Coworking spaces can be a place where you make music, make meals, make coffee, make friends, or make products. Hana Hariri writes about the history of early untitled coworking spaces, the coffee houses, in her country.

In Vienna, Austria, a place where the coffee culture goes way back, the coffee houses were (and still are) quite different from the rest of the world. It was quite common that people would come in, order one cup of coffee and stay for the rest of the day. At the end of the 19th century, the artists and writers who basically lived and worked there overran the Viennese coffee houses. It was the place where they painted, wrote, read newspapers and met their friends and enemies.

Upon first glance, meeting at a coworking space to nurse a coffee, hang around a bunch of business busy bodies, and chit-chat about the ways of overcoming in the Game of Thrones appears to some as benign. But consider the possibilities and the alternatives. The notion of being in a place where people have a common business drive and chase the same dreams for global success is, well, very powerful.

The alternative is to believe that one can achieve supremcy at a coffee house full of endless strangers or worst, from the pinned-up confines of the kitchen or dining room table. Contrary to belief, running a business is not the same as doing homework to recieve an alphabet (A, B, C, etc.) for a class. Money and alphabets are two different things.

Industry Talk

What do people in coworking spaces talk about the most? Many people in coworking spaces talk about the giants of retail and commerce in similiar ways that people talk about celebrities. These giants hold the Thrones of retail and commerce. For many coworkers, these Thrones embody the opposition that pushes for absolute domination over all seeking to find even the smallest of squeaky quiet corners for business.

Of course, it is only natural that coworkers chit-chat about winning in the Game of Thrones. At RATS coworking, we call this Industry Talk. We look for every opportunity to cultivate Industry Talk - lunches, dinners, launch parties, pitch parties, pot-lucks, art exhibitions, mardi gras parties, fashion shows, poetry sets, vision board parties, scrapbooking, blogging marathons, and anything-in-between.