The case for investing dev-time into impactful individuals across coworking

This year I’ve been experimenting with a programme to allocate time/resources into supporting folks who’s ideas, organisations or movements are important to the communities that included.co is designed to enrich; but might be held back by a lack of tech know-how.

I’ve learned a lot, and have decided to roll this out into a more structured programme enabling our incoming and passionate full-time team members to allocate a bit of their paid work-time into entrepreneurship-enabling projects that they’re passionate about. But more on all of that when we open up the included.co hiring process, interested in learning more, ping me an email.

The guiding principle I’ve been following is simple:

As passionate as these impactful individuals are, they’re often held back by technology and its implementation, management and strategic overheads. If we could help remove these hurdles, we’d be able to bring about even more change to entrepreneurial communities across the globe.

 

It’s been an amazing and enriching experience so far, and I’m proud to be involved with launching 2 more of these projects this week.

 

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#1. The Coworking Library

The first is for the non-profit CoworkingLibrary.com alongside Johanna and Carsten, from the German Coworking Federation and Deskmag respectively.

The new platform streamlines the sharing and indexing of 100s of publications about coworking research; with sprints planned to implement powerful search, filtering and community-driven notations in order to truly build up the world’s library of coworking research.

The reason why I picked this project is two-fold, firstly that the other two coordinators have invested over 3 years of time into the not-for-profit project, and secondly because we need a globally accessible and free repository of the data from, in and about our industry.

 

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#2. The new European Coworking Assembly

And the second is for the continent-wide European Coworking Assembly alongside their internal ‘Coworking Crew‘.

Not only was the site rebuilt to reinforce the Assembly’s focus on being approachable, supportive and mission-orientated, but it’s been prepared to become the platform from which many of their current and future initiatives can be launched from. With plans to assemble more PR and marketing opportunities on behalf of its members, and a number of other great collaborations in the works, I’m excited to see the change this coop-style alliance will make.

The reasons I picked this project are made clear by all the great work they are (and have been) doing for coworking across the continent.

 

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Other Projects now live and on the way

These 2 projects follow on the support provided to FreelancersWeek.orgOuiShareRadio.com; included-run platforms like coworking.jobs and freelancerswhocowork.com; and my own BIG BODACIOUS LIST of coworking software.

Whilst there’s still a few more projects in this ‘pilot programme’, with some possibly even debuting before the end of the year, I wanted to share this news before we all get too deep into the festive season.

Talking about festivities have you joined the 3rd annual Coworking Secret Santa gift-exchange programme?
You really should!

 

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Follow along as I strive to enable sustainable entrepreneurship through empowered communities.

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Hey, I'm Hector 👋

I lead strategic initiatives for people, brands, and projects at the intersection of tech & work

I’m part web dev, part guerrilla marketer, and all geek.

I love working on interesting ways to build campaigns, implement tech, elevate voices, and drive revenues for market-defining personalities, brands, and platforms.

In 1999, I hit upload on my first “website”, and 12-year-old me was immediately hooked on the ways the internet would become a force multiplier for people, brands, and ideas.

Since then I’ve worked on over 850 strategic initiatives across media, advertising, non-profits, proptech, e-commerce, marketplaces, productized services, and more.

I’m currently a co-founder of Syncaroo.com and curate the This Week In Coworking newsletter.

Previously I founded included.co and led the growth of the global perks network to 700+ communities, supporting over 133,000 members and businesses.

In my blog and on stage I share thoughts, observations, and undercurrent trends at the intersection of workspaces and technology.

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