Category: Free Culture

Coworking Spaces: The Hub Berlin

This weekend I attended Socialcamp ’09 in Berlin. The barcamp took place at a venue that is in itself very interesting: “The Hub” is a coworking facility and part of a network of similar locations around the world. As they describe themselves,

“The Hub Berlin is a co-creative community of people with good ideas for the world. This means anybody can bring their projects or business here. We enable people to work, relax, network and offer daily exciting events to all our members.”

People can rent anything from a few hours to a permanent desk at The Hub; conference rooms cost extra. What you get is not only a fully-fledged bureau, but also a bunch of interesting coworkers. The venue is aimed at people working for the good of mankind. They range from NGOs via activists to social entrepreneurs. In Berlin, there’s also somebody from a regular company who persuaded his boss to let him work there, but generally businesses seem to have concerns to let their employees cowork.

There are quite a lot of Hubs around the world – including some in places where I would not have expected them, such as Cairo or Sao Paulo. Unfortunately the network isn’t as strong as it could be. Members of one Hub can book conference rooms in another city, but not desks. But through an internal network, members of all Hubs can connect with each other.

The Hubs are not organized centrally, but independently from one another. In Berlin, there are three people who work full-time for The Hub that is currently working place to about 40 people. The organization is constituted as a cooperative, but I was told that they are thinking about founding a GmbH (similar to a Ltd. in Britain) to improve financing.

What’s also cool is that The Hub Berlin has a strong social-ecological focus. They exclusively use electricity from renewable energy sources, racks are built from used paper. They are also very international internally, i.e. signs are multilingual and English is a common colloquial language between coworkers.

Coworking is a very interesting concept, since it enables self-employed and small businesses to work in a social environment. I think it is especially useful for people who spend only part of their working hours at a bureau or job in different cities, but it should be interesting for everybody. It’s a quite young movement in this form, but I am certain it’s on the right way.

P.S.: If you are in Berlin and would like to find out how coworking suits you, I have a couple of vouchers for a day at The Hub Berlin. You can even bring a friend! If you are interested, just drop me a mail at [my first name] at [this domain].

Socialcamp ’09. Day One.

Socialcamp ’09 is a barcamp-style event that brings together social media people and NGO professionals. The aim is to exchange ideas for the public good. But after day one I must say that the sessions lack progressivism a lot. Their titles remember of a bullshit bingo playing ground: At least every second one has the words “social” or “fund raising” in it.

I’m not against anything social at all. But behind these titles are often people explaining a downgraded social media to NGO staff. It’s top-down lecturing that’s not barcampy at all in my eyes. I understand that some NGOs still need to learn a lot on how to use social media. But this way one common pattern becomes strengthened:

There are very few progressive social media projects by German NGOs. Instead, they tend to implement tactics that have been state of the art years ago, spending relatively much money on that. Often, resources are wasted due to redundancy since every NGO wants its own software. It’s not without reason that one session was called “Does it always need a new social community?”.

I think this money would be spend much more useful if NGOs would invest in progressive social media projects. Only they need to know about them beforehand. A socialcamp could be the perfect opportunity to elaborate ideas that take up the experiences of both social media experts, developers and NGO professionals. Instead, sessions are used to manifest old concepts.

Maybe that’s also because NGOs are generally perceived to be conservative and unable or unwilling to adopt new ideas. In fact, this can also be seen in sessions’ names. As I’ve said, “fund raising” is an important issue. It seems as if NGOs are mostly interested in funding their current projects. I.e. the question is “how can NGOs use social media to get money for funding” instead of “how can social media be used to reach NGOs’ goals”.

Luckily, talks between sessions have been much more interesting. I’ve met Tobias Eigen, the founder of Kabissa. The veteran in African social media is a partner of DigiActive – and Tobias even has a sticker of us on his mobile. Yay! Day two will hopefully feature a session with him as well as Christian Kreutz and Georg Neu of Transparency International on mapping for social change. It would be one of the very few sessions that are not centered on Germany.

Disclaimer: I know it’s not fair to complain about the issues debated at a barcamp, especially since I don’t hold a session myself. I’ll excuse the latter with my youth and the fact that it’s my first barcamp, and hope my criticism can foster a debate rather than piss off people.

Vera Polozkova

“Vera Polozkova cares about aesthetics.”

This sentence instantly popped up in my head when I heard Vera speak during our debate on “Blogs and Education”. She argued with fervor for learning the unnecessary, defending its ability to induce the creation of something beautiful against all materialistic circumcisions of the education system.

Although she is a VIP in the Russian blogosphere and a print-published poetess, of all the discussants, Vera seemed the most humble. Her contributions came as interjections or short anecdotes, brought forward in a calm voice, bearing an aesthetic that stood, fragile, but impressive, against all cold-hearted materialism.

On my last evening in Novosibirsk, I got the opportunity to find another proof that “Vera Polozkova cares about aesthetics”. Again it was Svetja that opened an unexpected door for us – this time not only of her car, but also of a reading by Vera in a private flat.

These underground readings, we were told, meant practically the only way for young people to come together apart from state-controlled events during the communist era. In those days, the poems read were often highly political and critical of the society. Today, the tradition is still held up by students, even though a civil society has formed in Russia.

When we got to the flat on a higher floor of a giant, anonymous apartment building, we encountered a scenery like I have never seen one before and do not dare hoping to find in Germany one day. The living room was packed with students, only slightly older than myself, sitting on couches, chairs and the floor, calmly looking at Vera. Her voice was somewhere between lightly chatting and serious lecture as she was reading a poem, her mimics accompanying the story in an emotional manner, sometimes lightly open, sometimes austerely withdrawn, sometimes dreamily moony.

Anastasia would provide me with summaries of the poems’ content. “If I say it, it sounds stupid, but from her it’s amazing,” she would often tell me, obviously impressed trying to explain the greatness of an ordinary story recited in the right words.

What’s a poetry evening if you don’t understand the poetry, you might ask. And all I can answer is: It’s impressive. There was the atmosphere in this room, ascending from the feeling of all the students to experience something great, something worthy. Something the value of which can only be measured in poetry itself. And there was Vera herself, sitting on a couch, reading from a notebook or even an iPhone, a guru amidst her believers, who for a moment had the air of a higher aesthetic. An aesthetic that is not just words, but rhymes and sounds and mimics, an aesthetic that is universal.