This week we interview Eduardo Diego, speaker of the #CwSC and co-founder of Sun and Co, pioneer coliving space in Europe. This paper brings us a paper entitled "The life cycle of a digital nomad", which will give us more details below. Here we go!
It is your first edition as a speaker at the #CwSC, what does this event mean to you and what do you think it can contribute to the Spanish coworking industry?
A great opportunity to make remote work visible as an opportunity for Spanish coworking spaces. The community is still thinking a lot in local terms and I hope to open my eyes to coworking managers about how they can also build a global community.
In the last Coworking Spain Conference there was a mini coliving track, this year there was in the Coworking Unconference Asia. Do you think that coliving is taking specific weight within the coworking ecosystem?
It is a sector in growth and, above all, in maturation. Today there is an internal debate about what is coliving, just as there was (and still is) about what coworking is. Keep in mind that coliving is 3 years old, it is practically being invented. It is still too early to say what weight it has in coworking or if it is inside or rather close.
We would like you to tell us a little about your professional development, and what led you to bet on coliving.
Professionally I am an architect and my training helped me rethink physical spaces to give them different uses. We had an entire building to give a new function and we bet on coliving because we believe that remote work will revolutionize the labor market. Little by little we will see more penetration in all types of professional companies that do not care to work from anywhere in the world while they have internet and we believe that we could offer a very intense social and professional experience for them.
What advice would you give to other coliving managers, taking into account the evolution of the sector in order to develop your business strategy for the coming years?
Anyone thinking of managing or opening a coliving would say that they know very well what kind of industry they are thinking of undertaking. Coliving is halfway between experiential tourism and social innovation and that makes it radically different from coworking. It is a business that works as a hospitality service (a hotel, for example) and that means being open 365 days a year, 24 hours a day, with staff shifts, etc. It is, in short, a different approach that is better to know before launching. The other big challenge is the construction of a global community, compared to the local community that is created with coworking.
Your presentation on the second day of the Coworking Spain Conference is entitled “The life cycle of a digital nomad”. Could you give us some details?
I would like first to open the eyes of coworking managers about what is happening in other parts of the world, especially the US, regarding new ways of working and then explain how the Spanish coworking ecosystem can be exploited in this situation. There are many preconceived and somewhat wrong ideas about digital nomads that we would like to clarify from our experience at Sun and Co. Being the first to adapt to these changes can make Spanish coworking more competitive worldwide.
