If you’re going to Austin this year for SXSW and you’re a fan of coworking, you might want to arrive a few days early to hit the Global Coworking Unconference Conference (formerly known as the Coworking Unconference) being held in the city on March 8. With a range of panels on starting and running a space, the all-day event is geared toward owners. But at least one discussion might be of interest not only to coworking entrepreneurs but also to forward-thinking managers as well.

As more and more workers take up the promise of technology and get out of the office to work where and when it suits them, employees’ needs for their company’s office change radically. Cubicles fall in importance as many opt to stay away from the office when they want to grind out work in isolation, and the remaining spaces increasingly need to be designed to foster collaboration. Enter coworking, whose very existence is predicated on the idea of providing spaces to break down isolation and get workers’ creative juices flowing. What lessons does the movement have for corporate types looking to create spaces that foster collaboration?

GCUC is featuring a panel entitled “How to Design, Build and Grow your Space for Collaboration” and to get a sense of what answers it might offer for those providing corporate spaces to increasingly nomadic teams, we spoke to two panelists — architect Jerome Chang, who is also founder of BLANKSPACES coworking in Los Angeles, and Harvard-trained designer Sidi Gomes, who is the founder of ParallelCities.com – for a sneak preview. Both said those interested in the future of office design should pay plenty of attention to coworking.

“The future, I believe, is that corporate offices are going to become coworking offices,” said Gomes. “One space that was able to host 100 permanent workers can now hold 300 mobile workers working different hours, half the time from home, or the coffee shop. Therefore, corporate offices should be learning everything they can from coworking spaces, especially how to still keep ‘community’ when the population suddenly triples in size.”

Chang agrees, calling Zappos’s new campus  for example, “a great extension of coworking ideals.” How so? Change explains that “Zappos is looking to build a whole mini-city community by having encouraged a lot more people to live, work and play all in the same area as their office. The surrounding community becomes the campus itself.” That’s an idea more companies may want to explore.

Not only are the ratio of workers to square footage and the relationship between campuses and their surrounding communities set to change, but so too is the balance of private to public spaces within offices, according to both Chang and Gomes. And coworking has something to teach companies here too, they feel.

Collaboration is all well and good, “but true creativity really comes from privacy and reflection,” according to Gomes. “Imagine Frankenstein being developed in a public lab. You need the privacy of a basement to do that.” But this creativity-protecting cocoon of privacy needs to be balanced with idea-sparking sociability. “If you were always locked up in a basement, you would never get the idea to create Frankenstein to begin with,” he continues. Coworking can provide a template for corporate offices looking to get this fine balance right.

“The cool thing about coworking spaces is that ‘privacy’ is achieved in an open floor plan setting, because you are surrounded by people you don’t know, and therefore are not expected to talk to, so you can put your head phones on and go heads down,” explains Gomes.

Could a bustling corporate campus housing three times as many folks as a standard office and with people coming and going at less regular hours offer the same advantages of meeting stimulating (relatively) new people combined with the privacy of proximity to near strangers that coworking does?

Image courtesy of Flickr user .dh.

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Our recent London conference participants were the best we’ve ever had in terms of the amount of questions they asked. We always promise, whether you ask 5 or 500 questions, we’ll get them all answered and we’ll finish on time. I think in London, they did ask 500 and we barely finished on time!

Some people, we’ve noticed, need to ask a lot of questions about a concept. Once they’ve asked about all their concerns, they can accept the concept as valid and are often the strongest supporters of the idea. It’s easy to assume that the reason they are asking questions is because they are distrustful of the person with the idea, rather than understanding that it’s just their way of understanding the concept.

If your’e the one presenting and you’re feeling defensive about the questions you’re being asked, try to let it go. It’s not you, or your idea. Work through it with the questioner. And, make sure you build in time for questions. If you don’t get any, and your meeting finishes on time, all to the good.

Last week we highlighted a piece in Canadian magazine Maclean’s that explored the question of whether the rise of independent work was contributing to rising income inequality. And while I argued that it was pretty hard to see how independent work rather than government policy and the globalization of the evolution of tech was the root cause of increasing inequality, the post closed by pondering whether the growing number of independent workers was in some way contributing to the widening gap between the haves and have-nots once the process was under way.

I didn’t have any solid data to answer that question, but one reader did: Steve King, a partner at consulting firm Emergent Research. King shared his insights on coworking with WebWorkerDaily recently and shot us an email suggesting we check out his firm’s research on the question of inequality and independent work. In a blog post explaining his company’s position on the issue, King states unequivocally that there is no causal relationship between the two trends:

As part of the 2011 State of Independence study we looked at independent worker income. We found median per capita income for U.S. independent workers to be roughly the same as the median per capita income for workers overall.

We also found a fair amount of income inequality among independent workers. In particular 3 overlapping groups of independent workers significantly out earn other independents: (1) older independents (55+), (2) independents who have been independent longer than 5 years, and (3) independents that are highly satisfied with independent work.

In other words, income inequality among independent workers somewhat mirrors overall income inequality.

Our explanation — which is based on our interviews and other qualitative work — is independent workers with the right skill sets and experience are thriving and are much more financially successful than those who don’t. This is very similar to what is happening across the workforce in general.

Because of this, we don’t see the shift to independent work as a cause of income inequality.

Instead, Emergent Research feels that independent work and inequality are rising at similar trajectories because both trends are powered by the same phenomenon. Recommending former Labor Secretary Robert Reich’s book Supercapitalism for those who want a deep dive into the subject, King pulls a quote from the book to explain the underlying causes of both trends: “The crisis marks the triumph of consumers and investors over workers and citizens.”

Maclean’s view that “independent jobs are bad and we should return to a world of traditional jobs is widely held,” King commented. “But it’s not going to happen. The shift towards independent work is too far along and too powerful.”

Has King convinced you?

Image courtesy of Flickr user BlaisOne

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Our self-forming Ethernet fabrics allow you to deploy new switches, migrate virtual machines, and reconfigure your network as your business needs demand, without a moment of interruption. It’s an automated, on-demand network designed for today’s high-bandwidth applications. And perhaps, best of all, it’s here today. More than 85 percent of our deployed Ethernet fabrics are in production — a benchmark no other networking vendor can touch.

Open innovation and partnership organizational strategies have blurred work boundaries and sharpened our need to understand who does what in a given company. WikiOrgCharts helps bring that information into focus. The cloud-based tool uses the power of crowdsourcing to populate org charts. More than fodder for headhunters, public org charts have become increasingly useful as more of our work is done in tight connection with associates outside of our organizations. And it can’t hurt to know who’s in charge of what while working on a personal job search.

WikiOrgCharts CEO Farhan Memon got the idea for the collaborative org chart while he was working at AOL . During his time there, his team had monthly meetings with external partners. Because they lacked insight into the partners’ knowledge and reporting structure, the AOL group struggled to figure out how best to work with the outside team. A colleague drafted an org chart of the other company, and Memon thought, “this org chart is good, but what I’d really like to do is work with colleagues to fill in the blanks and append information to the org chart.” Having a clearer picture of the roles and relationships makes it easier to know where the bottlenecks are, how decisions are made, and how to manage the underlying connections throughout the project, explained Memon.

Building a wikiorgchart is similar to creating an online family tree. (Memon says that they looked at genealogy websites for user interface inspiration.) You drag a person into position and then use linking lines to show the relationship between people. The privacy settings let you shift from the default of identified contributor to anonymous contributor. When members contribute people and relationships to the org charts, they gain the points they need to do their own searches. (The premium membership does not rely on points.) You can start your own profile by linking to your Facebook and LinkedIn pages. This quickly provides information about where you sit in your organization(s), and earns you more points for adding to your profile.

When it comes to getting your resume into the right hands, WikiOrgcharts has some advantages over LinkedIn . Search results on LinkedIn can be limited by a person’s position relative to your existing LinkedIn network and the type of account you have (free versus a variety of paid levels). WikiOrgCharts provides unlimited access to the available information — as long as you have accumulated enough points through participation, or, similar to LinkedIn, have a paid account.

Like Wikipedia, WikiOrgCharts is always growing, but the company has given the site a head start. Said Memon:

We built out the site using a number of different data sources, including social graph information, SEC data, and data from federal government employees. We’ve accumulated 9 million profiles. Our system automates some processes such as bucketing people from different companies, but we’re improving other processes such as sematic matching of companies.

Sensemaking, social intelligence, and the ability to connect are critical skills for modern work. WikiOrgCharts provides a tool to gather the data you need to begin those activities.

Images courtesy of WikiOrgCharts.

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When Deskmag presented the results of its second annual coworking survey at the Coworking Europe Conference in November, we brought you the initial findings, promising more details as they were released. Recently, Deskmag published further details.

What did the new data reveal? As Steve King of Emergent Research recently told WebWorkerDaily, coworking, it appears, is exiting its infancy and moving into a more business-savvy second phase with fresh faces outside the original, typical community-minded founders taking an interest in collaborative work spaces. And coworking space owners have apparently gotten the memo about their movement’s exploding popularity, telling the pollsters in large numbers that they hope to capitalize on growing interest in the movement and expand their businesses in 2012.

More than one in three owners (36 percent) surveyed said they hope to open an additional location this year. But not all owners are aiming to be moguls of coworking with a chain of spaces to their credit. A further 10 percent are simply hoping to expand their existing space in 2012. Just over a quarter (27 percent) have no plans to expand at all.

Earlier findings from this same survey indicate only a modest 40 percent of coworking spaces were profitable last year. ‘Wouldn’t owners of spaces in the red shy away from further investment?’ you might ask. The survey results suggest that’s not the case. “Of the spaces that want to open a new location, only 44 percent are presently profitable, while the majority of the expansion-planners are either making a loss or breaking even,” reports Deskmag.

For more information on how expansion plans relate to the number of months a space has been in operation and other details such as owners’ predictions for membership numbers in the coming year, check out the full write-up from Deskmag.

Are owners of often unprofitable spaces looking to expand prematurely?

Image courtesy of Flickr user britain.

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Dolphin Browser, a popular third-party web client for Android devices, is set to get even more popular. On Tuesday, the browser gained two new add-ons, supporting both Skitch and Evernote. The Dolphin Browser is relatively unique on mobile devices because such browser extensions are easily added and integrated.

The Skitch add-on brings the ability to draw or make notes on any web content in the browser. Users will need to install the free Skitch app on their Android phone or tablet for Dolphin Browser support. Skitch is already a handy utility on desktops, but I see the value in adding the app to a mobile browser. Think of annotating images, maps or text from a web page and then sending those to a friend or family member.

Evernote was already on my must-have app list due to its support for most desktop and mobile platforms; it gives you a ready-to-use notebook in the cloud for ideas, text, images, links and even audio notes or videos. With the new Evernote add-on for Dolphin Browser, it becomes easier to capture and save such digital objects.

As more people browse the web on mobile devices, these two add-ons make sense for the Dolphin Browser team. Instead of relying on a dedicated app to capture or store ideas — Evernote has a mobile app, for example — you can now browse the web and easily save text, links or media seamlessly among such apps.

Nearly a year ago, I provided 8 reasons for Android owners to try the Dolphin Browser. With Tuesday’s news, that list just increased to 10 reasons.

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Telecommuting may seem like a privilege of the professional and fully wired, so you may have assumed the practice was most prevalent in the developed world. But when Ipsos recently surveyed a total of 11,383 employees with Internet connections from 24 countries for a survey released Monday, they found quite the opposite.

While on average nearly one-in-five (17 percent) wired workers claims to telecommute on a frequent basis, the percentage of workers taking advantage of their broadband connection to get out of the office was far higher in emerging markets.

“Those working in the Middle East and Africa (27 percent), Latin America (25 percent) and Asia-Pacific (24 percent) are considerably more likely than those in North America (9 percent) and Europe (9 percent) to telecommute ‘on a frequent basis,’” the survey found. The rates for individual countries hold more surprises with these nations reporting the most and fewest telecommuters:

• India: 56 percent
• Indonesia: 34 percent
• Mexico: 30 percent
• Argentina: 29 percent
• South Africa: 28 percent
• Turkey: 27 percent
• Canada: 8 percent
• France: 7 percent
• Italy: 7 percent
• Sweden: 6 percent
• Germany: 5 percent
• Hungary: 3 percent

So who exactly qualifies as a frequent telecommuter for the purposes of the Ipsos survey? A telecommuter, the release explains is “an employee uses a stationary or portable computer to do their office work from a location outside of their office,” so a fairly standard definition that encompasses how the word is commonly used here in the States.

The survey also found differences between populations in how much appetite for telecommuting exists among those who have not yet been offered the option. In Japan, a measly 12 percent would telecommute if given the opportunity. Sixteen percent in Sweden and 19 percent in Great Britain felt the same, while a whopping 54 percent of Argentines would happily jump on the telecommuting bandwagon if allowed.

One thing healthy majorities in nearly every country agreed on though was that telecommuting is a productivity booster. Sixty-five percent globally told pollsters “telecommuters are more productive because the flexibility allows them to work when they have the most focus and/or because having maximum control over the work environment and schedule leads to job satisfaction and happiness.” Surprisingly, in telecommuting-bereft Hungary, 74 percent agreed with this proposition, as did a similar proportion of those polled in Argentina, Poland, India, Indonesia, Mexico and Saudi Arabia.

What do you think accounts for the national differences revealed by the survey?

Image courtesy of Flickr user diongillard.

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There’s (yet another) article in the Wall Street Journal today about resumes going away. The article gives examples of companies who are using social media presence or on-line questionnaires to get expressions of interest from candidates and to assess their skills before interviews.

The problem with this is that’s there’s two or three examples which the WSJ encourages you, by their headline, to think is a long-term, wide-spread change. It isn’t. There are always companies experimenting with different ways of finding and assessing candidates. They are exceptions. They make good headlines.

But resumes haven’t really changed in the last 50 years. When it comes down to it, hiring managers want to know what you’ve done and how well you’ve done it: issues the Manager Tools resume addresses head on. Don’t be fooled by ‘newsworthy’ changes. Consider what YOU’RE being asked for the in the roles YOU’RE applying for. We’ll bet 99.99% of the time, it’s still a resume.

http://professional.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405297020375040457717303199…

Parent jailed for non-support; warrants issued for others – Sequoyah County Times – Other non-custodial parents whose cases are worked through Kuester's Sallisaw Child Support Office paid a total of $368755.36, for December. The Oklahoma legislature and the US Congress enacted laws to allow the Office of Child Support Services to …