History of Coworking: My interest in the idea of CoWorking evolved from my interest in CoPlaying. I had been immersed, since 1971, in exploring what I came to understand as "the play community" - the social dynamics of people playing together.

I was living in Silicon Valley (Palo Alto) in 1983. My friend Dave Winer, who was very active in what we later identified as "social computing" (I had met him through his "Living Videotext" online bulletin board) had developed a computer program that called "ThinkTank," an "outline processor." It was a prefect match for how I worked, as a computer game designer. It allowed me to give structure (a very flexible structure) to my designs, to assemble all the interactions between the player and virtual objects with greater and greater detail until I was able to arrive at a comprehensive, clearly organized design document.

By that time, I had attended enough meetings to make the connection - an outline processor, projected onto a large-enough screen, could help me facilitate the social dynamics of people working together.
In 1984, Dave popped over my house with one of the first (I think it was number 4) of the new Macintosh computers. He was already at work developing an outline processor for the Macintosh, and I was able to help him understand his "personal productivity tool" in the context of group productivity. This led to a product called MORE, which was also the first program to allow people to develop group presentations.

By 1986 I was using a Macintosh and a computer projector (my first was a Limelight) to facilitate meetings all over the world, at places like Apple Computer and the Stanford Research Institute. I learned a great deal about how people worked together, and especially about how technology could be used to help them work with ideas, together and more productively.

My understanding of the dynamics of the play community was a tremendous help, because I discovered that meetings, like games, had many different levels of rules and interactions, many of which were changing almost as quickly as they were defined. And, like games, when meetings were "good" they tended to be fun. Sometimes very deep fun.
So I began to focus more and more on working together, and how working together could be made more productive, and more fun, through the shared use of technology. This led to my use of the term CoWorking.
According to the Internet Archive - http://web.archive.org/web/*/coworking.com - the 36th online issue of CoWorking was published on May 11, 2000.

The site was an outgrowth of my work with a method I called "technography" (first instantiation I could find on the Internet Archive - http://web.archive.org/web/19990429122650/http://technography.com/ - was April 29, 1999, and on 3.4.1999 on Dave Winer's UserLand bulletin board - http://static.userland.com/userLandDiscussArchive/msg003557.html )

A few years later, I met Gerrit Visser - who was passionately collecting and documenting links to the exploding variety of computer enhanced communication and productivity tools. He and I partnered to extend the comprehensiveness of the CoWorking concept. And in 2005, Brad Neuberg began using CoWorking to describe a shared physical space, adding a dimension to the CoWorking concept that helped bring it into popular use.

Today, Gerrit and I are delighted to announce that the Coworking.com domain will soon be transferred to people who are continuing to enrich the idea of Coworking, bringing it to new places and practices.

© Bernie DeKoven

Via (History of Technography)