The Hat Factory
January 23rd, 2008 by Cali & Jody
We’re not technology people. (We didn’t understand what Drupal was even after we read the Wikipedia entry.) Still, we couldn’t help but geek out a little when we ran across the Hat Factory, a self-described “community office space for geeks and media hackers.”
The Hat Factory gives freelancers in San Francisco a place to share the kind of resources you might find at an office without sacrificing the comfort and autonomy of working from home. At $200/month, it’s cheap. With their taco recipes and 16mm film festivals, it’s fun. And with their appeal to tech-obsessed hipsters, it’s probably not a bad place to meet people, provided of course that you want to meet tech-obsessed hipsters.
What we really love about the Hat Factory is not so much what it is, but what it represents. It reminds us of stories we’d encounter at Best Buy after ROWE had taken hold. Once people were free to direct their own work, they came up with all kinds of different ways to go about it. Within the larger culture of Best Buy, there were dozens of micro-cultures. Everyone was Results-Only, but how that played out depended on the team. They used technology to figure out what was best for them.
In our last post we wrote about the downside of work playing an overwhelming role in your life. On the flip side of that, what if work could be more like a social club? How much more effective could we be if we got to choose how we wanted to belong?
