#icollday

International Collaboration Day is tomorrow which also happens to be the day of our Makers Dozen Collaborate exhibition opening! Come on down to Manchester Craft and Design Centre from 6-8pm for the ultimate celebration of Collaboration.

Thursday 16th January will be the first International Collaboration Day.  I first came about #iCollDay from the Sage One Blog where Paul Lancaster caught up with Phil Dodson, the founder of a co-working space in London and key instigator of the event.  

According to Phil, the idea behind #iCollDay is to get co-working spaces and users to focus on a key message that co-working isn’t about a group of self-employed people sitting in a shared space with their headphones on with a bunch of strangers, instead co-working is more about being part of a collaborative, sharing and supportive business community.  

Worldwide there will be 83 participating in the event across 35 global cities, including Paris, Berlin, Barcelona, Melbourne, San Francisco, New Jersey and Toronto.  Their purpose is to generate further awareness of collaboration with the onus on co-working being a community and the ‘sharing economy’ through co-ordinated international talks, simultaneous global and local events, and co-working space open days for entrepreneurs and companies.  

  For the UK, Phil’s co-working space @Work Hubs are opening up the hub for the day to companies and individuals.  The day will include business networking, group workshops, lunch and an afternoon free to work with a group on implementing ideas.  

  The innovation space at 90 Main Yard will be offering free hot-desking for the day, from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m., as well as an interactive discussion lead by Bernie J Mitchell, of Sharing Economy Radio, who runs an excellent site about the collaborative economy.  I caught up with Bernie and I found his passion for collaboration, a working model which he has been advocating for more than six years, to be infectious.

  It’s clear from both Phil and Bernie that they view technology as playing a big part in driving co-working and productivity, whether that’s using planning tools such as Trello and or Google Apps that allow you and your team to work both independently or collaborate at the same time.  Couple these tools ability to leverage cloud technology with their ability to render any device or operating systems, ensures these toolkits are the forefront of the collaborative economy.

For us at StudioAlt, we too are passionate about collaboration and believe strongly that non-digital toolkits can compliment digital toolkits and together can play their part in increasing co-working productivity.  Nothing screams out collaboration more than seeing a group of people huddled around an A1 printed wall planner plotting their next move.