My wife and I have been discussing what it would look like to start an #IntentionalCommunity / #cohousing project here in the #SalishSea area (US side). There are existing communities that I am looking forward to visiting, but we want to focus our efforts with folks who are #Covid cautious right now. Throwing the question into the fediverse- is this something folks are interested in?
I have a proposal for a Europe-wide* experiment, that aims to bring together the movements around solidarity and ecology in order to build up the material infrastructure.
I'm looking for collaborators, please DM me!
Here it is briefly:
We try to raise 50 000 000€ over about 5-10 years and give that money as 1000 gifts of 50k€ each to new collectives for setting up housing cooperatives and land communes. The main vehicle for the fundraiser would be crowdfunding with focus on a high volume of small, recurring donations.
For example, this could be achieved with 200 000 donors, donating 5€/month on average for 50 months, or 4,17 years. That's 250€/person over four years.
Each recipient collective would make a legal pact with us or a trusted third party to ensure that the property will not be sold back to the market for financial gain. Additionally collectives would go through screening to ensure alignment with a shared vision.
*Even though internationalism on a global scale is important, I believe it makes sense to focus this effort geographically, to be able to have location-connected synergies between collectives.
In the end we would have boosted the 'ecosystem' with a network of maybe 10-30k members and created 1000 foci for social and ecological organizing. Additionally, we would have built up a network of Commons, that can help us gain a better understanding of this new, old, paradigm.
The leftist space is full of ideas and people with motivation to work and organize together, to try new forms of living and care, to grow food and to steward the land. I want to see this potential realized, but I'm afraid most of it will not happen unless we cooperate on a broader, international scale to push things forward.
Off-grid villages are popping up around #Ontario.
"Provincial inspectors have visited some of the controversial off-grid communities being built in the northern Ontario wilderness.
At least one of these new villages welcomes the government oversight...
"The government has been nothing but helpful to us, because they just provide us with more information about how we can move forward with the project.""
Floating an exploratory balloon here...
If I was to fundraise to hire someone to help me build a #convalescentCommunities home in #guelph#ontario as a pilot project others could copy and customize around the world, would you kick in for that? If so ballpark amount?
Basically a long slow care home for #longCovid and #chonicIllness where folks can get the time out and care to stabilize and manage their illness.
I'd call it #turtleBower FYI, so we have a tag to centre discussion around.
If you had a decent amount of 'fuck you' money... what would you do with it?
I want to make an intentional community on lots of land thats both wooded and able to be farmed... hopefully with a river.
I want to have a bunch of year-round yurts in the woods... all connected by wood planks. Some bigger, some smaller.
I'd want people to be able to live in some of the yurts... whether as couples, families, coliving... whatever-- and then I'd want the other yurts to be 'community room' type things. A kitchen, a dining room (maybe together), a rec room or a few, things like that.
On the farmable land, we would do just that-- animals and fruits and vegetables. We would use as much of all of our bounty as possible. The rest could be donated, preserved, composted... etc etc.
I still want an intentional community, and I want to make as much of this come true as possible. I guess I just need the fuck you money.
How do you keep small independent communities both small and interesting?
-- pixl97 @ HN
One inspiration I've had comes from thinking about intentional communities --- communes, utopian towns, and the like. The thought occurred some years back that amongst the most successful intentional communities are college towns. These are, hands down, some of the best places to live, and certainly on a per-population basis, in the US and Canada, based on a wide range of measures (though housing costs tend to be higher than surrounding areas).
There are a slew of smaller, non-dominant, and often quite small towns to be found around the world, though the US might be a good exemplar, whose central focus is often a university or college. Some public, some private (though virtually all benefit by public financing of research or student aid / loans).
These virtually always contrast sharply with surrounding towns, even for relatively small schools.
As to what makes these tick ... I don't have any solid evidence, but I've a few theories:
There are a number of associated populations for the institutions, with widely varying residency periods. Students pass through in 2-8 years typically (net of transfers, drop outs, extended undergraduate programmes, a/k/a "five year" and "six year" plans, and graduate / professional programmes). Faculty tend to remain much longer, often much of their professional career (40+ years). Alumni may settle in the region (though most do not). And there is the "town" (vs. "gown") component, which may be sympathetic, adversarial, or a mix of both --- residents of the community who are not directly affiliated with the university. (Instances of town-gown conflict, including actual armed battle and shooting wars, date back to mediaeval times, e.g. the St. Scholastica Day riot of 10 Feb 1355.)
The school itself has a central organising principle and mission, which many other intentional communities lack.
The school has associations with other institutions, organisations, and agencies, some of higher learning, many not, and tends to form strong relationships with government, business, cultural, and religious sectors.
Since the 19th century, official government recognition of the significance of both higher education and research has resulted in an increasing degree of official sanction and financial support, initially the German Humboldtian model, technical schools (e.g., M.I.T., founded in 1861 in large part to support the U.S. Navy's newfound interest in steam propulsion), land grant universities (organised in the US under national acts of 1862 & 1890), and the modern research university (largely spawned by the Manhattan Project and Vannevar Bush's Science, The Endless Frontier (1945) and formation of the US National Science Foundation, and widely emulated in other countries). In the UK there is a distinction made between the Ancient Universities (Oxford, Cambridge, St. Andrews, Glasgow, Aberdeen, Edinburgh, Dublin), the Red Brick Universities, chartered in the 19th century, the Plate Glass Universities, chartered between 1963 & 1992, and ... whatever comes after. See: https://www.ukuni.net/articles/types-uk-universities.
Note that universities themselves don't necessarily make money directly (through tuition), though some are extraordinarily wealthy (e.g., Harvard ($50 billion), Yale ($40 billion), Stanford ($38 billion), Princeton ($35 billion), see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_colleges_and_universities_in_the_United_States_by_endowment). Those funds tend to come from grants (both government and privately-funded research), alumni donations, and increasingly technology licensing. In the case of Stanford, real estate is a massive contributor. Schools often also benefit from tax breaks and other legislative relief and exemptions.
So, you say, that's really interesting, dred, but how do you translate that to online communities, especially those for which locality and location are not central elements, as they are for brick-and-mortar institutions.
I don't know, though ... I've been pondering just that for a decade or so.
The insight does suggest a few solution-shaped objects and/or characteristics, however:
A key failing of venerable fora is that the membership often becomes exceedingly stale. Not only do new members fail to arrive, but the more interesting and dynamic members of the old guard often leave as both the noise floor rises and the clue ceiling drops. Reward for participation simply decreases. Universities subvert this by pumping fresh students through. I suspect HN's YC affiliation and fresh founder classes in part aids HN in this regard.
A forum is almost certainly not a freestanding enterprise but an adjunct to another institution or set of institutions. Again, HN serves, but does not profit, YC.
Universities are mission rather than profit driven, and both teaching and research are a key element of that mission. This ... plays poorly with the notion of a VC-funded online community start-up. Ezra Klein in a podcast on media earlier this year noted that a key challenge in organising new ventures is that the profit motive and VC / investor interests tend to conflict strongly with journalism's prerogatives.[1]
Several of the most successful previous online communities formed either directly through or closely affiliated with educational institutions. The Internet itself, email, and Usenet directly, Facebook originated on the campus (and with the student body) of the most selective-admission university in the world, and I'd argue that Slashdot's early tech-centric membership was at least strongly academic-adjacent.
Universities are focused not only on the present moment, that is, streams, but on accumulated wisdom and knowledge. Here, HN is less a model than, say, Wikipedia and the Wikimedia foundation, in which something of a community forms through the editor community which creates (and fights over) the informational resources being created. Wikipedia doesn't quite have a social network, though various discussion pages and sections approach this.
On the "small" bit, there's both a selective-admissions and graduation element that academia shows. That is, you don't just let anybody in, and, after they've "completed the course", they're graduated and moved on, with the exception, again, of faculty and staff. Just how that translates to an online community I'm not entirely sure.
Another element of the "small" bit is that universities are organised: into colleges (that is, interest areas), departments (specific faculty), courses (specific topics of study or interest) and sections, that is, specific groups or meetings of students for lecture and/or discussion. Individual class size is a key dynamic, and much of the experience of the past 75 years or so shows the challenges of scaling lectures and the profoundly different characteristics of a small seminar (say, 5--15 students), a modest upper-division class (25--30), and moderate-to-large lectures (50 -- 1,000 or more students). Strong interactivity is sharply curtailed above about 15 students, and the options for interactivity above about 50--100 are near nil. Choosing how groups are organised, who's permitted in, and what size limits exist, as well as communications between various divisions (sections, courses, departments, colleges, universities) all come into play, as I see it.
And then there's politics. One of the notorious elements of universities is how various divisions rival amongst one another, gatekeep, define what is in (or out) of a specific discipline's remit, resist challenging new concepts, and form cliques and fads ... just like any human domain, only more so. I have a nagging suspicion that online communities might in fact have similar tendencies, and that these would also have to be subverted somewhat to avoid pathological development.
There are a whole slew of other factors --- techical capabilities, UI/UX, online abuse, legal issues, privacy and identity, spam, propaganda, surveillance, censorship, etc. So many dumb ways to die.
"How the $5500 Billion Attention Industry Really Works" (14 Feb 2023), interviewing Tim Hwang. Specifically: "If you’re able to aggregate a lot of attention online, we just have this almost religious faith that there’s just some way that you’ve got to be able to turn this into money. You will become a Google. You will become a Facebook.... [T]he flip side of that [is] that if you come to a V.C. and you say, I want to do a subscription business model, they’ll say, well, I don’t know — we don’t have a whole lot of examples of that really blowing up, so why don’t you just do advertising?" https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/14/podcasts/transcript-ezra-klein-interviews-tim-hwang.html Which is to say: unless you're planning a pure-play advertising monetisation model, which is to say, the Sidam Touch (advertising turns everything to shit), you won't get funding.
I'm reading When the Heavens Went on Sale, a new book by Ashlee Vance about private companies putting things into space.
He describes the Rainbow Mansion, an intentional community in Cupertino, California where people who are interested in space technology live together.
I've just made a #Wikidata item for the Rainbow Mansion. The house was already on #OpenStreetMap, I've added the name and linked it with the Wikidata item.