As we promised, we will reveal, since the date of the event approaches, some of the speakers who are part of the Coworking Spain Conference.
In this case we will talk about Manuel Zea, promoter of the event from the first year of its celebration, 2012. This architect, who opened in 2007 one of the first coworking centers in Spain: WorkingSpace.es, will be in charge of welcoming you, you will received by him at 9:30 in the morning with a short presentation and he will continue with his lecure.
This time he will talk about the "State of coworking in Spain".
We already had the opportunity to know through an interview that we performed how and when he knew the concept "coworking". It was in 2010 when he was invited to participate as a speaker in the first coworking Europe on "An overview of coworking in Spain." To prepare his presentation he contacted Coworkings in Spain and proposed them an interview.
After that he had collected so much information that he decided to open his own blog in which he posted the list of all the coworkings that there were in Spain at that time. He was invited to the second edition of Coworking Europe Conference again and it was there when he decided that "he had to organize a similar conference in Spain." And as you can guess, he succeeded.
Nowadays he is immersed in the promotion of the coworking culture, he makes known the wide range of coworking spaces in Spain with the main goal of promoting the collaboration among them, the spaces and their coworkers. One of the main services of the platform of which he is founder is the assisted search, through which you will be able to find the coworking that best suits your needs, either by the city where you live or because it offers a specific service as a meeting room.
This collaboration is offered, based on the competition among some of them. There is talk of competition among the big coworkings, those main operators who want to expand and make their spaces a firm with which to highlight. Collaboration among spaces is possible but only in certain cases.
Collaboration among great brands of coworking is quite difficult, but they don´t want to stop working on it, because of the so many benefits that it offers from their point of view: "Collaboration is the perfect way to accelerate your serendipity." Manu said.
To conclude I would like to rescue a doubt that we asked Manuel in the interview. We wondered how a so competitive market could become one of the most collaborative in Spain, if we consider that there are more than eight hundred coworking spaces in Spain. According to his experience the key point of this came from the real beginnings. At that time there were just a few spaces that only had a mission which was to make known the word “coworking” to society, which was a very hard job.
And that has been his work from the beginning, and that has been the mission of the Conference coworking Spain as well, “to connect all the managers of coworking spaces in the same place to help each other and solve common problems, while spreading the word " Coworking ".
