March 13
cow-orking
After an achy day in a coffee shop chair yesterday I spent some time last night looking up co-working again. Nothing new has happened on Co-Working Boston page since I was last there. However the CSMonitor recently ran an article covering Betahouse, a local co-working facility, previous covered in this boston.com article.
Lazy Cow (…) by law_keven. License: 
After I first posted my name on the Co-working Boston page I got a message from someone near Long Island looking to open up their own co-working facility. The issue in setting a new place up seemed to be finding the price to set. She wondered if I had a price in mind and since I’d been thinking about this already I sent her my formula for deciding what to spend.
I’m a bit of a details dork and this was formula to calculate my average commute costs when I used to drive to work everyday.
Distance: ~ 30 miles from Cambridge to Westford
Cost: ~ $0.505 per mile according to the Federal reimbursement numbers (which likely don’t take into account recent gas prices)
60 miles round trip / day * $0.505 = $30.30 / day
Working Time: 1777 average hours per year worked according to wikipedia which is 222 working (8 hour) days / year. Really you want number of days driven, not number of days 8 hours were worked but the total usually comes out to be less than the real value and therefore we end up with a conservative estimate.
$30.30 / day * 222 avg working days per year = $6727 / year ( or $561 / month )
Even if I through in the monthly T pass of $59 / month I now get and the fact that I still own the car ( payment + insurance + tickets and taxes) there is a considerable amount of money left which could go towards sharing a nice office space. However since I’m pretty cheap I’d probably opt for the $200 / month deal and be a part timer, after all the coffee shops do have their charm as well.
Title coming from the excellent cow-orker slang term.
Hello there planet mozilla
Funny. Seth Vidal and I were talking about trying to jumpstart a co-working facility in Durham literally just last night.
If we get something going, and if you ever make it back down to the Triangle for any reason (like maybe BarCampRDU), you can hang out.
Greg: That would be killer! The article had a great story about a coworking place in Dublin that started the same way. People posted to see if there was interest and it happened really quickly.
Heck, even in Fredericksburg, VA where I live, there are enough tech workers to make this happen several times over. I’m sure many of the people I’ve seen while at lunch in Panera, trying to work over the sounds of clanking oven implements and other kitchen noise, would jump at something like this.
I was in BetaHouse for a couple of months and have been hunting around for co-working places. A friend of mine says there’s one opening up in Davis Square, but I don’t know any details. There are Jelly’s and most of those are in Central Square area. There’s also the one I put together and haven’t done much about since called the Herd:
http://herd.jottit.com/
At present, it’s just Chris and I from PCF and we bounce between his apartment and mine. But it could be so much more….
Oh will, I’m totally in! You can add in a couple more that I’ve found.
http://www.yelp.com/biz/good-food-cafe-cambridge
and
http://www.gpcafe.com/
Both have free wifi and good food and coffee. Let me know where you’re headed next week
I recently added to the wiki http://coworking.pbworks.com/CoworkingBoston and thought Id drop a comment your way. WorkBar recently opened its doors in Boston, located right downtown: Workbarboston.com Id love to know what you think.
@Evona: thanks for the tip! If I hadn’t moved to vancouver I’d love to check it out. Do you think you could add some photos of the space to your site? It would be nice to get a sense of it. Thanks!
Check out our picture gallery: http://workbarboston.com/?page_id=135
What do you think?