Baltimore Sun reporter Gus Sentementes wrote a great article covering Beehive Baltimore in the Sunday, February 15 edition of the Baltimore Sun.
You can read the article here. Thanks to Gus for helping to raise awareness of coworking here in Maryland.
A few comments — not criticisms — on the article: the consensus is that it’s coworking, not co-working. This has been the subject of some debate in the community and I was informed that I got it wrong when I first started working with the concept. Arbitrary? Probably so. I think the reason the founders chose and have stuck with the coworking form is that it conveys more of a wholeness of concept than “co-working,” which might imply “working, separate but together,” while the former seems to imply more “working together.”
There has also been some debate as to whether “coworking” might be interpreted by some as “cow orking,” and if so, what “orking” might be, and whether the cow would like it. Regardless, coworking stands as the official name.
Newt Fowler and I in fact traveled to Philadelphia to talk with Alex and Geoff at Indyhall prior to SocialDevCampEast 2 (in November); we then held an exploratory session at SDCE2 to see if there was interest in coworking in Baltimore. In fact, I ended up spending a weekend in Vienna, Austria in September with Alex, which was one of the things that got me started on the idea.
I should also mention Beehive’s third (silent?) partner, Stephen Muirhead, who is also my business partner in Roundhouse Technologies. Stephen has believed in the coworking concept since day one and has been keeping our banking and books straight since the beginning. And of course, we should also thank all of our members who have shown such wonderful support and faith in coworking in Baltimore, and our operations committee who has helped insure a regular schedule of keeping the lights on.
Anyway, Gus certainly got all the basic facts right and we certainly appreciate the Sun’s interest in covering the emergence of coworking in Baltimore. Thanks again Gus!
UPDATE: Alex Hillman generously points out that the question of whether coworking has a hyphen has been thoroughly explored and definitively answered at the website doescoworkinghaveahyphen.com. We recommend this resource for further discussion on this and related topics.
UPDATE #2: The Sun just put up the photo showing Mike Subelsky talking in our server closet. While this was highly amusing when it happened, it should be pointed out that there’s ample space in and around the Hive for taking phone calls and that Mike was simply trying the closet on for size at the exact moment the photographer was there. And so a moment was frozen in time. We neither require nor expect folks to use the closet when taking calls, and Mike will be the first to admit that as an experiment, results were mixed. We did half-expect him to emerge in his Superman outfit, though.
