Stavros Messinis & Maria Calafatis - Virtual Events & Hackathon

Hello everyone! We are back with another podcast! And this time our guests are the founders of THE CUBE from Athens, Stavros Messinis and Maria Calafatis.

They will tell us about their current projects during this current crisis that we are in and how they are handling it on their end. And they are going to be delving into where the coworking community will be after the COVID19 pandemic.

They have been hosting hackathons with their members and with people all over the globe and they are going to tell us all about how they are doing it and about the common blocks they have discovered along the way.

What do you think about the emergence of coworking after the crisis?

Yeah, there’s a lot of opinions out there about what coworking will emerge to be. How it will evolve. There are some exciting people talking about how corporations will choose coworking spaces rather than having their own facilities to run because you know that the actual operation of managing a sterile environment — because effectively they will need to be sterilized in this environment unless a vaccine is invented anytime soon.

And that’s where they say that coworking will actually boom. The other side of the opinion is saying that coworking is dead. And personally, I don’t believe either of them will be the exact solution or the ultimate solution, we need to find some middle ground.

So Maria and I are working really, really hard to do more things online to deliver more services online, to run more coworking sessions online. So using tools like discord and slack to run Pomodoro sessions.

With our community and perhaps we may not have the types of membership that we have when people are paying for physical infrastructure, physical spaces, physical desks, and our presence or to be in the presence of other people physically, but we may have a different model, a slower model perhaps or lower charges.

Wider nets, if you like wider, wider communities, people working from their homes or working from smaller coworking spaces, community coworking spaces, rather than the big you know, thousand 10,000 50,000 square foot massive coworking spaces that that’s, you know, optimization decides we should have perhaps we’ll go down a different route we will have smaller subscriptions and people doing online coworking to be part of communities that are online using tools like discord and Slack, etc, etc.