I think I met one of the people involved in it at a recent event in Chiang Mai, Thailand (or maybe someone just told me about it).

Shameless plug: we're doing a trip with 4 weeks each in Da Nang, Vietnam, Bali and Chiang Mai, Thailand starting February 15th and still have a few spots left. If you're thinking of trying out the workaway lifestyle, check us out (we handle the hotel + co-working space with good Wi-Fi, snacks & coffee, etc + the trip is full of hand-picked, interesting people).

More broadly about the 'burgeoning industry' - from having interviewed hundreds of applicants at this point, I don't think the growing trend is developers going totally nomadic. There's some of that, but then there's also "I want to get the @%^! out of NYC/Berlin during the winter," or "I want to take a month off and see how I could work from here". My feeling is it's a lot more fun to take a month-long workaway than a weeklong vacation, simply because you don't have to be a tourist at the speed of light (just use the weekends to explore) and you get a much more authentic experience of the place you visit while avoiding the guilt of not being productive while the rest of your team is working hard.

St. Oberholtz in Berlin is pretty horrible to work actually. It's pretty loud.

Also, us: hackerparadise.org