Alastair Jarvis proudly says that he was tenant No. 1 at the Hub South Shore, the new co-working space in Mahone Bay.

In fact, he is so enthusiastic about the new facility that he doesn’t like the term “co-working space.” He feels it understates what the Hub South Shore is and does, and what it means to a rural community.

The new facility, which has 13 tenants or members, is part of an international organization that for almost a decade has been establishing casual office space in major centres around the world.

The goal is not just to provide a desk, chair and Wi-Fi but to bring people from disparate fields together to collaborate and benefit from interaction with one another.

The website of the Austria-based organization says there are more than 30 Hubs in the world and about 50 in the planning stages.

Most people in Atlantic Canada familiar with the Hub brand probably know it because of the office on Barrington Street in Halifax.

“To start with, things were a bit slow,” said Dave Thomson, one of the co-founders. “You’ve got to build up the trust of the community, and in the past month things have taken off. We went from having three members to having 10 members in the space of eight days.”

Thomson, a native Scot and founder of Responsive Web Design, founded the facility along with Matt Hall, a PhD in geology and founder of Agile Geoscience, and Tim Merry, a social entrepreneur, slam poet and change consultant.

They had difficulty growing their membership and then realized that not everyone wants to come to the co-working space every day — what they want is to become part of the community and interact with the other people at the Hub.

So the founders tweaked their pricing model and let people pay for anything from one to five days a week. That brought in the members.

Jarvis, a former games developer at HB Studio in Lunenburg and an independent consultant, said the Mahone Bay facility is one of the first experiments in what the Hub means for a rural community. (There are similar projects in Sweden and Italy.)

Small communities have “a hidden economy” comprising individuals working at home or on their own as consultants or on contract, he said. There are few opportunities for these people to meet and exchange ideas. Often, they don’t know what others are doing.

“What the Hub is doing is bringing these people out of the woodwork,” said Jarvis. “Now these people’s businesses have been colliding and they’re working together in some surprising and delightful ways.”

He said some of the tenants at the Hub South Shore are beginning to discuss forming startups.

It’s important to recognize that living in rural communities, having watched traditional industries vanish, it takes courage to consider, let alone attempt, entrepreneurship, and bringing people together helps to develop the confidence to try starting a business, Jarvis said.

So far, the Hub South Shore has hosted several events at its space. About 40 people attended the Art of Hosting, a whole day of collaboration and education about meetings that matter. And more than 50 came to its series of Brown Bag Business events, at which participants discussed self-publishing, social media, working internationally and government grants.