still need to digest the input. After a Flora Mate my spirit was recharged and I started to try out a new layout for one of co.up’s rooms, with the help of David, Lukas, Anika, and Alex. I learned that doing it on paper with the space blueprint I had created was quite hard, so we moved right to using masking tape to try out different configurations. It was a lot of fun, but took quite a while. Here are some results. I would like to present this idea to the rest of the coworkers to gather feedback and move to the next phase: design and colors.”

Lukas had two projects in mind: brewing mate with a mulled wine twist, & creating a UTF8 symbol selector. The “Glühmate” project was successful - it turned out to taste just like mulled wine, but with a nice kick from the caffeine. In spite of the great deal of time & brainpower invested in the UTF8 selector, the project didn’t move along as quickly as hoped, but as Lukas said, what’s important is that he learned a great deal & had a nice time. :) Thanks to Tadas for dropping by to help, too!

Alex, Gilbert, & Rūdis combined their powers to work on the “coworking disco” project. Alex writes, “The idea of the project was to allow us to control a bunch of PAR LED lights over our wifi. For that we would either use the existing Arduino board connected to the wifi or a brand new BeagleBone. The BeagleBone is much more powerful and has Linux and node.js pre-installed, so this was my preferred platform. The advantage of the Arduino was that there are multiple projects already for controlling DMX devices. While I was working on the BeagleBone software Gilbert produced a nice HTML frontend and Rūdis soldered and programmed the Arduino. After spending a bit of time on Google and not finding anything, I tried to implement the DMX protocol myself. I found a nice PDF describing the protocol and started off in node.js. DMX works by switching a single data pin from high to low at the right time, where the timing is measured in microseconds. That turned out to be the blocker for implementing it. DMX requires me to wait for 4 microseconds, but with node.js the shortest I could get to was 15 or so. This is probably the point where I should have started with interrupts or Assembler, but the lowest level of programming I ever did was a bit of C at university - back in the day. I tried to port my node.js code to C but that wasn’t any faster. This was not working. Having spent most of the day with the BeagleBone without any results, I developed plan C (the C implementation on the BeagleBone being plan B). I would write a small node.js app that would be the frontend for controlling the lights, and the BeagleBone would in turn control the Arduino board, which would talk DMX to the lights. The node app’s first version is ready and working, the software on the Arduino is almost working. Once it does I’ll push the source to Github.”

Dave enlisted the help of his “mathemagician” friend to create sudoku puzzle software that can create puzzles & allow players to go head-to-head. After figuring out the algorithm for not only 9x9 puzzles, but also larger ones, the project turned out to be much harder than anticipated, & Dave’s attention was also diverted by the other projects. :)

Urs, Anja, & Marko spent the day working on a pair of TV-B-Gone devices using an Arduino. After much soldering, the gang headed out to test the remotes, gleefully reporting back that they work!

It was lots of fun to spend the day with everyone. We’re already sketching in plans for the next CoHackDay, which will hopefully include some workshops, both technical & non-. See you then!

Kfé Innovación

2012-01-23T00:00:00-08:00

During CoHackDay we had the pleasure of being joined by Chris, Ana, & Ishmael. Chris & Ana are organizing Kfé Innovación, which co.up will be hosting this Friday, the 27th, at 19:00. What is that, you say? Chris explains:

On Friday, January 27th, Kfé Innovación will take place in Berlin for the first time.

What is Kfé Innovación?

Simple: 20 people meeting over a coffee/beer/club mate to share ideas, knowledge, experience, and lols.
Global: this will happen the same day at the same time in different cities all over the world.
Social: all the venues will be in contact through social networks.
Open: Events can be organised by anybody, anywhere.

Kfé Innovación has been around for a year now, and has gone from individual chats with so-called “experts” to talk about web2.0 and innovation with people who may or may not be involved with them, to the current simultaneous, all around the world face-to-face meetings of 20 people per venue to discuss a subject related to social issues and innovation and to share ideas, knowledge, experience & find ways to go from discussion to practice. There are currently 31 places which will be taking part in this edition of Kfé Innovación, #kfe05, ranging from a small village in the Pyrenees to New York City.

Here in Berlin the topic will be Networked cities/cities of Networks:

What makes a networked city? Is it the technology which controls the urban infrastructure or the networks of people who make up the population? And as networked tech becomes more ubiquitous both through big “Smart City” projects and the “smart phone” in your pocket, how will cities change, and will citizens be able to use their connected, distributed potential?

How will the open data, maker, hacker, designer, open gov, coworking, urban gardening and other networks play a role in the networked city?

Come along on January 27th and let’s work it out!

The hash tag for the event is #kfe05, and it will take place here, at the co.up coworking space, from 19:00-21:00

The event is free, but please sign up at Eventrbrite.

Jellyweek blog post

2012-01-20T00:00:00-08:00

The folks over at the Jellyweek site just published our article about Coworking Hack Day, taking place tomorrow! Read about all the great projects we have planned here.

Thank you, thank you, thank you!

2012-01-10T00:00:00-08:00

If you blinked, you probably missed it. :) We are amazed & delighted that everyone joined forces so quickly to raise money for the new fridge. The 30 donations we received put us well over the goal of 670€; we wound up with the incredibly generous sum of 899€ in a mere three hours! This is a very encouraging outcome for us, because the fundraiser was meant to test the response of the community to our request for help. Co.up relies on the people in & around it to continue being the place to meet like-minded, smart people, as well as the home to many great user groups. Your attendance, support, & patronage are what keep the space running. We’re truly grateful.

The money not spent on the new refrigerator will be saved for other projects, which are currently in the planning stages and will be shared with you soon. Every donation, no matter how big or small, is greatly appreciated. As promised, though, the biggest contributors will be mentioned here with much gratitude:

Patrick is one of our former coworkers, a software developer & consultant who also works with Wooga, a Berlin-based game development company.

Gregor is also one of our former coworkers & the great mind behind minutes.io, an excellent browser-based tool for sharing notes during & after meetings.

Robin is one of our awesome coworkers, & the diligent co-organizer of not one, but three (!) user groups (BerlinJS, BePHPUG, & up.front).

Caio is a friend of co.up who travels between Berlin & San Francisco. His website has more information about the things he’s currently involved in.

Amazon Web Services also made a very generous donation. This is the second time they have helped us; last year they were so kind as to sponsor a new projector. Many thanks!

Again, everyone has our enormous, heartfelt thanks to for rallying, helping, passing on the word, & being the best community of people we could ask for. Here’s to cold beers in the near future!

Cold drinks for everyone!

2012-01-05T00:00:00-08:00

Dear coworkers, friends, and supporters of co.up,

As you know, co.up loves user groups - we host a number of regular events every month, as well as those that take place less often like the Mini Game Jam or our very own Coworking Hack Day. Many of the user groups are organized by our own awesome coworkers, like Berlin.js & BePHPUG, & are a great way to get together & learn from each other in an informal, relaxed atmosphere. They are a terrific example of the collaborative spirit of coworking, which is why co.up is happy to support them with the space, chairs, the projector, & drinks as well.

Unfortunately, something that co.up can’t provide is enough cold drinks for the hundreds of participants who frequent the user groups. Surely many of you have experienced the disappointment of having to drink lukewarm beer at a meet-up. A few of our coworkers have been unpleasantly surprised by bursting bottles, which is a result of some poor, desperate person cranking up our dinky little refrigerator, in the false hope of getting something cold to drink in 10 minutes. Our tiny fridge just can’t handle it!

This is why we would like to ask you to help us provide you with cold drinks at all the meet-ups, by making a donation toward a new fridge. Not just any old refrigerator, but a gigantic 335 liter monster with enough space for 249 bottles of ice-cold brew! The glass door will let you see what you’d like, so you can just open it, grab your drink. Low energy consumption thanks to thick insulation means that we’ll be environmentally friendly, too.

Help us bring the time of having to come a half an hour early to up.front in order to snag a cold beer to an end. Every donation makes a difference, but 5€ will get you an icy bottle of the drink of your choice, handed to you with a smile. If you’re feeling more generous, for 20€ we will throw in a free day of coworking. As for our biggest supporters with donations of 50€ or more - we will bow down to you in eternal gratitude & feature you in our follow-up post.

No matter how much you donate, or even if you just help us spread the word, you will have our sincere thanks and cool drinks for a euro if we meet our goal of 670€. To show we are serious, upstre.am and cobot.me have donated 100€ already. You can see the progress of the fundraiser so far here:

Thanks very much for your participation & support!

Update

Wow, more than 50% within an hour!!

If you absolutely don’t want to use PayPal you can also use our bank account. Please add “fridge” and your twitter name to the subject so that we can say thank you.

– removed –

Please also send us the info (amount and twitter name) via email hello@co-up.de so that we can keep track of our goal.

You all rock!

Update 2

We made 899 Euros in around 3 hours, that was much better than we hoped for. We like to thank everybody who donated! We are all pretty excited right now. We will order the fridge tomorrow :).

Coworking Hack Day #2

2012-01-04T00:00:00-08:00

After the great fun of the first Coworking Hack Day on August 27th last year, we’re organizing another event! Just like last time, the event is open to everyone. One direction for projects could be to come by the space for a visit & think of something that would make working here nicer, more efficient or more comfortable. Projects of this nature from the first CoHackDay include the awesome Arduino door bell hack, which lets us buzz open the outside door downstairs without having to get up every time (seriously the best). Another direction would be to create a workshop to present to others, teaching them a little about something you’re passionate about. Last time, Semi showed us how to make cloth mushroom throwies with magnetic bases, perfect for urban – as well as coworking space – beautification. Yet another way to participate would be to come with an idea or a personal project that you may be looking for help with; among a big group of friendly, helpful people with varying skills, you’re sure to find someone who would be happy to tinker with your idea or give you some advice. Be prepared to lend a helping hand yourself! Visit the Coworking Hack Day site or follow us on Twitter for updates. Go to the Wiki & include your idea for a project, workshop, or activity on the Projects page. Tell your friends, re-tweet, & come be creative on the 21st! We’re looking forward to seeing you!

End of 2011

2011-12-20T00:00:00-08:00

It’s unbelievable that another year of co.up, the coworking space with the most awesome coworkers, is coming to a close. :) It’s always nice to be able to look back at what went on & see how far we’ve all come. Quite a few changes took place this year, so we thought to make note & share with you as well.

Gilbert, former designer for Wildbit (Beanstalk and Postmark) joined in March, and became a regular at work and parties. :)
In May, Rodica and Matt from Amazon visited us to check out the tech scene, and were so nice as to sponsor a new projector!
unhosted.org, an open source platform separating web apps from data storage, was founded in co.up by Michiel.
Andreas “Andy” Hellwig joined in July to team up with our very own Urs to take care of the myclimate.org web applications, which you might have used without noticing when paying something extra to offset your CO2 emissions.
In late July, Aleks started work as co.up’s community manager, creating order where before was chaos. ;)
In preparation for the SlutWalk Berlin, we happily donated that space to the fine folks organizing this event.
The first Coworking Hack Day took place on August 27th & was a total blast! Planning CoHackDay #2 is taking place now, & you should definitely include your project idea in the wiki. The event is open to anyone who would like to participate. Spreading the word would be a big help, too!
Coworking Week 2011 took place in September, and co.up participated by hosting an open house and co.beers in the evening.
Processing Berlin is a new user group of ours that started meeting in the autumn. They’re interested in coding and generative art, and can be followed on Twitter for updates.
We also spread the word and hosted the founding meet-up of the Graph coding dojo in October, with a focus on graph databases. Contact Pere for more info on other events.
Our wonderful friend & coworker, Kriesse, had a great opportunity to go to San Francisco. She’ll be with us from January 2nd until the 13th, so come by & say hello!
co.up celebrated its 2-year anniversary on November 2nd. It was great to see the space packed full of friends, whether they used to work here or are doing so currently. The party next year will be even bigger & better!
Several cool one-time (and hopefully son to be regular) events were organized by our members, like Couchhack by Jan and the open data hackday by Urs. It makes us happy to see that people not only use the space as a place to work, but also to organize something!
The European Coworking Conf in the beginning of November included co.up as one of the stops in the official tour, so we could show our space to the world. We had several groups of people starting their own spaced stop by for inspiration, which was a nice compliment. :)
We’re continuing to follow the exciting development of CouchDB, including the first-hand experience of Jan, our dear friend & coworker, who is not only running a business around CouchDB, but is a core developer and the co-founder of Couchbase (formerly CouchOne and/or Couchio).
The space grows more and more international, with Matteo from Italy, Esther and Javier from Spain, Jeremias from Finland, Edward from the Netherlands, not to mention day-pass users and other members who perhaps don’t come in quite as often!
Our space became quite green, with lots of plants and an anonymous good spirit taking care of them. (Thanks! <3) It’s also nice that members have been sweet enough to bring in treats to share.
We are also saying goodbye to our longtime member, friend, and party animal, Alexander Wilde, who needed a change of scene. Good luck with all your endeavors! :)

What a year! A heartfelt thanks to everyone for being part of it. So, what’s next?

More parties! We want to create a fun and friendly atmosphere, which means providing lots of opportunities to get to know other members better. Co.beers is an event that takes place every two weeks on Wednesdays and is a great chance to have a few beers (it’s on us!) and find out more about whoever you sit next to during the day.
Exploring new ways to make the space more yours. Coworking is centered around the people working at the space, which means that everyone has a right (and an obligation!) to provide input, help with changes and new ideas, as well as to take on some of the responsibility for the space. We want you to feel at home as well as take part in the growth and development of co.up!
More for the community: more user groups, events, meet-ups, Coworking Hack Days, personal project evenings, lunches, etc. Have a great idea? Let us know!

Have a happy, happy New Year, and see you in 2012!

Till's CouchDB book

2011-12-19T00:00:00-08:00

Our fantastic coworker & friend, Till, along with Andreas published ”CouchDB: Das Praxisbuch für Entwickler und Administratoren.” The book is currently only available in German, but anyone looking to translate the material into another language should most definitely drop the guys a line. We congratulate Till on the fruits of his hard work & look forward to more publications in the future! :)

2 years with awesome people and counting

2011-11-04T00:00:00-07:00

This Wednesday (02.11.2011) we celebrated the 2-year anniversary of co.up and – a little late – 5 years of upstre.am. It really was a great party for me because so many people showed up who are somehow connected to us. I hadn’t seen some of them since our last party a year ago (note to self, we should have more parties). And since coworking is not about a space but rather the people, I’d like to give a shout out to everybody that showed up (and who I can remember right now):

Our #1 coworker and CouchDB expert Jan; former coworker and party friend Tadas; our wonderful accountant Manuela; our latest coworker from Finland, Jeremias and his girlfriend Mare; Christian and Georg, two designers who helped us a lot with our first web apps and the upstre.am logo; Julia Sörgel, whose time tracking app mite we use every day; Pearl from Austin, researching and living in Berlin right now and joining our party; Futurist and Blogger Plomlompom; Thomas, the maker of scalarium, a cloud management software that makes our life so much easier; short-time employee, long-time friend Katrin; Till, our favorite coworker with a cute dog; Gilbert, our coworker and recent UI designer of choice, with his lovely girlfriend Anna; recent trial member and author, Katrin; Nico: designer, developer, fashion victim ;-) ; knitting hacker Fabienne; another former coworker Alexis, who’s now making awesome iPhone apps with CodeKollektiv; Alex, founder of indyhall and coworking guru; Niklas, a regular guest at our events ever since he found his passion for sewing during coworkinghackday; Bernd who just turned 38 years older than co.up that day; Sebastian and his colleagues from 9elements.com, who rock Ruby on Rails in the Ruhrgebiet; Rudolfs who did most of the work when hacking our door opener so that we don’t have to get up all the time to open the downstairs door; our community manager Aleks, who did a great job of organizing the party; Gregor, also a former coworker who now works in Zurich mostly on his beautiful meeting tool minutes.io; Anne who is fighting against discrimination and sexism with the SlutWalk Berlin, as well as at least a dozen more people that I can’t recall right now (sorry!). And last, but not least, I’d like to give a shout out to all the coworkers and friends that couldn’t make it that night.

We looking forward to many more great years with you all! ♥

She goes, she goes far

2011-10-26T00:00:00-07:00

When you run a coworking space, new people pop in and out of your life (sometimes on a daily basis), and some people leave bigger impressions than others. Yet certain individuals shape things in a big way, and if such people move out of your space, it’s definitely something noteworthy. Kristina, our #3 coworker, is such a person. Today our friend is boarding her plane to San Francisco to start her new job as an Art Director for readyforzero, yeah! I thought I’d write down some parting words to say thank you.

When Kristina joined our coworking space, we didn’t even have a name, or even actually know that what we were doing is called coworking. We were impressed with her design skills and worked with her on many client projects. When we moved to the office that is now co.up, it was only natural for us to ask Kristina if she would create the logo and design for co.up (the one you see now). Well, it didn’t end with that: she designed our our company website and probably every of our project websites ever since, including cobot.me with the cute cobot character, so she became our face on the web. Thank you for that.

She goes, she goes far

@kriesse, always leading in style

Our magic board, hand made by Kristina and friends

Beers all together after coworkinghackday, shoot by Kristina

A rare photo of the famous kitchen table

Besides being our designer of choice, she is a friend with whom we’ve shared some great experiences, from adventures like our work abroad in Istanbul in 2010 (which I sadly had to pass on), to cool conferences like SXSW 2011, as well as many co.beers and a few long nights ending at her famous kitchen table, which was where the most quality time was spent. ;) Thanks for these great times.

And last, but not least, she influenced not only the life of our space but the entire web community in Berlin with her initiative for the up.front user group, Berlin’s biggest and only regular meeting for web designers and front-end developers. The meetup regularly brings the space to the verge of bursting. Well done! I guess she will have an eye on it from afar while Hannes, Jens, and Robin keep it going. Thank you for making this happen.

This is just a short summary of how Kristina affected my life and the lives of others at co.up. It was great having you here with us, but since good things can’t stay the same, only change, we’ll make something good of it. We will follow your adventures in San Francisco closely and are sure that you will rock things hard over there!

And now a last personal thank you for giving me a sense for a good design and the right fonts.

You will be missed.

Berlin tech user groups

2011-10-14T00:00:00-07:00

A post in the rug.b Google group a while ago, as well as this post made us realize that there isn’t really a list of Berlin’s tech user groups, so we made one:

.net Developers group Berlin Brandenburg

Ableton user group

ALT.NET user group Berlin

Amazon Web Service user group

Android user group

BePHPUG, Twitter (PHP user group)

Berlin DevOps, Twitter

Berlin Go user group, Google group

Berlin graph coding dojo

Berlin GTUG (Google technologies user group)

Berlin Hack&Tell, Twitter (5-minute talks about personal projects & hacks)

Berlin.js, Twitter (Javascript user group)

Berlin Lispers’ meetup

Clojure Berlin, Twitter

Cocoaheads (Cocoa (Touch) user group)

InDesign user group Berlin

Java user group Berlin

Processing Berlin, Twitter (creative coding, generative art & design)

Python user group

rug.b - Ruby user group Berlin, Twitter

Scala user group - Berlin Brandenburg

Silverlight Usergroup (SLUG)

Supercollider user group

Ubuntu user group

Up.front, Twitter (frontend & design)

vimberlin, Twitter

Zope user group

The Berlin web event list is also a good resource for irregular or one-time events. If you know of anything that ought to be added to this list, please let us know by sending an email to hello@co-up.de. Thanks!

Coworking Hack Day video

2011-09-27T00:00:00-07:00

Alex did a great job of documenting what took place on Coworking Hack Day. Check out the result!

coworking hackday @ co.up from Alexander Lang on Vimeo.

Coworking Week 2011 Open House

2011-09-15T00:00:00-07:00

Coworking Week 2011 (also on Twitter and Facebook) will take place this year from the 19th until the 25th of September. co.up will be participating by having an open house on Wednesday, the 21st - a day when anyone can come in for a free day of coworking, as well as enjoy some beers with other coworkers when the work day’s over at 19:00. We would love to see lots of new faces, especially those of people who are have never worked in a coworking space, so please feel free to extend invitations to anyone you may think would be interested in seeing what our day-to-day is like. People who are unable to attend during the day are welcome to drop by in the evening to have a look around, too. Please help us get the word out by linking to this blog post or the Facebook event page, retweeting, & by inviting people personally. We look forward to having a full house & a great day to remind us what the best thing about coworking is: community. For more information about other events, check out the event calendar on the Coworking Week 2011 website.

Coworking Hack Day

2011-08-30T00:00:00-07:00

CoHackDay #1 has come and gone! The roughly 30 of us filled the space and created a friendly atmosphere easily. Digital projects were worked on in one of our rooms, as well as on the couches, while hardware and sewing hacks were left to the other room. The lounge was used for socializing, eating pizza, and playing MarioKart, Tetris, and other games on SNES.

Participants had the chance to sew cloth mushroom throwies with magnets in the stem, a project proposed and facilitated by Semi. From the various fabrics she had brought along, participants cut out the pieces of the mushroom to be sewn together, stitched them up, and finished by stuffing the mushrooms and perhaps putting an LED inside. The mushrooms now grow in co.up on a variety of metallic surfaces and are a sweet addition to our decor.

Lukas showed us how to make our own highly-caffeinated beverage of choice – mate tea. He began by brewing the tea and then adding lemon, sugar or agave syrup, caramel coloring, and caffeine, after which the tea was allowed to cool before being carbonated. The various batches of delicious tea were labeled and taste-tested by other CoHackDay participants. More documentation can be found on the wiki.

Kate had a deadline to meet, and so worked on the newest installment of The Fetch, which is a biweekly email about events in the business, digital, and creative communities of Melbourne, Australia. She plans on starting a Berlin and Sydney version soon, too! To check out The Fetch from August 29th, click here.

Rico and Niklas were hard at work trying to create the graphic chat system Rico had proposed on the wiki. In the end, though, they wound up creating a websocket multiplayer paint that sends mouse coordinates to all clients via socket.io, and draws the corresponding lines on a canvas. They say that they are happy and proud to have learned some node.js, too.

Thilo’s proposal of a web-enabled door opener was executed by Rūdis, who arrived with three big boxes full of soldering equipment, tiny LEDs, capacitors, resistors, etc. The project has been documented here, and is a great addition to our space – everyone is thrilled to no longer have to run to open the door. Plans are also being made to add onto the project by writing code to award a star to a coworker on their Cobot profile each time they are first to open the door, which will be a great project for the next CoHackDay.

Mat worked together with Tim to bring you BitCoin Lookup, a way to link your BitCoin account with Twitter, an email address or a mobile phone number. Mat writes, “The idea behind Bitcoin Lookup is to solve a particular problem with transactions. Currently sending Bitcoins to someone (e.g. sending them money) requires them giving you their Bitcoin address (think of it like an email address or account number). Bitcoin addresses are a sequence of 34 letters and digits, so they are difficult to type in to e.g. a website and impossible to remember. Bitcoin Lookup tries to solve this by linking people’s public identity to their Bitcoin address. In this way, if you want to send me money, instead of having to remember 1M9fZDQaYgcCNM2PSnZ7nVzpysDrysSgDq, you just need to remember @matholroyd (my Twitter handle). On top of linking Bitcoin addresses to public identities, Bitcoin Lookup will allow any 3rd party access to this info, so anyone can build their own lookup tool. Think of it like a public phone book.”

Kristina, Claudine, and Alex worked on various projects between letting the many coats of magnetic paint dry on the chalkboard proposed on the wiki. This project still needs to be finished, but will make a great addition to co.up, serving as a message board and a spot to hang Polaroid portraits of coworkers.

Joan spent many an hour improving the website of her WoW guild, which can be seen here. She used the Blizzard API documentation to show the status of her guild’s realm as well as the raid and progress information on the site, and created an invitation mailer as well.

Alex has a lot of footage to edit now after whisking participants away for interviews and documenting the project groups’ work. We’re looking forward to seeing the final result, and will definitely let you know when the first screening will take place! Meanwhile check out more photos on our Facebook page.

If you are not mentioned here but would like to be, please send an email to aleks@co-up.de with some information about what you worked on Saturday night. All in all, it was a great night full of many interesting projects and lots of cheers and laughs. We hope you’ll join us next time!

New community manager

2011-08-09T00:00:00-07:00

Hi! My name is Aleks; half-Latvian, half-USian, and now – since not so long ago – happy Berliner. Working at co.up is my first foray into the world of coworking and I’m enjoying it so far. I help Alex and Thilo to take care of the space, show new co-workers around, organize events like the coworking hack day, and generally try to rein in chaos. ;) It’s great to have the opportunity to learn so many new things, as well as work in a cool environment with nice, creative people.

Even though I’m surrounded by them on a daily basis at co.up and at home, I’m not actually a computer geek, but rather more of a literature/philosophy nerd (inter alia), with a keen interest in animal rights, feminism, queer theory and further deteriorating my already poor eyesight by reading all the books I can get my nose into. In my free time I like to bicycle around the city, attend geeky/nerdy/arty/political events and talk nonsense in German, which I am still in the process of learning. “Wenn du mit mir Deutsch sprichst, dann bitte langsam and deutlich! Danke!”

I’m also helping my friend, Swantje, open her own co-sewing space, so if you are interested in sewing, knitting or crafting at any skill level, visit the Nadelwald.

Any requests, tricks, suggestions and questions regarding co.up as well as explanations about German grammar and its “Ausnahmen” can be sent to aleks@co-up.de. If you want to stay updated about what we’re doing at co.up, follow @co_up or @piile if you’d like to follow my personal ramblings.

World of Coworking - Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

2011-03-29T00:00:00-07:00

While on holiday in Brazil I had the opportunity to visit some coworking spaces. My holiday started in Sao Paulo.

As Sao Paulo is the economic center of Brazil it’s no wonder that it’s also the biggest coworking city. With the help of the coworking wiki and the mailing list it was easy to get in touch with two spaces there.

First I visited Ricardo in his Beans! coworking space, which is located close to the Avenida Paulista, one of Sao Paulo’s Business centers. The Space is situated at the end of a narrow courtyard, which faces the Rua Augusta. A large window on the first floor offers the Beans! coworkers a view on the plants that decorate the court yard and a good amount of sunlight in the afternoon. This main room offers space for up to 20 people. The restroom doors are a special eye catcher with their large drawn faces on it.

In the lower room, which you pass when entering the space, the receptionist will greet arriving coworkers throughout the opening hours. There you also find the obligatory fax/printer/copy machine and some desktop computer terminals. The meeting room is accessible separately from the outside and offers room for a dozen people.

While I was talking with Ricardo I learned that he first came in contact with coworking when The Hub Sao Paulo opened its doors. His take on coworking is basically less focused on the actual physical space, which could be managed by a third party, but more on the network of people that cooperate and might need a physical space from time to time to get together. So it’s not a surprise that he built his initial coworker base out of his professional online network, which is called Beans!.

Two days and a lot of rain later I visited Fernanda at Pto de Contado in the Jardins district, which is in close neighborhood to Beans!. As things go sometimes I read an interview with Fernanda about her coworking space in the TimeOut Sao Paulo magazine the day before. Nonetheless I was surprised to find that her new space is located at the top level of a small shopping mall. It is her second space she opened in Sao Paulo, her first one is located in Pinheiros, the new downtown of the city.

Pto de Contado takes up the entire top level and consists of a spacious room for around 50 coworkers, some small rooms around the floor, which are rented out to small companies, plus 2 meeting rooms. The highlight is certainly the big terrace that offers a magnificent view onto the surrounding neighborhood. If the weather isn’t good enough to sit outside, you can relax on the couches at the center of the level.

Fernanda’s coworking space is equipped with a modern biometric door lock system which allows 24h hour access for all coworkers and the usage is precisely billed per hour. You can buy different monthly hour packages to get a discount.

Fernanda intends to open more spaces in Brazil in the future to help the growing number of innovative, small businesses, as office space in the major cities of Brazil is scarce and expensive. She wants to have a country wide infrastructure ready when the soccer championship takes place in 2014 in Brazil which will bring a lot of traveling business people and give Brazil’s growing economy another push upwards.

At the end of my trip through this awesome country I visited BeesOffice in the beautiful city Rio de Janeiro. It used to be the only space in Rio for some time, but according to Cadu, co-owner of BeesOffice, two more should have opened their doors by now. BeesOffice is located in Centro, one of Rio’s business districts. The Space might be a little hard to find from the outside, but if you ask the warden at the building’s entrance nicely, he will be happy to guide you the way. The space is located on one of the upper floors.

Although it is rather compact, it backs up to 30 coworkers, offers the obligatory meeting room, good coffee and an exercise bike. As you can expect by the name BeesOffice, you can find various incarnations of honey bees around the office. A picture of a surfer bus on the wall and some bean bags invite you to relax in one of the rooms’ corners. BeesOffice charges per hour, too. Prices depend on the season you come and are usually lower during holidays. The space has a very diverse membership base and long time coworkers often exchange services among each other to help with their businesses.

Did you know that Cadu had the initial idea to celebrate coworking day every 9th August? Cadu came to coworking through an article about PTO de Contado when he was in need for an affordable office space for his newly established software company in 2008. To learn more about the coworking movement he met with Jacob from Office Nomads and visited The Network Hub in Vancouver. Unfortunately due to the lack of money Cadu had to postpone his plans until 2010 when he met his now business partner Marcello. Together they raised enough money to rent a space and run advertising campaigns for coworking in Rio, thus laying the ground for more space there.

If you ever happen to be in Rio or Sao Paulo check out the spaces or one of the other at least 14 spaces around Brazil. You will find that the Brazilians are generally very helpful and kind, so it will be a great coworking experience.

Internatinal Open Data Hackathon - Berlin

2010-12-01T00:00:00-08:00

The upcoming Saturday, 4th December, we will open our doors together with our neighbors ”yourneighbours” for Developer, Designers, Researchers, Journalists and all other folks to join the “Global Open Data Hackathon”. Checkout the official website if you want to know more about the global event.

Where: Our space, Adalbertstrasse 7-8, 5th floor, 10999 Berlin.
When: The whole day starting from 10:00.
What: Everything that involves Open Data, from visualization, over applications, to datamining. Take a look at some data sources on offene daten, or get some ideas what you could do by browsing the world banks data site.
Your Host: Our valued coworker and member of the Open Data Network Urs (@ur5).
Infrastructure: Around 20 Workplaces, Power, Printer, Fast Internet, Music
Bonus: Score a Double. ”Random Hacks of Kindness takes place the same weekend. So use the data to build something good. Official location for Saturday and Sunday just down the street at Betahaus.

Notes from the first European Coworking Conference

2010-11-26T00:00:00-08:00

If you haven’t read it already checkout Alex notes about the first European Coworking Conference conference over at our cobot blog.

Coworking Europe 2010 - First European Coworking Conference

2010-10-13T00:00:00-07:00

After having established more than 140 coworking spaces, the coworking movement in Europe is now taking it to the next level by having the first conference on the subject. The Coworking Europe 2010 conference will take place November 19-20th at The Hub Brussels.

In a way Europe is catching up with the U.S. where the concept of coworking originated and coworkers from around the States already meet once a year in Austin, Texas during South by South West.

I’m sure this conference will not only attract attention in Europe but overseas as well, as coworking is evolving fast and there is a great need to exchange ideas to get the most from it and to promote it to more people.

Alex will be on site to put our ideas and experiences into the brain pool and show interested people how cobot can help to get you started with your own space and run it more easily.

World of Coworking - Austin, Texas

2010-09-17T00:00:00-07:00

If you get around a lot on your job it is good to know some coworking spaces at your destination. A coworking space is a great place to get some work done and meet locals. We at upstream travel a lot to conferences for example to keep our programming skills sharp, so that we can continue to ship great software like our coworking web application cobot. So as avid coworkers and in order to learn more about the needs of our potential cobot customers we seek out coworking spaces at our travel destinations. In this post I would like to share my discoveries in the coworking world of Austin, Texas. I had the opportunity to stay there for a few weeks while attending the Lone Star Ruby Conference.

Lets start with Conjunctured. Conjuctured, Austins first coworking space is located east of the city center on 1309 E. 7th Street. You can either take a bus there from downtown (4 - Montopolis) or take a 20 min walk, like I did. If you get there, don’t be surprised to find an entire house, yes an entire house including porch and front yard for great open air parties. Inside you’ll find a matching homely style. Two large rooms are the main work area with the basic setup every coworker needs: good chairs, tables and power outlets. There is also a quite-room in the back of the house, a small conference room and a room with some comfy couches as well. An open kitchen in the center of the house makes the space complete.

Conjuctured has built a strong community that roots in their position as coworking pioneers, good outdoor parties and the fact that they only offer full time memberships or drop ins. I found it interesting to hear from David Walker, one of the cofounders, that the full time membership concept worked very well right from the beginning, it even paid the first rents for the house upfront. Their membership structure has the advantage that members are more connected to the coworking space than part time members or drop-ins. As most coworkers know each other through the space, they sometimes do a project together. Conjuctured calls these ad-hoc cooperations Co-Company, I call it one of many other benefits when doing coworking. The house was well visited while I was there, but the people were spread well across the rooms. According to David they have the fastest internet available, I just can say it worked fast and reliably for me. As an international visitor you are welcome to drop in for free for a couple of days, something that I highly recommend.

If you are looking for something closer to downtown or need your own office for a limited time you should check out CoworkAustin. It is right in the city center in a historic office building on 200E 6th Street, just a stone’s throw away from the Austin Convention Center. The lift will bring you to the 3rd floor where CoworkAustin is located among other offices. The reception desk, the modern design and contemporary art on the walls give this place a very professional flair. There is a common area with a comfy couch and a longish table with chairs to work next to it. From the common area you can get into small offices that you can rent exclusively. The space has a big conference room which can also be rented exclusively per hour. And lets not forget the nice terrace overlooking the east of downtown, which makes this space also a viable party location. While I was working there, mostly from the couch, it was rather empty, things that change if big events are in town according to Blake Freeburg, the founder. The Internet via Wifi worked fine beside some timeout problems on oversea sites, which disappeared at the next day.

CoworkAustin has a strong focus on renting their facilities for events, entire teams and professionals that need a separate space for a very limited time, e.g. during events like SXSW. Blake told me he plans to expand the space for next year to offer a bigger shared coworking area and also more office spaces. Give it a try while in Austin, especially if you have equipment that you don’t want to carry around all day.

My last stop was CoSpace, a rather young coworking space in the very North of Austin. It is located in a business park next to a shopping center in . You can get there by bus very easily as there is a Park and Ride hub nearby. If you step through the door you will be right in the big community working area. Long tables with chairs and power plugs invite you to start work right away. If you are on the right plan you can use or rent some of the small offices at the end of the room. One of these small offices contains the mandatory meeting room. A part of the community area is separated by glass walls, this part hosts a full fledged kitchen and some couches for a relaxed chat over dinner or a coffee break. The space was used by a lot of different people while I stayed there and also hosts a startup team. The network infrastructure is good, you can choose from a range of dedicated Wifi Networks for optimal throughput, and the internet connection worked flawlessly during my stay.

On my initial day at CoSpace I attended their first coworking meetup where coworkers introduced each other and Kirtus Dixon, a co-founder, shortly talked about the intention of the space. These meetings (and parties as well) that focus on the people that use your space are very important to build up a community. Otherwise people run the risk to just work next to each other without getting to know each other. This not only lowers the chance to get new long term members in, it might also alienate people when they don’t get a chance to connect to the space and its members. If you happen to be in the north of Austin or want to meet a lot of different people this place is right for you.

These are the three coworking space I visited during my stay in Austin. I heard at least of one more which is more of an incubator style coworking space called TechLab. But judging from cafes filled with people working on their laptops there is still room for more coworking spaces in Austin.

So if you like to run your own coworking space around Austin or anywhere else in the world be sure to check out cobot. Cobot helps you to set up plans, manage your members, keeps track of payments and solves many other tasks, thus makes running a coworking space a lot easier.

Coworkingweek 2010 – Raus aus dem Büro, rein ins Vergnügen

2010-09-13T00:00:00-07:00

Die Coworking Week ist ein einwöchiges Coworkingfestival, das erstmals vom 13. bis zum 19 September gleichzeitig in verschiedenen Städten in Deutschland stattfindet. Explore: Coworking Week

Das Ziel der Coworking Week ist es, möglichst vielen Menschen einen Einblick in das Thema “Coworking” und mobiles und flexibles Arbeiten zu geben. Zu diesem Zweck rufen wir in der Zeit vom 13. bis zum 19. September dazu auf, den gewöhnlichen Büroarbeitsplatz zu verlassen und mobiles Arbeiten in Coworking Spaces, Wlan Cafés, Parks oder offenen Büros auszuprobieren.

Die Aktivitäten vor Ort werden von lokalen Initiativen eigenständig organisiert und koordiniert. Die Formate können variieren zwischen thematischen Events und Workshops, Tagen der Offenen Tür, Vorträgen und Zukunftswerkstätten etc.

Während der Coworking Week kann jeder erfahren wie befreiend es ist, den herkömmlichen Arbeitsplatz zu verlassen und sich in einen Coworking Kontext zu begeben. Arbeit mal anders, die auch Spass machen darf!

co.up selbst öffnet im Rahmen der coworking week seine Türen für die Öffentlichkeit. Interessierte können die ganze Woche über kostenlos zum “Probearbeiten” vorbeikommen.

Am Donnerstag den 16.9. findet zudem eine Coworking-Kutschfahrt (organisiert von Club Office Berlin) in Berlin statt. Ausgestattet mit WLAN besuchen die Mitfahrer diverse berliner Coworking Spaces.

Annual Report

2010-09-05T00:00:00-07:00

Ladies and gentlemen, for the public to enjoy: the numbers behind co.up.

Our coworking space was founded in August 2008 when our small software company upstream moved into their own offices. We only had 60sqm of space, leaving room for about 7 coworkers and us. In November 2009 we moved into our new 180sqm office and put the coworking under its own brand: co.up.

In January 2010 we launched cobot, our coworking space management service, which is also the time we (err, cobot) started recording any numbers, so here we go:

Coworkers

Our space has room for about 20 people max, but we can sign up more because nobody is there all the time (see “Attendance” below). Since January we have grown from 8 to 23 coworkers (Not counting the people with day passes and “upstreamers” - people working for upstream and not paying any rent).

We are getting maybe 2 or 3 people per week dropping in to try out co.up. 1 to 2 of these sign up every month. Churns are very low, mostly because people move to other cities.

In the beginning, most coworkers were on a “full time” plan, but now the “part timers” are the majority.

Revenue

As you can see our revenue is steadily increasing. We have 3 plans:

full time: 120 EUR/month, you can work 10am to 8pm 5 days a week,
part time: 60 EUR/month, up to 11 days per month,
day passes: 10 EUR per day

We don’t offer any discounts on buying batches of day passes - the steady income of subscription based plans is better for our space, especially in the summer when it can get quite empty, but people continue to pay their monthly rent.

As a result we are making most of our money from these subscriptions and hardly anything from day passes.

Even though most people are on the “part time” plan, the majority of revenue still comes from the “full time” coworkers.

Attendance

We only got our new router in May, which allows us to automatically record the attendance of our space using cobot once again.

This chart shows the attendance from the beginning of May to September:

Interestingly, even though our no. of coworkers more than doubled, the attendance stayed more or less the same. One reason for this might be the summer, where the space generally seems to be less frequented.

Here’s a chart from August:

As you can see weekends are mostly empty, Monday is also not the preferred day of work.

Cost

We have a few fixed positions, the largest being the rent for the space.

Position	Amount EUR/Month
Rent	2170
Cleaning	220
Electricity	70
Internet	50
Overall	2510

Conclusions

Currently we are making almost 2000 EUR per month from our coworkers and we have fixed costs of 2500 EUR. We can fit in a few more coworkers to get closer to the 2500, but to turn our space into a profitable business (to the accountants anyway) we’d have to increase prices and offer/charge for additional services.

You have to take into account though that our software company with between 4 and 6 people is also sitting in this space, not paying any rent.

Overall we are quite happy how things are going. We have a huge office, surrounded by amazing people, enough space for many kinds of events, and we as a company are only paying 500 EUR of rent. Most of the administrative work is taken over by cobot, so the space not a huge burden for us to handle.

I hope other spaces will join in and publish their numbers, too. I would be very interested.

Kitchen Rules

2010-08-24T00:00:00-07:00

Our coworking kitchen has been a messy place. Dishes standing everywhere but in the dishwasher, the dishwasher itself being only half emptied, used coffee mugs all over the place.

One day one of our coworkers, Jan, had enough, and he changed it all with a single piece of paper:

Since then our kitchen has magically become much cleaner. People empty the dish washer and everything.

Inspired by the success, yesterday I tackled the next problem: food becoming alive again and walking around in the fridge.

We’ll see how that goes.

Upcoming Event: node.js Knockout

2010-08-16T00:00:00-07:00

On the weekend of August 28th/29th 2010 we will be hosting a local node.js Knockout event.

The knockout is a programming competition where teams build a web software within 48 hours. node.js is a new server side JavaScript framework that allows us to build fast and scalable web sites using one of our favorite programming languages.

Upstream itself will be participating with a team of four. The entire space will be open for other teams and spectators for the most part of the weekend. Coworkers can also come to work.

Welcome

2010-07-30T00:00:00-07:00

Welcome to our blog. Here we will be blogging about our coworkers and space, events and coworking in general.

For starters here’s a video we made, starring some of our coworkers: