What Is the OpenOps Project? Ben Newton's Vision for Shared Operational Intelligence in Coworking

Coworking has spent years debating occupancy, growth, pricing, and demand, and far less time on a quieter question that sits underneath all of them: how much should it actually cost to run a coworking space? For most operators, the honest answer is that they do not really know how their costs compare. Cleaning rates vary by region, internet provision differs sharply between urban and rural markets, maintenance depends on the age and type of the building, and facilities management is structured differently from one operator to the next. Each business ends up with its own numbers and almost no way to judge whether they are competitive.

That is the gap at the heart of the OpenOps Project, an initiative discussed by Patch founder Ben Newton during a Coworking Tech Week session on operational standardisation and growth. OpenOps is still evolving as a concept rather than a finished product, but it points toward a meaningful next step in how operators share knowledge and benchmark performance, and it fits squarely within the broader move toward shared data in coworking.

Ben Newton is the founder of Patch, one of the UK's most recognised networks of rural and regional coworking spaces. Patch has built its reputation on a workspace model aimed at smaller towns and communities rather than traditional city-centre locations, and that vantage point is exactly what makes Newton's interest in benchmarking worth paying attention to.

Much of coworking's conventional wisdom was shaped in markets like London, New York, Berlin, and Amsterdam, while regional operators live with different cost structures, different demand patterns, and different operating realities. Across conversations about standardisation and operational maturity, Newton has consistently pulled the discussion toward the practical questions that decide whether a location works financially, and OpenOps reads as a direct extension of that mindset.

Operators are generally comfortable talking about revenue. Occupancy percentages, membership growth, pricing strategy, and meeting-room utilisation come up constantly at conferences and in peer groups. Operating costs get far less airtime, even though they often determine whether a space is profitable at all.

Consider a few everyday situations. An operator might spend a fixed sum each month on cleaning without any way to know whether that figure is reasonable for a space of their size. Another might invest heavily in internet redundancy while having little idea how peers approach connectivity spending. A regional workspace might carry maintenance costs that look nothing like a city-centre operator's, and without comparison, all of these numbers simply sit in isolation. OpenOps explores whether operators can build a shared framework for comparing this kind of operational data in a way that is actually useful.

One of the clearest descriptions of the project's potential came out of that Coworking Tech Week discussion on standardisation, where Newton argued that benchmarking cleaning, maintenance, internet, facilities management, and other operating costs could be especially useful for regional and non-city-centre spaces, where typical assumptions may not apply. The observation captures a gap that has existed in coworking for years, because most benchmarking effort goes toward top-line performance while OpenOps turns attention to operational fundamentals instead.

The categories worth comparing are not exotic, which is part of the appeal. They include connectivity and internet, cleaning contracts, building maintenance, security services, utilities, facilities management, vendor relationships, and the operational processes that wrap around them. For many operators, getting visibility into even a few of these would have a direct line to profitability. The same logic drives our breakdown of what operators actually spend on technology, which looks at where the money really goes across a typical stack. The full Coworking Tech Week session with Newton is available to watch on demand.

The most interesting thing about OpenOps is how relevant it is for operators outside the major urban centres. Industry benchmarks tend to emerge from the markets with the highest concentration of coworking spaces, which creates a blind spot, because operating realities in London, Manchester, Birmingham, Bristol, or Leeds can differ substantially from those in smaller towns and rural communities, and the same is true internationally.

A rural workspace operator often has few comparable businesses nearby and limited opportunities to swap operational knowledge, so the usual fallback of asking a peer down the road simply does not exist. Shared benchmarking could bridge that gap by giving operators visibility into the costs and practices of similar businesses elsewhere, surfacing information that would otherwise stay completely out of reach.

OpenOps also plugs into a larger conversation playing out across coworking technology and operations. As operators grow from one location to several, consistency becomes harder to maintain, and processes that worked informally inside a single space start to strain across a portfolio. That pressure naturally pushes operators toward standardisation, which has historically focused on technology platforms, reporting structures, member experience, and workflows.

OpenOps adds another dimension to that work by asking what becomes possible if operators standardise how they measure and compare operational performance. Agreeing on definitions would unlock more than benchmarking; it would make it possible to identify and spread genuine best practice across the industry, which is difficult today precisely because everyone measures differently.

The timing of a project like OpenOps is not incidental. Building benchmarking infrastructure used to demand serious technical resources, since data collection systems, reporting tools, and analytics platforms were expensive to develop and maintain. AI-assisted development has changed that equation, and operators can increasingly build industry projects themselves, which is a large part of why so many recent initiatives are emerging from operators rather than software vendors. The barrier to experimentation is lower than it has ever been, and OpenOps reflects a wider pattern of coworking leaders becoming builders of industry infrastructure rather than only consumers of it.

OpenOps remains an emerging initiative rather than an established benchmarking network, and that may be its most interesting quality, because it represents a question the industry is only starting to explore: what could operators create if they shared operational intelligence as freely as they already share ideas? Coworking has always been built on collaboration between people, and the next phase may add collaboration between datasets.

If that happens, projects like OpenOps could create a new layer of operational understanding across the industry, focused not on growth and occupancy but on the everyday realities of running a coworking business well. It pairs naturally with operator-led benchmarking efforts such as WIN, and for operators chasing real visibility into cost, efficiency, and operational performance, that understanding may prove every bit as valuable as any occupancy benchmark.