Experienced work-at-homers know how isolation and loneliness can leave one yearning for some herd time. Jelly and the larger coworking movement, of which it's a part, aim to help.
In a nutshell, coworking means getting together with other teleworking / telecommuting folks to combine work and a bit of socializing. Coworking centers like Office Nomads in Seattle, Wash., WorkSpace in Vancouver, BC, Canada, and Cubes & Crayons in Menlo Park, Cal., exemplify the trend, with many more here.
Jelly, an informal variation of coworking reportedly begun by Amit Gupta and Luke Crawford in 2006 at their apartment in New York City, gets people together in dorm rooms, apartments, cafes -- any ad hoc place -- to chat and work and take the edge off home-based or on-the-road labor. (The term "Jelly" emerged from the jellybeans Gupta and Crawford were eating as they brainstormed the concept.)
Having been home-based for decades (and hearing regularly from our work-at-home workshop participants how heavy isolation can weigh), Chris and I think Jelly is a great idea, and can't wait until the "ghost town" suburbs of America are warm again with the "jelly" that used to characterize pre-commuter American town life.
For more on Jelly, check out these links:
-- Jelly main site
-- An earlier backgrounder on Jelly in WIRED
-- Finding a Jelly near you, or starting one of your own
For more on the decline of civic life in US society (which telework, by putting people back in their "communities," can directly counter), see Harvard prof. Robert Putnam's landmark book, Bowling Alone.
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