Prescient given that just yesterday we got the ball rolling on sign-ups for our February coworking day, the New York Times have published a piece on coworking and by the sounds of it, they’ve already seen some of the problems that we might need to think about as we move to doing this permanently:

‘Many of the ideas come from the open-source software movement, in which people share their work freely with little regard for financial gain. Taking a nod from that movement, the people involved in coworking share their experiences and ideas on a Web site, coworking.pbwiki.com.

Despite such ideals, the arrangement does not always work perfectly. Thor Muller, the chief executive of Get Satisfaction, a San Francisco start-up, said he had opened his offices to friends to come in and work. One day, a friend started aggressively recruiting Satisfaction’s employees for his own start-up, and he was banned from the office.

“There should be honor among start-ups,” Mr. Muller said, still rankled.

Ms. Hunt and Chris Messina, her partner in Citizen Agency, said they have had to make sure that people respect their space and leave it clean.

“Someone wanted to bring her dog in, and we had to say, ‘That actually doesn’t work for us,’ ” Ms. Hunt said. And Mr. Vlahides at the Hat Factory griped about “some humorless European guys” who sat at the common table and talked loudly on their cellphones instead of going outside. ’