Station C is a space that fosters community, collaboration, innovation. People come here to work and connect. We are a hub for creators and innovators: entrepreneurs, geeks, artists, social activists.

Station C is part of an international coworking movement, which brings together the best elements of the office, cafe, and salon. This movement is built on a set of common values:

• Community — We are a community that thrives on connections and mutual support. Everyone participates, contributes, and benefits. Station C members take the initiative to care for our collective space, welcome visitors, orient new members, start conversations, and host events. We also reach out and contribute to our local community.
• Collaboration — We work together, intentionally as part of project teams or in an ad-hoc way when  someone needs a hand. We help each other out by sharing ideas, learning, solutions, resources.
• Openness — It is beneficial to share and build on each others’ ideas and knowledge. We encourage this in a concrete way by working at shared tables in an open space. We’re a modern agora, providing a public space for informal community gatherings and encouraging folks to drop in and work with us for the day.
• Diversity — We want people with different ideas, perspectives, and ways of working. People from different backgrounds. People at different stages in their life and career. Diversity means occasional misunderstandings, annoyance, and arguments — all of which are a small price to pay for sparking creativity and avoiding groupthink.
• Sustainability — Financially, Station C was designed to sustain itself and the community, not to make a profit. Each of us is responsible for finding our own work. Environmentally, like everyone, we are still learning and finding ways to lower our impact and promote sustainable products and behaviors. We need to do more and welcome help with this.

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This is a great opportunity for a designer who wants to build their portfolio and work with a creative team, as well as support urban ecology, the reclamation of the commons, and local history. Main contributors to the project (designer, artist, publisher) will invest time in developing the book and then split the profits from the book and related merchandise. The project will contribute to the commons — all outputs will be licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike license, allowing subsequent creators to remix and build on it.

Interested? Visit Emily’s site for more details.

Non-profits and social-change initiatives should look closely at how micro-sharing can work for them, as well as folks interested in knowledge sharing and communications (idea here is to create conversations among a community that you can eavesdrop on and then pull out the good bits to feed back in or broadcast). I’ve already posted on uses of Twitter at the end of my Blogging for Good Governance article. And been thinking about how Identica (an open-source alternative to Twitter) and SMS can be used to create a real-time support network in places with limited connectivity.

Here in Montreal the people in the community that I’m a part of on Twitter and Identica regularly ask each other questions and get quick responses via text. Topics range from the best iPhone plan to new vegetarian recipes. I also like how micro-blogging or micro-sharing is fun — no need to write too much. Less thinking, more flow.

As I write this I think that “micro” is the word of the week. At the new Montreal NetSquared meetup last week (hosted by Station C) Peter Deitz told us about his “micro-philanthropy” project, Social Actions, that makes it easier to share and connect to actions: work, donate, sign, meet.

This is what I love about the web — we can break seemingly insurmountable and complex tasks into fun, manageable pieces and work on them together. We haven’t yet solved the tragedy of the commons, but I see great hope in the “creativity of the commons”.