"Regardless of how one classifies these workers, they remain largely invisible to policy makers and to economic and workforce developers.   That needs to change.  In addition to recognizing the importance of this part of the workforce, we also need to develop a more nuanced understanding of their concerns and needs.   At a minimum, providing a stronger safety net—as suggested by the Freelancer’s Union and others—makes sense.   It also makes sense to develop work spaces that support the 1099ers.   Here, the recent growth in co-work spaces is a positive trend.    Finally, we need new kinds of support and services for the 1099ers.  These might include traditional training in business development, but other supports, such as networking or peer-to-peer lending or on-line tools to find customers and partners should also be part of the mix.    It’s time to recognize that the 1099 economy is here to stay and will be an important part of every community’s workforce for decades to come."

"Giving sophisticated models and fast computers to traders is like giving handguns and tequila to teenage boys. Only complete mayhem can result (and as we saw recently, complete mayhem did result) . The quants were there to make sure the guns were loaded, but also to make sure the traders didn’t shoot themselves in the foot.

Not that we were terribly appreciated. In fact, we were basically the trader’s little bitches, and any quant who’s honest with himself realizes that. In time, we quants developed knee callouses from genuflecting to service the traders, on whose profits our livelihoods depended."

"Owen had neglected to notice that expectations also change through circumstance. As our communal conditions advance, we all tend to want to become the prophet, not merely the congregation. Once the problem of survival is solved, it’s no longer enough not to be starving or abused or overworked – we want personal satisfaction and self-direction. So, yes: some of the great names in business – the Lowell mills, Hershey’s, Cadbury’s, Lever Brothers, Google – applied dilute Owenism to great effect, but success makes employees become more individualist and ask for more of their reward in cash, while hard times make shareholders less generous, pointing out that plenty of people would take the job without the crêche, lecture series, or company brass band. Shifting expectation drives the carousel for another turn; we remain ambivalent about work, this thing we do through most of our waking lives, because we still don’t know what it is for."

"Cultural CoWorking: CultureWorks is currently developing Philadelphia's first coworking space specifically for the culture community in Center City. This space will provide networking, peer-to-peer support, technology, and other resources to individual creative workers, start-ups, and small organizations."

"In the course of one week I spoke at length with Kelani about new media performance art happening in North Philly, had a discussion in Swahili about coworking spaces in East Africa, and met the girlfriend of my friend Elijah Dornstreich. It’s ridiculously clear that there is tremendous power in simply being in one space, coworking together–so thank you for being the flagship for this movement here in Philly."

"One interesting phenomenon is that some of the best seats in the house (near the windows, plenty of natural light, good access to the bathroom and kitchen) are avoided like the plague because they're too near the front entrance. Nobody wants to be mistaken for the receptionist. (Which we don't have.)  With 22 companies, 5 conference rooms, and a speakeasy throughout our 2 floors, guests need to be pointed in the right direction. The problem is that on busy days that could easily mean 15+ interruptions...not ideal for productivity."

"This is perhaps the most telling point about cities. Even in this age of technology – where people can collaborate with people they barely know on the other side of the globe thanks to the internet – success depends, as Harvard economics professor Edward Glaeser points out in his book “The Triumph of the City”, on communities of individuals being in close physical proximity. Hence all the attention paid to encouraging clusters, whether they are in high-tech, as is the intention in the area around Hackney in east London, or anything else. Glaeser and others have plenty of evidence suggesting that future economic growth is dependent upon the ideas and initiatives originating in cities."

The process of bringing together entrepreneurs has been made exponentially easier by the coworking phenomenon. If done right, these spaces become incubators for new businesses and help drive job growth in the area.

Collaboration means getting to know that other employees possess expertise on this or that topic, but also developing comfort with one another by sharing significant symbols relating to self, family, friends, and social activities, thereby understanding one another as people.

"Standing in contrast to these stretched models is the hybrid. It is based on the principle that a single entity—be it an L3C, a 501(c)(3), a benefit corporation, or a traditional for-profit—cannot by itself do everything that a social venture needs to do. Instead, the hybrid uses a series of contracts and agreements to combine one or more independent businesses and nonprofits into a flexible structure that allows them to conduct a wide range of activities and generate synergies that cannot be done with a single legal entity. The two (or more) entities that generally make up a hybrid are distinct for legal purposes, and each is responsible for compliance with the laws and regulations that govern it, but when properly structured, the legally distinct entities can behave much like a single entity. For these reasons, a hybrid is often a better solution than a single legal entity that tries to incorporate a wide range of activities."

"No wonder they shut down the internet. It's more powerful than guns. Smart mobs with online capabilities are defeating status quo organization ruled by hierarchy and unfamiliar with coordinating technologies. These mobile smart mobs can be built on the fly in a matter of hours or days and they will continue to get smarter. Reaction rates are getting much, much faster."

"HTSQL ("Hyper Text Structured Query Language") is a schema-driven URI-to-SQL translator that takes a request over HTTP, converts it to a SQL query, executes the query against a database, and returns the results in a format best suited for the user agent (CSV, HTML, etc.).
HTSQL 2.0 is a work in progress and not yet ready for production use. The initial supported release will be in October of 2010."

"The YouTube Nonprofit Program provides for extra benefits like branding capabilities, increased uploading capacity, and call-to-action overlays. Non-profits can use the call-to-action feature to drive sign-ups, donations, website traffic, and any other response in which users take action. This feature was effectively used by the World Food Programme to raise $36,000 on World Food Day with this video.…"

"This leads me to something else that I always find hard to articulate: the ROI of IndyHall, or even coworking in general.

We’ve been running IndyHall for nearly 3 years as a business for a reason, and a profitable one at that. But the metrics for ROI aren’t salient, since most of the investment has been in human, knowledge, and time capital, and the return doesn’t show up on our balance sheet. As such, Geoff and I don’t take a draw, at least not in terms of cash…because that’s not what’s we’ve invested. If there was a balance sheet for the social capital we’ve invested and seen in return, though, and we had metrics for it, we’d be able to far better express and share what we’ve accomplished."

“… these spaces have been shown to make significant contributions to the energy and robustness of the local entrepreneurial environment, and have become an increasingly common way for cities to promote themselves as supportive of the new breed of entrepreneurial venture.”

"Creation spaces have the potential to generate increasing returns — the more participants that join, the faster new knowledge gets created and the more rapidly performance improves. They bring into play network effects in the generation of new knowledge. In contrast, traditional knowledge management systems are inherently diminishing returns propositions. Since existing knowledge is by definition limited, it requires more and more effort to squeeze the next increment of performance improvement as existing knowledge gets more broadly distributed."

I would like to suggest a Workantile Exchange Faceball league.

"The L3C is a low-profit limited liability company (LLC), that functions via a business modality that is a hybrid legal structure combining the financial advantages of the limited liability company, an LLC, with the social advantages of a non-profit entity. An L3C runs like a regular business and is profitable. However, unlike a for-profit business, the primary focus of the L3C is not to make money, but to achieve socially beneficial aims, with profit making as a secondary goal. The L3C thus occupies a niche between the for-profit and charitable sectors.
As of September, 2009, an L3C can only be formed in the states of Michigan[1] ,Vermont, Wyoming, Utah, the Crow Indian Nation and the Oglala Sioux Tribe. On August 4, 2009, Gov. Pat Quinn signed Illinois' L3C Bill SBO239 and the law will take effect on January 1, 2010."

"The key insight is that a single strong heuristic will do worse than a collective of individually weak but diverse heuristics. The problems are too hard for any one heuristic to solve perfectly, but the diverse heuristics can, so to speak, cover each others' weaknesses and help each other out when they get stuck; a single strong heuristic can't. A collection of diverse strong heuristics would be even better, but the strong heuristics for a problem tend to be similar to each other, so a group of them lacks diversity. In problem solving and prediction, diversity is exactly as important as individual ability."