Earth911 is located in a corporate office space in the Scottsdale Arizona.
We moved into this space quickly and got right to work on transitioning our systems, and our website. We thought it would take at least two quarters and as much as a year, which turned out to be about right.
Now we’re taking a hard look at our internal processes and how we work together so we can bring the good stuff out to market even faster. In order to do that we’ve identified that our office space needs to be reworked in a big way.
Over the last 6 months we’ve bandied about a bunch of ideas and most of them have been really interesting, but given all the higher priorities we have usually ended with “we’ll have to move to do that”. In the last few months we’ve realized that’s not really a productive direction, and that we have plenty of space to work with if we leave our concerns about who has to sit where at the door. Well we also opened a smaller office nearby for executive/investor offices and that’s helped a great deal.
So I’m going to blog here about how we transform an area of our office into a really exciting collaboration area that helps us be even more creative and responsive.
I’m also going to be asking you, gentle reader, to take an active role in that process. What examples can you give me of the best collaboration spaces you’ve ever seen? I’m looking for spaces that actively encourage and assist collaboration here, not spaces that are more focused on being hip and new for the sake of being hip or new.
To spark some ideas there’s a couple recent pages I’ve looked at online..
I love the list Jason Calcanis posted a couple months ago about How to save money running a startup (17 really good tips). Tip #4 really helped me improve our approach with regards to organizing the space.
I’m a big fan of Alistair Cockburn’s writings on collaboration - especially his concept of Osmotic Communications that he so well describes in his great Crystal Clear book.
