My coliving experience, I want more now!
My passion for coworking and building community of professionals made me decide to be part of the rebuilding camp in Sende. Sende is a rural coworking and coliving space in Northern Spain, that converted old Galician houses into creative spaces optimized for collaboration and getting work done. In their range of activities they include rural sketching meetups, product camps, hackathons, international youth exchanges and training courses.
The rebuilding camp in Sende showed me what coliving is about, how it looks and what great things happen when 7 creative minds live together.
Coliving is a form of homesharing in a community with other likeminded people.
There were we: Freska from California, Sandro from Portugal, Harriss and Giannis from Greece and myself from Macedonia hosted by Edo and Maria from Sende. We had a mission to rebuild a space.
Here I will share what I learned during my coliving experience:
- Coliving can be fantastic place for new ideas and crafting a Minimum Viable Product
Coliving experience brings the possibility to live in a new environment with new people. In Sende I was surrounded with a serial entrepreneur, a software engineer for a startup in San Francisco, a graphic designer and travelers. Spending time talking and observing them challenges the current way of thinking. This creates perfect setting not only for new ideas, but also to start building them.
During the 7 days spent 2 minimum viable products were born. Coliving space in Portugal and the web page 0f this idea was already created in Sende. An online programming course which most of it was designed during the 7 days of coliving.
Living in a village isolated me from the all news or things that affect me when I’m at home. That helped me to be less distracted by my daily concerns. The perfect ambiance to focus and get the work done.
- Co-creating vs solo-creating
In the 7 days we were following the approach of creating for others. We were rebuilding the space to be used for organizing events and various activities. The new space will be for all people that will come to Sende in future. By co-creating, people feel ownership and now I feel I am part of story of Sende.
Co-creating together not only reduces the financial costs, but can turn clients into partners. This approach shows that many things can be created together instead of doing them alone. Coliving is just one example and I believe many other projects can be created in collaboration.
- Community for personal enrichment
We were 7 strangers that spent 7 days together in a new small circle. We got to know each other well because we worked together and we spend a lot of time sharing our own stories and ideas. For me having meals together was very important.
At the end we started to feel like a small family. That’s what community is really about.
