Coworking is turning 20... or is it?

Open Coworking · July 24, 2025

Champions of the coworking movement will be celebrating a 20-year mark at this year's Coworking Day on August 9—but is that the day coworking really began?

(Originally posted on LinkedIn here.)

As a custodian of coworking.org (and .com), early coworking space founder (2008), and general mega-cheerleader of the movement, I thought this 20-year mark would be as good a time as any to put some of the questions to rest.

Of course, no matter what I say, others will have different perspectives. If you think anything I'm saying here doesn't align with how you experienced the emergence of coworking, please let me know! I want to paint the most accurate picture of the story as possible.

Let's start with an easy one: who invented coworking?

Ha! That's a trick question, and you know it. This is actually one of the more nuanced questions we can try to answer, so I'll share some context:

Artist collectives, hackerspaces, and open source culture set the stage.

The idea of creative folks getting together, building community, and sharing space and resources traces back to our earliest days as a race. In more recent centuries, documented movements of artist collectives emerged that laid a foundation for a culture that pervades today.

In more recent decades, so-called “hackerspaces” emerged at a time when working together on computers meant hauling in hardware that still had to be plugged into a wall.

And around the turn of the century, the open source software movement emerged as part of a wider perspective on sharing and decentralized movements.

As a result, there were actually many coworking spaces around long before they started using the word “coworking” to describe what they were doing.

But who invented the word “coworking”? That was Brad Neuberg, wasn't it?

Technically, no. The late Bernie De Koeven shared his idea for a concept he called “coworking” in 1999. You can learn more about his ideas here.

While there is philosophical overlap between De Koeven's coworking and the movement that emerged, I haven't found any links between the two aside from the word itself. De Koeven's own site, deepfun.com, recognizes this:

The Coworking Movement was launched in San Francisco by Brad Neuberg (the San Francisco connection) and Chris Messina in 2005 and carried forward by a growing and remarkable group of passionate, socially aware people who converted office spaces (Alex Hillman in Philadelphia) and even their homes (Lori Kane in Seattle).

So who is Brad and why do we celebrate Coworking Day on August 9?

Brad Neuberg published a blog post announcing the establishment of his coworking project on August 9, 2005. While Brad's concept bears little resemblance to the coworking we are familiar with today, and the project itself didn't get very far, it did do something critical that merits recognition—it inspired some others who went on to do big things.

Among them were Tara Hunt and Chris Messina. They built Citizen Space, which was a coworking space in San Francisco that served as a prototype and model that inspired many others to build similar spaces in their own cities.

Tara and Chris, drawing from their experience in hacker and open source cultures, open-sourced the coworking concept with Brad's permission. They built the Coworking Wiki, Coworking Google Group, and Coworking Blog, and invited anyone to join and discuss this emerging idea.

Gradually, others who were exploring these ideas (or who had already been doing it for a long time) started to coalesce. The Google Group expanded to thousands of members in a matter of a few years. The Wiki boasted hundreds of entries telling of spaces popping up all around the world.

The Google Group got busy. Many discussions were had, with newcomers joining the group, and therefore the movement, from an ever-expanding list of cities and countries.

Out of those group discussions emerged conversations about coworking's core values, the Coworking Visa, and even the earliest predecessors to coworking conferences (SXSW 2007, 2008).

Among those early joiners were people like Alex Hillman of Indy Hall in Philadelphia, Susan Dorsch and Jacob Sayles of Office Nomads in Seattle, Angel Kwiatkowski of CoHere in Fort Collins, myself, and many others.

This emergence led to mainstream press—by 2007 through 2010, coworking popped up in dozens of major newspapers, magazines, and TV programs—including the NY Times, Wall Street Journal, NPR, CNN, Entrepreneur Magazine, Inc Magazine, and many more.

All of this can be traced directly back to what Brad started on August 9, 2005.

When it comes to the movement we know today, Brad did little more than light the spark—but he did one other critical thing, and that was to give his blessing. Tara and Chris were perhaps most instrumental in building the infrastructure for the movement to emerge, with Tara becoming perhaps the single biggest champion of the movement for many years and the person many other early coworking space owners credit as the person who gave them the most inspiration and support.

What about in other parts of the world?

Folks in Europe credit Berlin's CBase, which started in 1995 as part of the hackerspace movement, as a major contributor to the start of coworking culture in their part of the world.

Ashley Proctor started down a journey that would include many coworking spaces with Xpace in Toronto in 2004. From Ashley:

We had been studying artist collectives, shared studios, and hacker squats in Berlin right before Xpace. Open source culture was a big influence.

Read more directly from Ashley in her excellent post here.

I'm in the process of soliciting stories from leaders in other parts of the world—if you or someone you know can shed light, please send them my way.

Celebrate Coworking Day with us

We might never all agree on exactly where coworking began, but one thing I think no one can deny is that coworking has changed the lives of so many people it's come into contact with, and it continues to do so today.

So, this August 9th, celebrate coworking with us. Here are some ways you can participate:

Send in a photo. Send us a group photo or otherwise a nice picture of people doing things in your space. Preferably a recent one, but it doesn't have to be! Bonus points if you're doing something silly or fun. Email tony@opencoworking.org, or just drop a photo below as a comment! Make sure to include the name and city of your community.
Share your story. As you can see here, coworking has many histories. Share your perspective on how you discovered coworking and who inspired and supported you along the way.
Post about it. I'll put together some materials you can share. In the meantime, queue up some social posts for Saturday, August 9th—or Friday, August 8th if weekdays are better for your posts!

References

Originally published on LinkedIn