For a small group of  Third Place members last Thursday, it was at the NAB Village.

The NAB Village is a specifically designed co-working space for National Australia bank business customers to learn, work and connect. We were lucky enough to be invited to use this space for our meetup and marvelled at the collaborative spaces that allowed for free flow of ideas and shared working.

With six members join us on the day, we had our own meeting room where we could spread out and make use of the space for note taking and brainstorming.  We were all from various organisations who had different skills and expertise across the learning functions.

There were people who were in learning roles for corporates and not for profits; freelance consultants; and those looking for new career opportunities…and me, in-between.

I booked the space for the morning so that people could come and go as they please however we were quite happy to sit at the table and chat.

With our own barrista who would pop his head around the corner and ask us for our coffee orders every so often, we pondered why everyone couldn’t work this way – or at least, view the spaces around us and in our cities and towns as potential communal workplaces.

I brought to the meetup the recent Australian Institute of Training Development National Conference program guide as well as Jane Hart’s (@C4LPT) Social Learning Book as two of my main discussion pieces if anyone wanted to know more about them and to get the conversation started but really, we didn’t need any prompters!

We sat around the table with our laptops and devices.  At times, we joined in on the conversation, at other times, people split into pairs talking or showing each other their work or learning tips and techniques for learning design.  Other times, there was a lull in the conversation as we had our heads down tapping away at our keyboards lost in our own work.

See how we worked in the Vine animation of Third Place.

Some people mentioned that this co-working event had sparked some ideas of potential new business, new networks or simply to test an idea or approach they had been working on because they had a ready audience there.

One member said, “this morning has just given me so many ideas which I would never have thought if I was at home working by myself”.

Personally, as well as organising this event, I had a couple questions of my own that I wanted to ask the group and get some answers.  These were related to everyone’s experiences of BYOD in organisations and how they were implemented as well as the pros and cons of using a 1-Password manager software to manage the myriad of passwords that I’m accruing.  So I used the opportunity to learn from others myself.

People ask me about co-working and how to go about finding where they are in their own city.  If you do a simple Google search something is bound to come up!

For Australia, The Fetch has provided a list and prices of co-working spaces.

But really, you’re only limited by your imagination when it comes to working together.