In 2020, several members of the Effinger coworking community, together with support with the local government, started a small coworking project in the municipality of Köniz, a suburb of Bern. The pilot project was concluded in 2022, and became the SharedSpace: a sociocratically managed office space run by local freelancers and entrepreneurs.

Here are some information sources you can explore to find a space like this:

• Coworking.ch (Switzerland)
• CoworkingMap.de (Germany)
• Coworking.org (GitHub)
• Workfrom.co (Crunchbase)

Today there are several new local coworking initiatives, such as Workspace & More and Stadtkloster Frieden in our vicinity. We will dive into the data soon in a new podcast.

To celebrate my becoming a citizen of this beautiful country of coworking spaces (& more!), we decided it's time to get together tonight to dig into some quality Swiss cheese while watching footage of streetcars, busses and traffic, almost like inside a real Fondue Tram, anno 1935. It takes a lot of openness to indulge in these kind of stinky vibes with each other! And we expect the smell to linger for weeks, along with hopefully a fond memory of the occasion.

The story of 🫕

"A red fondue pot. Most platforms show cheese fondue with fondue forks sticking out of the pot. Fondue was approved as part of Unicode 13.0 in 2020 and added to Emoji 13.0 in 2020." -- Emojipedia

In 2017, two journalists at 20 Minuten (Tobias Bolzern & Stefan Wehrle) submitted a proposal to the Unicode Consortium in the USA. The six-page document was entitled “Proposal for a New Emoji: Fondue”, and was officially reviewed in 2018. It took two years to approve the proposal, and a few more months until various designs were finalized and started coming out in different Emoji-fonts - e.g. on iOS 14.2.

It was unfortunately not included in the otherwise excellent 2021 analysis of Emoji use by the Consortium, or in the "An empirical analysis of emoji usage on Twitter" paper by Li, Chng, Chong, See 2019. Emojis continue to play a role in our public sphere, and are still being studied with new methods, such as "Multimodal text-emoji fusion using deep neural networks for text-based emotion detection in online communication" by Kusal et al 2025.

To look for the perfect weather for your next 🍫 chocolate tour, ⛷️ ski trip or 🗣️ yodel meet (on the roof terrace of a nearby coworking space 😜), follow the @meteo bot by @rastrau, giving you three daily weather updates in the world's favorite pictograms.