Just Toured the Queen St. Commons

I was just over to take a peek around the cool little Queen St. Commons project that Rob Paterson, Cynthia Dunsford and the SilverOrange guys have started up in the old blue house next to the parking garage on Queen St. here in Charlottetown. It's really neat, they're going to sell memberships for $35 / month and you can use the facilities with desks, private rooms, a meeting room, fax machine, mailboxes, kitchen and whatever other things people seem to want.

It's a cool idea especially given how ridiculously expensive temporary office space is, and it strikes me as realizing what the Atlantic Technology Centre was supposed to be before government got too involved and it blew up into a giant money hole giving space to existing companies that already had office space around town.

It's pretty rough right now, mostly because they got the house for a good price and are in the process of fixing it up, which is smart. They seem to be planning on hovering in that medium between simply renting out space to whoever and it being a close-knit collective affair. Sensibly, they want people to have flexibility in how they use it, but not step on the toes of the other members, relying on social pressure and norms rather than too many strict rules. As someone who's been in awe of the sheer bureaucratic nightmare that is the ATC for the last few months I can see the desirability of a more collective way of running a shared space.

Back when I was working on a couple of independent projects something like this would have been exactly what I'd have wanted, instead of working from home. Hopefully they'll be successful, and the idea spreads and people see the practicality of community.