During past few weeks I was working closely with owners of coworking spaces originating from Kyoto area to launch CoworkingKyoto.com
Part of the reasons why I started making Coworkify back in 2011 is that I wanted to foster entrepreneurship culture across the globe by enabling easy discovery & access to places where like-minded people gather and collaborate. That mission still stands as of today but there is something else that concerns me recently, and that led me to creation of above website.
While coworking spaces are popping up every now and then, I personally feel ones in my country aren’t really open to outsiders and by outsiders I mean people from foreign country. When I visited Citizen Space or HUB Singapore, I met people from all over the world and the spaces were intentionally built by global awareness. However, I don’t see that level of diversity and awareness here just yet.
I was wondering why ones in my country are different from others, started seeking for a root cause, and came to a conclusion that it’s just due to lack of information available in English. On the other hand, because information is only available in Japanese, majority of people there are also Japanese. I wanted to change that, and I wanted to start it from historically rich places like Kyoto.
I’m hoping by promoting coworking spaces more internationally we can widen variety of people coming to the spaces and hence create global awareness. So if you plan to visit Kyoto or nearby areas, be sure to stop by one of those coworking spaces. I’m sure you will be most welcomed.