Hey all, I'm a freelance web developer about to take a 6-month long trip down the Western US coast. (Check my submissions page for a thread about it.) Once I'm done, I need to figure out where I will live and work. I know there are other freelancers on this board, and I want to brainstorm a little. (Let's assume I settle in the Bay Area.)

1.) Does anyone want to share office space? I'd prefer not to work from home; it's too easy to get distracted. I would be very willing to chip in a few hundred a month to rent an office with 2-8 other people in similar situations as my own. It would be an really awesome environment to work around talented people doing the same thing as I, without the whole boss/coworker relationship to tiptoe around. I really like to talk about web development best practices and brainstorm ideas for apps. Plus, it gets lonely working by myself.

2.) I think once we get beyond the initial share-an-office space, we could leverage our various talents. I'm a C# and PHP guy. Java pays well (from what I hear), but I have no desire to learn another platform. I come across Java work from time to time, and I'd be happy to pass it along to anyone in the office that knows Java. I'd be more apt to do this if I'd met and worked with the programmer in person and knew they were good. Also, I'm a code guy. I can't make a pretty page to save my life. Are you a Photoshop/CSS guru? Great. I probably have work for you. Very few programmers use every platform/language; we usually specialize. Which means we've usually turned down work before. Let's share that. Or, are you working on a PHP app with a complicated regex? Let's talk about it at lunch and I can probably help you. If you want, buy me a beer later. Good times.

3.) If we get a bunch of great people I can see it becoming a co-op of sorts, where we'd emulate those big medical complexes that have a Radiologist, Oncologist, Physical Rehab guy, and Optometrist sharing a building. Hopefully we could develop a reputation and become our own "headhunter" firm of sorts, possibly even have a dedicated work recruiter. But I can see a lot of our business coming from referrals and word-of-mouth, as mine usually does once I get a foot in the door. Two .NET guys want the same project? Great, write proposals and present them to the client. Operating under a business name and having dedicated office space would let us seem more professional and charge higher rates - that's undeniable. We could also possibly share database servers, books, code snippets, bandwidth, printers, and more...(UI testers? Guitar Hero controllers?).

I think if we could do it right, we could really have fun, make some friends, learn a lot, become better coders, and make more money. What do you all think about this? I wouldn't mind it if you were founding a startup, but this is not for crazy-cheap bootstrappers with six guys on laptops around a card table.

Myspace and Facebook have led us into an era where we interact with our friends online, but our work acquaintances in person. Shouldn't it be the other way around?