Hanging Out With A Purpose?

A new coffee shop just opened up in Toronto. It caught the attention of our colleague Dan Silver, and we had an email discussion about the name Cloud Free Agent Espresso Bar. Cloud is a tastefully appointed coffee bar with what sounds like great food and drink. Cloud is also very explicit about its aim to be a hub for freelancers, entrepreneurs, and small business owners – the kind of people whose work is suited to doing business in the loose, somewhat bohemian surroundings of a coffee shop. Unlike traditional bohemian hangouts, however, Cloud’s focus on entrepreneurs signals an ongoing shift in modern café culture.

In my research with indie musicians (just published in Industry & Innovation) I found that as “creative work” becomes increasingly professionalized and competitive, the demands on creative workers increase. The ‘DIY’ model means that the free time artists once enjoyed is now being spent not only ‘creating’ but performing business tasks like updating websites, marketing products and booking shows as well. Indie production may not mean showing up at the office at 8am in a suit every day but it is becoming more professionalized. So traditional networking – “hanging out” in the bohemian sense – is increasingly being replaced by “just-in-time” networking and “hanging out with a purpose”.

As one indie musician put it:

We are so busy that we actually book meetings just to see each other. We might meet at places like this coffee shop, where there is Internet access. We can hang out and work on our Internet stuff like websites and promotion because a lot of the things we do are on the Internet.