Sebastien Provencher takes the bus into San Francisco for another day at the office. At the third-floor loft of Citizen Space, he sits at a desk, fires up his laptop and gets to work.
But this isn't his regular workplace: The tech entrepreneur's home is 4,700 kilometres away in Montreal and his hotel is outside San Francisco's pricey city centre. He has set up shop for a week at Citizen Space, here in the hip SoMa district, as other business people work on their own projects at nearby desks.
This type of service, known as co-working, lets travellers like Provencher rent a desk in a communal setting. Once mainly the province of tech-oriented freelancers, co-working centres are attracting a broader spectrum of consultants and small-business people in search of space to work - and network - on the road.
For Provencher, who travels regularly to San Francisco for his business, Citizen Space provides a comfortable place to work, check e-mail and meet clients. "When you're an entrepreneur, you often can't afford the expensive downtown hotels, but you have meetings downtown - and this is a good option," he says.
"But really the benefit of a co-working space is networking," he adds. A typical co-working environment has a social area to chat with the people from across the room and maybe strike up a collaboration. "You're really meeting people from your own tribe," Provencher says. "People who understand what you're working on and won't be bothering you with, 'You should have another coffee, sir.' "
Vancouver's WorkSpace, one of the pioneers of co-working in North America, has a similar ethic. General manager Dane Brown says he sees a steady stream of "digital nomads," freelancers who travel the world while staying tethered to their business via laptop. WorkSpace - with its high ceilings, exposed brick walls and giant windows that look out onto the North Shore mountains - has the loose feel of a tech-sector office. And many of its visitors have been in tech-related businesses.
However, Brown now sees a broader set of clients coming in. "We have lawyers, accountants, people who do special effects for films," he says. "There's a very wide range of people starting to work like this because the need for an office is going down if you're an independent businessperson.
"If you have a laptop and a cellphone, you can work off of that. All you need is a place that's quiet and where you can meet clients."
For the business person on the road, co-working spaces are much more comfortable than a coffee shop or hotel meeting room, says Tara Hunt, a California information-technology consultant and the owner of Citizen Space in San Francisco.
But she also says the most valuable aspect of co-working is the chance to network. "By going to these spaces, you meet people who are local," says Hunt, an Alberta native who worked in Toronto before relocating to the Bay area.
"You make connections and have the opportunity to learn about the local marketplace," she adds.
"In a smaller market like Vancouver... if you go to WorkSpace and you're working there, you'll hear about all the start-ups that are emerging and the people who are doing good work in that area you can potentially collaborate with."
Co-working's history and culture are planted in the tech sector, where the open-source ethic encourages people to share resources and information freely, often without regard to profit. At Vancouver's WorkSpace, Brown has seen clients trade expertise and work: from building an online store to getting a product produced in China, thanks to the expertise of one regular. "If anybody needs someone with manufacturing experience, they talk to him," Brown says.
Like many open-source projects, co-working doesn't have a clear history, but many of the first sites were opened in Canada.
