Our analysis elucidates strategies and situated practices enacted to create a supportive social context for enhanced individual productivity and well-being. We draw attention to three overarching themes from our analysis: 1) the practical arrangements of Hoffice events, including the adoption of the work structure, the digital technologies used, and the physical places inhabited, 2) the participatory efforts made to get individual work done, and 3) the co-creation of an alternative social model that is centered on values such as trust, self-actualization, and openness to new acquaintances.
The Practical Arrangement of Hoffice Events
Hoffice events are advertised through the Facebook group of the local Hoffice network. Adopting Facebook’s terminology for activities, an event refers to a working day occurring (typically but not exclusively) at a private home (Figure 1).
Once an event is created on Facebook by a member of the network who is willing to serve as a host – that is, to share one’s home as a temporary workplace – other members are welcome to show their interest and sign up to attend it. When a Hoffice event takes place, guests (and the host) are free to work on anything they choose. Anyone in the network can host an event. During data collection, we encountered both first-time hosts and regular ones.
Activities undertaken during Hoffice events are not limited to paid work. For instance, during our data collection, we also met students transcribing lecture notes as well as people attending Hoffice to take care of mundane tasks like paying their bills.
The Hoffice Work Structure
A core tenet of the Hoffice community is the work structure, typically referred to by participants as “the Hoffice structure”, or just “the structure”. This consists of the alternation of 45-min work sessions with short breaks between them, and a longer one around lunch time. The breaks are usually taken together and involve joint activities led by whoever has an idea of what to do (often the host), with the intent to relax, socialize, and get to know other people. A regular day spans from 9.30 to 16.30 but this time is not fixed: hosts are welcome to organize events in line with their preferences, and attendees are free to arrive and leave when it best suits them. The host is usually responsible for introducing and keeping the structure of the work day. This work of guiding the group to stick to the structure is referred to as facilitating the event. This includes timing the alternation of work sessions and breaks, along with giving advice on what to do at different moments – an effort that is especially important when there are newcomers in attendance.
The work structure has the instrumental and practical goal to organize the working day into cycles during which particular tasks or activities can be accomplished. In this sense, it is similar to frameworks such as Scrum (Verheyen 2013), nowadays extensively adopted in software development. However, during Hoffice events, the synchronized alternation of working sessions and breaks is meant to support individuals in accomplishing their own, personal objectives as well as to foster a sense of mutuality and trust among the participants. This sense of support and the opportunity for building a positive and supportive group is a core characteristic of Hoffice as a co-working setting, rather than cooperating on shared tasks or interdependent activities.
Another important part of Hoffice is that participants do a check-in in the beginning and in the end of each working session. This means that all attendees state their goals for the upcoming session, and then share what was accomplished. This is meant to provide an opportunity for participants to articulate clear goals that are feasible within the given time slot.
As recurrently mentioned by our informants, the flexibility associated with being self-employed, or being allowed to work remotely can be challenging as it requires individuals to establish and maintain their schedule independently. By providing a clear structure, complete with plans and breaks, Hoffice alleviates some of that burden. Prior work has described the strategies people adopt to separate, or not, work and life (Nippert-Eng 2005), the continuous reconfiguration of work–life boundaries (Gregg 2013) and how separating work and life can, in some cases, be conceptually difficult and practically undesirable (Leshed et al. 2014). Attending Hoffice events serves as an effective and collaborative way to create such boundaries, and clearly mark when a work day begins and ends. Following the structure – and pairing out one’s work into smaller tasks to be undertaken within short sessions – helps participants feel accomplished. As discussed during the interviews and the focus group, by putting emphasis on celebrating together the work that got done, rather than worrying alone over everything that did not, Hoffice reduces (or even alleviates) feelings of guilt and sustains long-term wellbeing and efficiency. Key to achieving this is the combination of setting feasible goals, working in a concentrated, structured manner, and taking social breaks that often involve also physical activity. This structure is meant to make Hoffice days effective without draining the participants, and based on our observations, this seems to be the case for active Hoffice goers. As one of them described: “I’m not exhausted when I get out of here”.
The central importance of the structure for what makes Hoffice an inspiring concept is visible in how the structure has been adapted for use in spaces and for needs that differ somewhat from the original formulation. (Here, it should be noted that the structure was meant by the founders as a starting point for co-creation and experimentation, rather than a strict set of rules). For instance, hosts have set up events in libraries (Boffice, from the Swedish word biblioteket), the forest (Hoffice i Skogen), and online (Voffice, where the Virtual Hoffice involves no physically co-located activities but offers an online setting for articulating one’s objectives, reporting on progress, and experiencing a sense of togetherness). Some people have started using the structure at their regular workplaces and/or at home with their partners, without opening the events up for the wider community. To sum up, events that rely on the Hoffice concept need not be organized in a private home by a private homeowner, even though this is still held as the gold standard within the community.
When it comes to Hoffice, the use of networked technologies is normalized to the point that it “goes without saying”. During our fieldwork, we have been continuously struck by how seamlessly Hoffice attendees set up to work in various locations and how rarely any mention of technology comes up in community members’ accounts of their experiences of Hoffice. Yet, it is evident that the very existence of Hoffice depends upon an assemblage of networked technologies that enable both the creation and coordination of events and the work that takes place at them. The set of technologies that is central to Hoffice includes reliable, ubiquitous connectivity through smartphones and wi-fi networks, Facebook as a hub for connecting people to the community and coordinating participation, and the availability of laptops and cloud services that makes it easy and comfortable for participants to move work resources (i.e. documents) to different places. Overall, using such technologies seems straightforward for the participants: everyone brings a personal device and as long as there is wi-fi – be it the host’s home network or a hotspot on a participant’s smartphone – getting to work requires little technological setup. Our analysis shows that these efforts were limited to finding out the password for the wi-fi.
This highlights how the world of work has evolved since CSCW scholars first started examining nomadic work practices, and how many of the concerns they found nomadic workers struggling with at that time are non-issues in a context like Hoffice. Setting up to work at Hoffice differs from prior CSCW accounts of nomadic work practices. These earlier investigations illustrated, for instance, how place-making was experienced as the extra work required to turn locations into amenable workplaces (Brown and O'Hara 2003; Rossitto and Severinson Eklundh 2007; Perry et al. 2001), that planning and orchestrating the use of constellations of technologies was an essential aspect of nomadic work (Rossitto et al. 2014), and that creating and maintaining the mobile office was a main concern for nomadic workers (Su and Mark 2008). Such differences can certainly be explained in terms of the different settings different studies have focused on. Hoffice, for instance, lacks a strict organizational structure and this makes it possible for participants to use the technologies they prefer. However, it is worth noting that over the past years, the rapid evolution of mobile computing and a variety of cloud services has made the circulation of working resources and artefacts easier to plan and manage. Thus, compared to the investigations above, the socio-technical practices around the mobilization of work (Perry et al. 2001) are normalized in the case of Hoffice to the point of becoming unremarkable for participants. In this vein, smartphones play an integral and indicative role in the practical arrangement of Hoffice events: when participants are making their way to a Hoffice event, the experience is smooth largely thanks to the availability of connected devices that can be used for navigation as well as for messaging about small but crucial details such as door codes. This tends to go unnoticed if nothing goes wrong – very much in line with the idea that infrastructures are embedded and transparent, and only become visible upon breakdown (e.g. Bowker et al. 2016; Star and Ruhleder 1996).
An important practice that Facebook facilitates is private messaging between the host and those who have signed up for events. For instance, on the day before the first author was going to attend a Hoffice event hosted by a person she had not met before, the host sent a private Facebook message to all the guests to share his professional LinkedIn profile. He also included information about the floor on which his apartment was located, the availability of coffee and of nearby lunch restaurants. These first-contact online practices are an important way to welcome guests and introduce them to the physical home and to the person(s) living there. Interestingly, they were so obvious to Hoffice participants that they were not mentioned during the interviews and the workshops, and only became visible through participant observation. Similar to negotiations over network hospitality in the context of platforms such as Couchsurfing and Airbnb (Lampinen 2014; Ikkala and Lampinen 2015), this back-and-forth messaging between the host and the guest functions as a way of establishing interpersonal trust and paves the way for face-to-face interactions.
Home as a Shared Workplace
Sharing one’s home by turning it into a collective – even if only temporary – workplace, is a core aspect of Hoffice. In setting up an invitation for a Hoffice event, the host usually sets a maximum for how many people can attend. This is, in most cases, determined by the size of the apartment and the number of work stations available. Work stations can be seats by a dining table or spots on the couch – anything that the host deems fit to serve the purpose. Considerations over how many guests can be accommodated are reminiscent of those that Couchsurfing hosts make in determining what, to them, constitutes sufficient space for hosting and how, in turn, they can ensure that guests arrive with realistic expectations regarding the space that will be available to them (Lampinen 2016).
The arrangements that are made when opening up domestic space for members of the local Hoffice network tend to be straightforward and pragmatic. For instance, hosts can make key information, such as the names of wireless networks and their respective passwords, easily accessible to all attendees by writing them on a blackboard or a large sheet of paper. These are usually left available so that guests can easily refer back to them when needed.
Beyond practical considerations, taking part in a Hoffice event for the first time – or for the first time with unfamiliar people – can feel challenging for both the guests and the host: people might have concerns regarding safety but also anxieties about awkwardness or discomfort. This, however, relates more to how enjoyable interactions are than to concerns about more drastically adverse experiences. Attendees choose to put these hesitations aside and, as one participant put it during a lunch interview, consciously opt for trusting other people and coming together with them. While not everyone is comfortable with the idea of taking part in these types of activities, some are. As one, rather extreme, example of Hoffice hosts’ willingness to open up their homes, a participant told us that she was once booked for an emergency doctor appointment on the very morning she was supposed to be hosting a Hoffice event at her place. She described how she had sent out a message to all guests to let them know about this change of plans but, since the notification went out quite late, she bumped into one of the guests on her way out. To solve the situation in a hospitable way, she decided to give the guest – a person she had never met before – the keys to her apartment so that he could let himself in. This is clearly an exceptional case even within the Hoffice network, and we are not suggesting that many of those involved would be willing to do anything like this. Based on research, it is very unusual for hosts not to be present at Hoffice events. Still, the incident shows the extent to which some network members can be comfortable with letting people into their home.
A challenge for those who are willing to host Hoffices might be the separation between work and life at home, particularly the presence and the preferences of family members or housemates. Several of our informants explained that at some point they had had to stop hosting Hoffices due to the presence of babies or small children, or because their spouse did not like the idea of unfamiliar people spending time at their home. Where hosting remained possible, we learned that family members had negotiated days on which the person involved in the Hoffice network could have the place for themselves and host events. Here, again, the practice is similar to negotiations regarding network hospitality (Lampinen 2016) where household members needed to come to a consensus about whether, when, and who they were willing to welcome to their home. In such negotiations, each household member was typically given the power to veto any hosting plans. Thus, the boundaries of hosting were essentially set by those most reluctant to open up the home and, where visits were arranged, those most enthusiastic to host agreed to shoulder most of the effort involved in welcoming guests.
Participatory Efforts to Get Individual Work Done
In the sections above, we have covered the basics of how Hoffice events are arranged in terms of schedule, space, and technology. Below, we turn to another key aspect of Hoffice, that is the participatory efforts to get individual work done. This constitutes a departure from traditional CSCW investigations of collocated work where the articulation of work around interdependent, collaborative activities has been paramount to both analytical purposes and subsequent design efforts (e.g. Normark and Randall 2005; Luff and Heath 1998; Luff et al. 2000).
We characterize Hoffice events as participatory (Delwiche and Henderson 2013) in the sense that each participant’s contribution is valued, and that connection with and care for other participants are central to the experience of taking part in Hoffice events. While, as we will see below, Hoffice events require everyone’s contribution to be enjoyable and rewarding, work-related activities usually undertaken during work sessions are typically not interdependent. (This in contrast to scholarship that focuses on collaborative work where challenges stemming from interdependence are a key issue, see, e.g. Bannon and Schmidt 1989; Schmidt and Bannon 1992.) Rather, collaboration at Hoffice unfolds in the form of collective efforts to enable each attendee to accomplish their own goals. By describing Hoffice as a participatory – rather than a collaborative – ensemble, we draw attention to each member’s contribution and responsibility to co-create a setting that fosters social and emotional support to get individual (rather than collaborative) work done. In what follows, we further unpack the participatory nature of Hoffice events by focusing on two core aspects of the community: planning togetherness and internalizing the norms of the community.
The paramount motivation to attend Hoffices is to come together to work in the company of other people. Both during the workshops and the interviews, our informants privileged this aspect of the community, without bringing up any challenges related to the practical achievements of coming together (for instance, troubles with wireless connectivity or hassles in bringing along necessary working resources). The togetherness that participants seek serves an instrumental role: being physically collocated is experienced as a way to find the concentration and discipline necessary to carry out work-related tasks effectively. In this sense, being together provides a more efficient alternative to working at home, in isolation and without support for structuring one’s schedule and plans. Two of the participants in the first workshop provided us with extreme examples in this regard. One explained that during the period when she was finalizing her book project, she attended Hoffices regularly enough to make her home office redundant. Another described how, on a number of occasions, he had spent a long time commuting into the city in order to attend Hoffice events:
‘I live in [a smaller town outside of Stockholm], so if I go to a Hoffice I have to travel for quite a stretch, so I used to travel for two and a half hours to go there, and two and a half hours to return home, but it was worth it. […]. The reason I do it is that, without any doubt, I get four working days out of just one. And I think that the reason is that we use group pressure in a positive way. Some people may think that group pressure is negative, but if one uses it in the right way, it is good.’ (Allan).
Although most attendees did not commute for such a long time, the connection between being together and working effectively was a recurrent theme in the data collected. As the quote indicates, being with other people serves as a positive reinforcement to get things done during a work day.
However, there is more to motivate attendance than just improved work performance. Many participants talked about how they had met interesting, new people through the network. For many, these were casual acquaintances, but we also heard about friendships and possible professional contacts, while one participant even credited Hoffice for his new romantic relationship. Some appreciated the break activities as a source of improved physical well-being, describing how after a day at the Hoffice, they did not feel as drained as they tended to feel after a day at a regular office or at home.
The shared motivations and practices that are characteristic of how Hoffice events are co-created are key to contributing to a sense of togetherness. This makes working at Hoffice substantially different from working, for instance, in coffee shops (Liegl 2014) where the lack of a shared schedule and work structure dissolves the participatory dimension of being together.
Internalizing the Code
Coming together is not without its problems, and discussing these troubles brings us to the importance of norms in creating and fostering the emerging culture of Hoffice. As previously introduced, the Hoffice structure serves to establish a shared rhythm of working sessions and breaks, while prompting attendees to explicate immediate and concrete work objectives. Here, we consider the role the structure plays in creating boundaries around work, and in nurturing a sense of belonging to the community which was mostly associated with the internalization of central Hoffice norms.
Firstly, while Hoffice events are co-created by everyone in attendance, some roles are more demanding than others. As participants in the workshop recounted, events need a host (who makes the invitation and offers the space to be used), a facilitator (who is responsible for helping the group to follow the work structure and managing the breaks), and guests (who contribute by showing up, following the structure, and sometimes by providing ideas for the break activities). The same person usually serves as both the host and the facilitator. Managing both roles is, however, a demanding task that can get in the way of the hosts’ ability to focus on their own work. This is problematic, as a key motivation for hosting a Hoffice event is the opportunity to work along the Hoffice rhythm. A common complaint from experienced Hoffice attendees, particularly hosts, concerned novice members’ failures to adhere to the Hoffice culture. For instance, participants shared stories of attendees commenting on what others had achieved (or not) during specific work sessions. This was deemed as something to be avoided, since check-in rounds are meant to assist people in articulating their plans and progress, rather than evaluating the session outcomes.
A second, related issue concerns the ability to articulate one’s own objectives briefly. For instance, one of our workshop participants valued the check-in rounds, as hearing that others, too, are tackling specific tasks creates a sense of being in it together. However, she felt that it is uninteresting and irrelevant to hear the specific details of what people are going to do. Attendees who share too much on check-in rounds simply do not get the code. The articulation of plans for a work session is strictly for the benefit of the individual, not an effort to explain one’s work to other attendees.
‘It is interesting to listen to [other people] during lunch, but to hear the details of what they are supposed to do now [during a work session] is completely uninteresting to me; I’m here to work, but it is however interesting for me to hear that they have a task that needs to be undertaken, because then I’m also on it…you see this is the structure. Maybe this should be clarified because there have been times when I felt, not annoyed, but I felt that someone doesn’t quite get the code.’ (John)
The value of this became quite tangible during one of our participant observations, when the host – a Hoffice novice – kept mentioning specific work processes that were difficult to understand for most of the attendees.
A third concern relates to failures to understand and respect the separation between silent working time and social breaks. As we learned, this had caused an intense discussion which had inspired two core members of the community to write a short document on proper Hoffice behavior, and to share it on the Facebook group to help socialize newcomers to the expectations and practices of the Hoffice network. Here, it is worth noting that togetherness is experienced in conjunction with an obligation to relate to other people and establish a relationship with them, even if this is limited to the short breaks. In this vein, several participants described how they explicitly avoid talking too much about their work even during breaks. This helps establish breaks as a genuine moment of setting work aside and engaging with other attendees on a different level.
What is at stake is a way of understanding one’s participation as consequential for other people and for the atmosphere of the event. Trouble in meeting these expectations was often associated with new members, and their inability to grasp what the meaning of the structure really is and how it intertwines with everyone’s efforts to make a Hoffice day successful. This was a source of tension that sometimes degraded the experience of being together. In the following quote, a host recounts his experience of a Hoffice day that did not work out as expected:
‘It has happened that people have been [at Hoffices] because it is a social thing, they think it’s cool to sit and babble, and then when the break is over they keep on talking; and this is indeed the reason I think it has been difficult, since I thought I had clear rules or that I had said how Hoffice thinks [that things should be done].’ (Martin)
While failures to internalize and respect norms was a source of frustration and concern for most of our participants, we initially found it somewhat prescriptive. It was only during a participant observation that we realized how the whole experience can break down when only a few people follow the structure, and the basic norms of being silent and acknowledging the presence of other people are disregarded. During a Hoffice event at the local library that both authors attended, it was clear from the beginning that rather than following the structure, other attendees were interweaving work and socializing in a less structured manner. This meant, for instance, that only three of the six attendees (including the two authors) stated their intentions before any work session, and then had breaks and lunch together. It also meant that the room was not silent during work sessions as the other attendees repeatedly talked with one another, played loud sounds from their laptops, and came in and out of the room several times. Their non-participation in the shared structure undermined the opportunity to relate to other people, acknowledging their presence and enjoying their company.
Co-Creating an Alternative Social Model
When it comes to Hoffice, the co-creation of an alternative workplace is the outcome of participatory efforts aimed at sharing a physical space (a home) and at nurturing a social dimension of work. On the simplest level, this relies on there being people who are willing to become hosts and guests of Hoffice events. On a more interpretative level, the co-creation of temporary co-working spaces draws attention to the values and expectations that constitute the Hoffice culture.
Fostering trust between individuals, encouraging self-actualization, and remaining open to new acquaintances and interactions are key tenets of Hoffice. While these values can sometimes be in tension, they are crucial both to the vision of Gradin Franzén, the co-founder of the Hoffice network, and to more peripheral members’ accounts of participating in the community.
In the following sections, we draw attention to trust, self-actualization, and openness to new acquaintances. We consider Hoffice as an alternative social model that seeks to address challenges associated with flexible forms of work. The central values of trust, self-actualization, and openness contribute to the idea that sharing resources and engaging in self-organizing events have the potential to reposition people as valued members of their local communities, and as active co-creators of their working conditions. The situated practices around sharing homes and co-creating workplaces make Hoffice an alternative social model that challenges the frame of workplaces as sites associated with profit, competition, and managerial structures.
Fostering Trust between Individuals
Belonging to a supportive community was a recurring aspect in Hoffice members’ accounts of why they had been attracted to the network in the first place, and why they kept on participating in the community. The care that such a community can offer is a central objective of Hoffice. It is often manifested in helping others be productive but also in refraining from judgment when it comes to what others are doing and how much they are accomplishing. Moreover, collaborative efforts to take care of everyone in attendance include breaks that acknowledge that knowledge workers are more than just brains-on-a-stick and that they feel better when their work day features movement, too, be it a short walk, some stretching, or a few minutes of dancing to finish off the lunch break. In a circular fashion, these acts serve to establish trust between the participants, but the more the participants already trust each other, the better they tend to be able to receive and offer such care to one another.
Placing trust in other people is central to the culture of Hoffice. This entails, for instance, confidence in that others, including complete strangers, can be kind and that opportunities to laugh with them – even about oneself – are to be embraced:
‘For me, it’s about building this trust and openness in groups and I often find that structured activities are better. People playing a game together they feel closer afterwards than if we would have had a group discussion or just having coffee together because, then, they share a laugh and they do something a little bit outside of their comfort zone, and then even though they don’t know much more about each other they feel more comfortable.’ (Gradin Franzén)
As recounted during interviews, co-creating break activities is a strategy that facilitators adopt to nurture trust. To prevent people from feeling uncomfortable doing activities they may find awkward (e.g. yoga positions), guests are actively encouraged to suggest what to do, thus empowering them to influence the activities and social interactions that take place during breaks.
This sense of trust is not a fixed quality of participation, but rather a feeling that evolves and develops over time as people familiarize with each other. For instance, during one of the interviews a participant told us about an occasion when attendees took longer breaks and engaged in a playful music jam. While our study suggests that this was an isolated case, the incident illustrates how repeated participation results in learning to know other people and, eventually, trusting that something can be achieved collectively.
Sharing a purpose is another aspect that fosters trust in the Hoffice community. On a basic level, this is evident in the collective efforts to make the event work, thus giving all participants the best possible opportunity to attain their personal goals. More profoundly, while attendees do not typically work together, they often still share an orientation to work in the form of shared values, such as an emphasis on doing personally meaningful work rather than maximizing one’s income (if the two are in tension). This brings us to the second value, self-actualization.
Bringing about a Setting that Encourages Self-Actualization
Another repeating feature in empirical accounts of Hoffice is that it provides a space for a fuller expression and exploration of one’s identity and its different facets. Emphasizing aspects of life and work, such as personal satisfaction and sense of self, is central to Hoffice as a cultural and social phenomenon, especially since some participants experienced that such values were not shared or acknowledged in traditional work settings.
In the quote below, one participant discusses her experience of contributing to a community and engaging with a different circle of people instead of giving too much importance to money and other economic issues:
‘I have several, often older persons, they just talk about pensions and how much money they make, and I haven’t had, I’ve worked for myself and not paid much pension savings, it gives me so much anguish, so it’s lovely to join such a company, in a way it’s more about contributing, I actually think this is very important for me. I don’t care if I’ve got a lot of money, just that I manage.’ (Thilde)
During the first workshop, this disregard for money was also discussed in relation to the tension between working for a living and engaging with a job that sparks personal interests, inner creativity, and personal fulfilment. Hoffice was described as a social space that nurtures creativity and motivation particularly with respect to secondary, part-time jobs regarded as meaningful yet difficult to engage with otherwise. The quote below illustrates this point as a participant describes her everyday work – what she calls a bread job, that is a job to put bread on the table – and her “side” project to write a book:
‘The thing I like the most about Hoffice is to be my creative self, because I'm self-employed, but I have a bread job just to support myself, and then it often happens that I'm not creative, that I'm making money instead; so to get on with my creativity, with what I want to do and to have fun, it's cool. When I go to Hoffice, I do not talk about my bread job and so on, this is [going to Hoffice] the thing I do as my own choice, this is what my heart desires: to write this book and do it here. Then my creativity becomes stronger, and that part of me, and this part of my identity. […] I do not know if others feel [like] this, but I find that there is a lot of creativity and that we reflect on each other's creativity; it's not like this how the job should be done, but often this is the job I want to do’. (Johanna).
The relation to creativity and self-actualization was therefore regarded as a way to create one’s own reality and, thus, to make change for oneself and for other people. This is something that most people did not feel they were getting from their regular employment, or from their solitary work arrangements. Hoffice serves as an alternative workplace that makes room for self-actualization by offering acceptance, acknowledgment, and care – and allowing individuals to contribute reciprocally by supporting others.
Remaining Open to New Acquaintances and Interactions
The third value, openness to new acquaintances, is key for accomplishing the first two. In a setting like Hoffice, trust or a fuller actualization of one’s self could not emerge without openness to new acquaintances and interactions. Yet, remaining open is also important in its own right.
As previously discussed, the importance of being open is reflected in the choice of Facebook as the main platform, and in the practice of accepting new members to the group by default. An expectation of openness and inclusivity is deeply ingrained into the Hoffice concept: Hoffice is supposed to bring people together to work side by side, to help participants to get things done effectively, but also to provide a meaningful and comfortable social setting where one might make new acquaintances and benefit of a supportive sense of community. While experienced participants in our workshop wanted to retain the open culture, despite the rapidly growing number of network members, they explained that living up to this ideal felt at times too troublesome. Participants expressed appreciation of opportunities to make new connections – they did not want to turn away newcomers but they worried about how the community would survive its rapid growth. They described frustrating experiences where they felt too much time had to be spent on onboarding novice participants and explaining to them how Hoffice events typically unfold. Furthermore, they mentioned that the lack of stability and continuity in who attended events had made it hard to establish the kinds of supportive peer relations they were looking for from Hoffice.
Fast growth has made it hard to keep the community coherent. In this sense, the Hoffice community in Stockholm is a victim of its success. After receiving some visibility in the press, the number of members in the Facebook group has grown fast. The number of network members willing to host events has not increased in sync with this change, making it harder for people to find events to attend. Out of these pressures the community has started to fragment as some have chosen to organize events to which only selected people are invited, rather than being advertised on Facebook for the whole community. Fewer events on the main group makes it harder for newcomers to join the activities, learn the community’s norms, and take on more active roles, for instance by hosting events. We will not explore these issues in length in this article but they are worth noting to remind readers that despite its appeal and early successes, Hoffice, like other self-organizing communities, is brought about through collaborative effort and sustaining it over time is not a simple task.