tl;dr: co.up has to shut down if they can’t double their funding until January. Go to their support page to support them.
Berlin has a special room: the co.up. Just by looking at it, it’s a rather plain room. That it not to say it is cheap. It has nice audio and video equipment, good chairs. It’s important what happens there.
co.up was originally a part of the coworking space of the same name - but that doesn’t exist anymore. In a weird twist of fate, the owners of co.up got successful with cobot, a management software for coworking spaces and use it as a plain office now.
Since around that time, the community space is funded by the community and still organised by cobot. They did a fundraiser back then that I can - in retrospect - only consider a show of force of the Berlin software community.
Co.up is a free and open space that allows anyone and everyone to run an event under two conditions:
For a long time, you could even get a key for their space - but after an unfortunate series of thefts, you had to pick up the key at the coworking space above. And that’s how rigid it got.
This free availability meant that the space was the starting point of a lot of community action:
The pattern is always the same: the frictionless and availability of the space made it possible for people to setup something new. Laura puts it best:
co.up is the one space i know that has always supported initiatives because the initiatives do good things, not because it helps co.up to “be more visible” or appear to “support the community”.
co.up has also allowed those initiatives to ramp up massively: * Some OTS learners events are weekly * In total, OTS has over 1000 events in 5 years, a majority in this space!
co.up has been the introduction of a countless number of people into technology.
All in all, co.up is a cornerstone of the free community in Berlin - it’s time for another show of force.
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