This post is from the old CooperBricolage site – and I wanted to preserve it before I take down the CB site. Alex Linsker did a series of interviews of the people at CooperBricolage, and I was fortunate to be one of them.
Who’sAtCooBric: Sanford Dickert
November 30th, 2007 | by Alex Linsker |
Sanford loves applying engineering principles to new startup companies and communities. For full bio and blogs, visit SanfordDickert.com. Sanford helped start and is a member of the cooBric Governance Committee.
How did you become CTO for John Kerry’s 2004 Presidential campaign?
In 2003, I happened to be at a July 4th barbeque at the American Ambassador’s residence in London. I met this gentleman who was talking to my friends.
He said, ‘Who are you in support of for the primary?’
They said, ‘Howard Dean! Howard Dean! Howard Dean!’
The guy was shocked. ‘Why are supporting Howard Dean when John Kerry’s been a senator for 19 years?’
I told him the reasons why Kerry’s online strategy and engagement strategy weren’t as effective as Dean’s. He said, ‘I have a friend that I should introduce you to.’
Turns out, this guy happened to be a high-dollar fundraiser for the DSCC and the person he introduced me to was Jim Jordan, campaign manager of the Kerry campaign.’
Two months later, I was the CTO of the campaign.
Originally, I was hired to manage the online community efforts, but the technical infrastructure was lacking. So instead of focusing on online community, I became the CTO to take care of the technical problems, to build up the infrastructure, and then focus on online outreach.
You’ve mentioned that you’ve been putting groups together since you were twelve years old. How did that start?
It started with my fourth grade teacher. She took a chance with us students by letting us go beyond our fourth grade material. With me, she gave me the fourth grade math book and said, ‘If you can go through all the tests, I will give you the fifth grade math book.’
And what’s really amazing, she did this to all of us.
By evaluating me on my strengths, testing us to our limits and pushing our own expectations higher with her support, she gave me the confidence to do more things. She went out of her way, which inspired me to prove myself to myself and to her – and now she’s my mom.
What do you mean, she’s your mom?
She married my Dad, two years later. They met at a parent-teacher conference in the fourth grade and she became my mom when I was in the sixth grade (after I left elementary school).
She saw who I was – or better, who I could become.
Wow. So you’re twelve years old. You’ve gotten this confidence. What’s the first group you organized?
I remember winning the Student Treasurer role in seventh grade. It was a cross-class position – everyone in the sixth, seventh and eighth grade got to vote on this position. Since I already knew the seventh graders, I focused on the sixth graders and the eighth graders, while all the other candidates were only focused on their friends in seventh grade.
What do you get out of organizing?
Overall, I get friends, experiences and a sense of satisfaction. I also end up with a group of people over the years who are good friends, who will stand up to do the right thing. They’re leaders in other ways.
One thing I like about coworking is how anyone can step forward to volunteer and lead. How did you first get into coworking?
When I started Rawlings Atlantic in London, my two business partners had a very big apartment. You actually could have twenty, thirty people in the space easily. We used to call it Club Holborn. People would come by and work there on various things. You knew you could just drop by. It’s what they call now Jelly, but we didn’t have wi-fi. That was where I was doing coworking.
What are your challenges with coworking today?
As an entrepreneur I listen to my own drummer, but I also am listening to the orchestra around me. When people told me cooBric was impossible, I would stop and ask why. People would tell me what they thought, and I would listen. I think, ‘Okay, this is an idea this person has, what can I do with it?’
For example, programmers wanting a 24/7 space. Heck, I want a 24/7 space too, but I don’t have a solution right now. Instead, with what we have, we’ve started events that programmers can come to and share, which provides a community space. And then, over time, others will gather and solve the problem that I couldn’t.
In grad school, I learned that I don’t know the answers, but I know that everyone else can help find them.
What’s your vision for how coworking will grow?
At cooBric, we are trying to learn from experiences and see who’s attracted into the idea of coworking. We have a simple philosophy: working together to build the community. This is about building a space that is supportive for people with ideas.
Throughout your work, you’ve constantly built teams. Why is that?
I’ve lived in an academic world for a lot of my life, and everything transitions in a year. The friendships you make in grad school, a good one-third of them always leave at the end of the year to live their lives in other places.
Transience is a challenge to overcome and I have learned that over and over again. That’s one reason I build organizations with the understanding that it is not solely me. It’s the group. We create the idea. If the idea rests with me, it usually dies with me after I leave.
It’s the group that matters. We create the idea. We create the purpose. We create the meaning. We create the possibilities.
So who should the idea of the group rest with?
It rests with the people who are part of it.
What do they do with the idea?
You codify it. Religion is based on a document, a structure. The Constitution and The Declaration of Independence lived long past the writers of those documents. They created an organization that lasts. Our organization has its set of rules. You know where it is? In the social norms that we’ve sort of agreed to. I set one view of it, and you, Tony, Dan, Nate, Jennifer, Kara have expanded it and brought it together.
If you notice, there’s a set of rules on the wiki.
When you sign up, it’s on the wiki. You’ve actually taken the step of signing up. It’s a small investment and no one thinks of it as an investment, they think of it, ‘That’s what I’m doing because that’s what I’m doing here.’
Eventually rules get codified and formalize over time.
How do you make decisions and who do you make them with?
When it comes to cooBric, I made a number of initial decisions, and have since backed away from being the final arbitrator of decisions because the ownership of the idea had grown far bigger than myself.
The cooBric Committee is now running the show and we work as a team to solve the challenges. It’s a great team, and I am proud to be a part of it.
[...] longest-running coworking space, souk, with Mike Thelin and Jennifer Costello, and here’s a more complex interview from 2007 with Sanford Dickert, a leading member of CooperBricolage, the predecessor to NYC’s coworking space New Work [...]