Fly The Coop, as some of you will be aware, is an Independent & Provident Society (read: non-profit co-operative), here to help all you freelancers and SMEs out there collaborate and co-work on a regular basis.

We have an opportunity to get involved in the new Hackspace in the Northern Quarter and take over the first floor to call our very own. However, we need to do a feasibility study and work out whether this is even viable before we commit ourselves to taking the space.

So, if you have 5 minutes please do go and fill in the survey.

We’re also interested in finding companies who want to “sponsor” the space, without perhaps making use of it in the same way. Perhaps you’re a service provider who doesn’t need a desk, or you only need one desk but want to provide more support than one desk gives us, whatever. This sponsorship would help us offset move-in and first year costs whilst we get settled in. If you’re interested in sponsorship, please do get in touch with either myself or email info@flythecoop.co.uk

* Until the next AGM, anyway

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. ’

Not least because it follows a time of high spirits, but the bleakness of watching people fail their resolutions, struggle with credit card bills and deal with a slow business cycle would normally make it bad enough. Watching the pound lose face in the markets, people whine about a credit crunch and for several businesses I deal with to baton down the hatches just made it all the more depressing for this young entrepreneur.

Regardless of how bleak it was in other ways, January has been a great month for events in Manchester, and I thought it might be nice to give people a quick overview of what has been going on. In other words: Sorry I’ve been so quiet, here’s something to make up for it.

One highlight for me this month was the fact BarCamp Manchester was announced and booked out in less than a week. There’s still quite a bit of work to be done to get the final few pieces of the jigsaw together, but I’m confident it’s going to be a great event. If not, well, I’ll probably insist it had nothing to do with me!

Another highlight was the new format Co-working day and OpenCoffee that was a bit of an experiment that seemed to work really well for the co-workers. We need to get the OpenCoffee attendance up, but other than it worked well. In fact, the idea is so tempting that Leeds are going to be experimenting with the format in March. I’ll be opening up registration for the next Manchester one on Monday morning (planned to happen on the 26th February, space strictly limited), so keep your eyes peeled if you want in on it.

At the last Co-working day incidentally, it was decided to form a co-operative with a view to taking on a space permanently. Watch this space.

Also this month I managed to sit down and have a coffee face-to-face with Craig Smith who is the man behind O’Reilly GMT and I’ve agreed to start putting more content up there of a more generic European tech nature – at the moment it feels like a cross between an events listing blog and the occasional PR run. I’m working up story ideas at the moment, but if any of you have ideas on how you would like to see it develop, let me know.

The Northern geek scene has been developing in other ways as well. In the last month we’ve seen Manoj step up his events with the re-launch of the NW Startup 2.0 site. Always the man of ambition, he’s going for three regular events each tailored to an audience that four years ago probably didn’t exist in Manchester. I’ll be going to as many of them as time affords, keen to meet up with people who don’t make it to the more geeky events.

And of course those lovely Yorkshire types have been stretching out ahead of us North Westerners with the launch of NorthPack. Since the death of afeeda I’ve missed having a single place to track the whole of the local scene’s blogosphere. Good work lads.

Also, there appears to have been a miscommunication about my anatomy in the last month, as I got an invite to the very first Manchester Geek Girls Dinner being run by Valerie de Leonibus. It sounds like a hoot, so I hope it builds into a regular event like many others have around the UK and abroad.

All good stuff.

February and March are already looking like busy months, and with all that plus my own business to sort out it looks like the whole of 2008 is going to be filled with inspiration, communication and ideas. How on earth can we fail? :-)

I’m not at all that surprised though that he has aired some reservations about what I’m doing to OpenCoffee, by slotting it into a co-working day. We’re good enough friends that we can each sustain a little criticism from each other.

That said, I thought it might be an idea to clarify what I’m up to.

As I explained to him, my reasoning is pretty simple. There are two big problems with OpenCoffee Manchester as it has gone so far: regular, consistent attendance and grassroots innovation.

We get sporadic attendance because people are busy with other things, and often there are not enough “doers” in the room to make an idea like edocr (spawn of OpenCoffee) to happen. I wanted to try and change things so that more business people could meet more developers.

But I knew the developers wouldn’t come.

When I go out to the developer community and I say “come on, let’s go network in the middle of the day” I get a pretty solid response: no way. Businesses in this sector in Manchester are small, often micro-sized and are incredibly busy. They need some sort of guaranteed payoff to giving up 1-2 hours of their time in the middle of the day, and ideally one that results in cash in their hand. OpenCoffee was never meant to give that, so has traditionally attracted a more conservative business audience who want to get to know more people in the community. All good stuff, but not where I think it can reach its potential.

So, we give people who can’t justify a few hours a way of justifying a whole day. It’ll be like a little mini-Geek conference, where we discuss ideas and work out ways of making them happen. Or we just get on with some work if nothing appeals that day – if nothing is going on, no loss. There’s still good company, quiet space to work and a bit of a drink afterwards. Oh, and in the morning, some people who understand finance, marketing, execution, they’ll be around to talk to if you want to find out what that is all about.

It’s about giving two core audiences exactly what they need at the same in the same place but giving them different things. It’s almost like a magic trick – each side sees what they want to see, but in the middle is something else going on. The people who want an hour of networking get an hour of networking. The people who want co-working get co-working. A few will cross between the two, and that’s where the interesting stuff might happen.

Yes, it might work, it might not. For at least a month or two, let’s give it a go and we’ll see how it develops. If nobody is interested in OpenCoffee but is into Co-working three months from now, we still have a win. If it goes the other way, we still have a win. What I’d be really surprised is if in three months time we don’t have a group interested in doing either.

We’re going to be a little bit more structured this time around, and we also have a few extra spots to get more people in the room.

Ideally, you should come along with something you want to talk about. It could be about wanting to learn some SEO voodoo, share some experience, or you might just have a crazy idea you want to shoot around the room

9am: Start

9am – 10am: Introductions, and ideas for discussion later

10am – 11/12am: OpenCoffee – people turn up to network, meet people, they’re not going to be there for the whole day. Get on with some work if you want to.

Lunch – 4pm: Co-working, we can schedule discussions in this time as well outside of the main work area, and we’re going to try and find a way to feed you (but there’s decent butty shops nearby as well).

There will be free (Fairtrade) coffee and tea available throughout the day. If somebody wants to ‘sponsor’ lunch let me know, but I’ll try and work something out. To be honest, I’m winging this… :-)

Total capacity for the co-working is 20 including me, and you must register here:

http://opencoffee.eventwax.com/january-co-working-day

First come, first served, no exceptions.

If you just want to come along at 10am for an hour or so for the OpenCoffee bit, you can just turn up – no need to book.

I’ve been thinking about ‘Co-working’ for some time, where a number of people get together and share a space and collaborate there as well if they want to. I was thinking how cool it would be to create that space here in Manchester, given there are so many interesting small companies about right now.

So I waited, and waited and waited. Hoping somebody else would get the ball rolling, that I would be confronted with a bunch of people thinking the same thing somewhere in Manchester. It didn’t happen.

Last night I spotted a space I’ve had my eye on for several years is on the market, and so I’ve decided to try and get the ball rolling myself.

Head to the co-working wiki if you’re interested and want to read more or want to get involved: