THE City of Ballarat’s co-working hub project appears to have been put on ice with a board set up to look into the project disbanded in August.
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The council invested in a $30,000 feasibility study to discover how to install a co-working facility in Ballarat in 2013, however the project seems to have stalled, with little financial interest in developing the project further.
The “co-lab”, as it is commonly known, is a way of getting a series of businesses working together in one space to take advantage of each other’s skills.
City of Ballarat chief executive Anthony Schinck said the council’s position was to provide the framework for the project before handing it over to the board to work on.
“Our job was about ‘how do we support it to make it happen’ and then get out of the way to let it happen,” he said.
Mr Schinck said the group that was charged with taking the project further “had decided not to progress”.
“The initial work into it hasn’t been in vain. It will help workplace initiatives across the city,” he said.
The hub is also listed as one of the key projects in the Ballarat Regional Capital Plan.
The initial idea to create the facility in Ballarat followed a similar intuitive in Melbourne called Hub Melbourne.
Mr Schinck and City of Ballarat’s Jeff Pulford, along with other people from Ballarat, visited the facility and were driven to create a similar model in Ballarat.
Ballarat Co-working Inc co-chairwoman Claire Sandford said the council had been supportive of the project.
“It is fair to say there was some confusion with what the role of the board was,” she said.
“Were we meant to execute the feasibility study or were we meant to support the whole concept of co-working?”
Ms Sandford said some board members were unhappy with the level of transparency in the feasibility study, with the entire process even tainting some members’ desire to be involved.
Ammon Beyerle, co-director of Here Studio, which was responsible for the feasibility study, said the study had attracted interest internationally to create a hub like the one proposed.
“It is definitely still possible, a lot of people had a lot of interest in it,” he said.
matthew.dixon@fairfaxmedia.com.au
