You live in a what

I live in a 20-person house. Usually when this comes up in conversation people's eyes bug out and I can see them imagining a beer-soaked frat house, a den of nudist hippies, or - if they're from San Francisco - a hacker house (shudder). To be fair, there are many houses that fit these descriptions. The Archive, however, is not: my experience is of a group of reasonable adults who have all tried living alone and find it more fun, easier, and inspiring to live with a diverse group of values-aligned people. Surprising things become economical at this scale: we have a chef come every week, for example, and we recently bought a sauna; and the only people who share rooms here are the handful of us who choose to do so to save money.

The time is ripe for a resurgence of communal living. Adults the world over are lamenting how hard it can be to make new friends, the Internet and social media exacerbate our social isolation, and older generations continually remind younger generations to spend more time with their friends and less at work. As someone who isn't great at staying in touch with old friends and has been lonely before, let me assure you - coming home to a house where close friendships just happen without any effort on my part is wonderful. The density of experience here is comparable to college.

"Sociologists since the 1950s consider... three factors crucial to making close friends: proximity; repeated, unplanned interactions; and a setting that encourages people to let their guard down and confide in each other" - New York Times

So naturally I've been researching the lifestyle further. What do the houses with the most fulfilled residents have in common? What are the secrets of long-lived urban community houses? What's it like to live in a large community, say at the limits of Dunbar's number (100-150)? How can communities support members with families? I've been gathering as many data points as I can find by interviewing community dwellers about their experiences. Here's a working list of best practices:

[#]Principles for a great community

Eat together. Over and over again I hear that this is the #1 practice that keeps communities feeling close.
No meetings. Too many agenda-driven meetings are a fun sponge and the loud & confident have their opinions overrepresented. If you can build consensus quickly, democratically, and frictionlessly, then project leaders are unhindered and the house runs smoothly. We run all decisionmaking through a Slack channel in which we asynchronously vote on proposals with emojis, and it's been unbelievably effective.
Have a high bar. "Strong gate, soft center." If you have a high bar, then you don't need as many rules. Our bar is that everyone is a yes and more than a third of us are a fuck yes.
No bosses, many leaders. Empower everyone to execute big projects independently with a "doocracy". Distribute funding power. Housemates contribute $X per month to a shared account and we use cobudget.co to vote on which projects our dollars should fund.
Don't shame disengaged housemates, support them. It's natural for your energy for a house to ebb and flow, particularly when you're feeling overwhelmed. Make sure they don't feel guilty about it.
Avoid breakups. Generally speaking, housemates should be discouraged from dating. There are plenty of fish in the sea and casual relationships are unnecessarily destabilizing. Does not apply in case of True Love, of course.
Automate common friction points. It's amazing how many houses fray at the seams because they can't figure out how to seamlessly distribute chores. We have the house cleaned every week. We also used to struggle with dirty dishes until we installed a webcam - we learned that we were all already doing a great job, and that the dishes were coming from our guests! None of the other chores have caused us any issues (yet).

Many more to come! I just started this project in late July 2017.

Key research themes

Scaling. Would this actually be better if we were a village of 100-150? I imagine we'd be more stable, and I feel like we'd have super strong "social gravity", which would enable us to attract brilliant and fascinating people from around the globe. But how does this actually work - how does intimacy scale? How do we keep the house introvert-friendly? Update: Danish and American cohousing communities commonly range from 20-50. At the upper end, nobody's a stranger, and there's enough variety that everyone can have 3-5 best friends. Source: Creating Cohousing.
Sustainability. How can we make a community that is supportive of big life transitions, like starting a family? Probably graduate from one large house to an apartment or condo complex or a neighborhood with many small cottages and one large common house.
Recruiting. How do we recruit well? How do other houses manage this? What proportion of short-term to long-term housemates is optimal? After ~2 years of experimentation, I love having 1-2 subletters in the 2-4 months range; they bring a lot of enthusiasm.
Governance. What technologies can help keep logistical details low-friction at scale?
Space. How might we design spaces for both extremes of the introvert/extravert spectrum? What communities have existed in unique spaces (e.g., an old cruise ship), and how has that affected their experience?
Culture shift. This lifestyle is fringe, but many would benefit from trying it - how can we normalize and evangelize it? How might we increase the supply of communal houses? Update: we've been featured on news articles, national TV, and an upcoming book about loneliness by Vivek Murthy.
Impact. What can/should we stand for and what difference can we make in this world?
Culture. Some communities have a culture that says: "you are enough"; the Archive's culture says "grow into your full potential". Both have advantages and disadvantages. Is it possible for both to exist in the same place?

My interviewing project to-do list contains an expanded list of the above questions.

[#]Want to contribute to these principles?

Great!! Let's hang out: message me on Facebook.

Updated: August 13th, 2019

Sources, notes:

Key: ✍️ is a blog post, 📘 is a flashcard, no emoji means notes & highlights.

What is the past, present, and future of distributed friendships? February 2nd, 2020

Some histories most famous friendships were distributed in the past, which we know because we have histories of their correspondence. Ben Franklin and his suspiciously close female young female friend Marie I believe. I'm sure other historical figures and other people that they wrote to. seems like these were the richer type of intellectual friendships.

some of the best examples of historical friendships were distributed and I think they shared a fondness for each other and an intellectual kinship that enabled them to like have a fruitful correspondence for many years.The best and deepest friendships are both intellectual and of convenience.

Distributive interest today I think enabled by our ability to travel involve people like Jillian. She travel the world, end up in a place for a couple of weeks, and to crash on the couches of a few different people for three days apiece. As she says house guests and fish both go bad after 3 days. Probably this happened in olden times too, except you would stay for much longer than 2 weeks if you're just spent a month traveling there by ship.

I guess in the horn blower times you would ride home to your wife and you would exchange letters of your week, but you only see them once every five years, for even less than a year at a time. in that world it seems like most people wouldn't have distributed friendships at all, but they would laboriously maintained a family life even though they were so distant.

I'm inclined to say that just really friendships have always had an intellectual friendship nature. Good contrary evidence would be romantic notes written to a long separated lover? But that just doesn't make as much sense because to keep the fire of romance alive you need to be close.

Another example is of Alfred Loomis who would write to all of his favorite physicists over the world send them first class tickets in the mail and they were just up here at the doorstep of his science castle. This is a brilliant way to share a community. And a brilliant way to create scenius.

I need a theory of friendship. What types of friendship are available? Types of friendship do people share? Romantic and flirtatious friendship. Platonic intellectual friendship. Friendships have convenience where you do the same activities work at the same places, have the same friends. Just want to characterize more by having fun together and, spending time together and possibly never diving deep into each other. I've had groups of friendships that lasted years, where I don't really even know every other person there. Group friendships, where the group as a whole shares an identity but individual relationships aren't as well defined. somehow people get by without ever learning much about each other's personal lives or current states. Phil Levin said that 10 to 15 was the ideal size because at that size he not only has a relationship with each individual, he also can hold in his head the state of each individual relationship between every other person. Whereas at 20, there's a combinatorial explosion such that I can't really hold everyone else's relationships in my head. I don't know who doesn't like each other, who does like each other, I just default to whatever my optimism baseline would suggest. Before a long time at the archive had maintained the fantasy that every pair was relationship was super healthy, so when I learned that too in particular didn't like each other I was a little bit blindsided.

In some group friendships the group as a whole takes on an identity and each individual member develops a relationship to that group. These relationships can exist, and even be strong, despite an individual not knowing any other individual well at all.

Distributed friendships of today have been over email, over Twitter, by texting, by FaceTime and calling, and very occasionally by letters. We travel the world so easily and frequently that it's quite easy and feasible to maintain dozens of such friendships. Each friendship you choose to take on ads a maintenance burden to your life that isn't really true of other friendships of convenience. Friendships have convenience maintain themselves they have their own inertia, because you run into these people during the course of your daily life. The whole point of intentional living is to make these the people that you want to hang out with the most. To unite your distributed friendships and your friends of convenience into the same circle of Venn diagram. Get all your best friends to live with you! Or, get all your best friends to live within a few blocks and hook them up into one distributed neighborhood.

The purpose of intentional living is to choose your friends if convenience. To make your aspirational best friends the most convenient people to be friend in real life. To unite the vent diagram of friends of convenience and aspirational friends.

Genesee spends even more time on FaceTime. They have a phrase for people that you run out the battery with, where you literally just stay awake late to the night and hang out together. You're not even doing anything in particular, you're just spending time with each other. I think this is actually breaking a critical and interesting barrier. When you're on the phone with someone, at least for most people the main thing you're doing is talking. Some people are more advanced phone users, and we'll clean the house or even watch TV while they're talking on the phone will be multitasking but more importantly with the doing is co-existing together. they're doing what friends of convenience would have been doing in a similar situation. They're removing them artificialness of keeping up when you're apart.

Gen Zis starting to prioritize the distributive friendship over the friend of convenience, and I think they're the first generation to do so. Their native to the tools that enable this, like FaceTime, and they're choosing to do the activities that typically were the domain of the distributed of the friend of convenience, like hanging out together and watching TV, and spend those with attributed friend instead.

I think distributed friendship fool goes similar route. I think more and more people are going to do this. A whole generation is already doing it. We'll spend faster more time on our phones on our devices connected with our friends, in large rooms where everyone is chatting and talking. We'll have ways to form instant breakout groups, someone will say something silly and everyone else will split off into a group without that person in their other errand selectively mute what they say like guide it to a particular group. It'll be a vast and intimate world.orphanages for people that just share interest will pop up, more subcommittees will pop up, people have revealed that they prefer those types of places like-minded communities. And it's not really the case that the tools we have for bringing together like my new communities are aligned with those values. Reddit as a place to hang out centers around sharing content. it doesn't shed central around the relationships of the members. It's too big. Twitter doesn't send her around sharing content and communities do emerge, but it's rare. WhatsApp or grouper maybe, or for joining communities and friends? but for them it's mostly about maintaining old groups of convenience old friendships with commands. Best examples is the internet elect on Twitter it's a group that helps meet ups. Read it also periodically host me those now that I think about it.

I do wonder if friends of convenience will get crowded out by increasing the distributed true fence. A world in which that is true, is one that's much less friendly to strangers. It's one that's even more polarized. When people stop talking to the neighbors they meet fewer people that are unlike them. They also don't learn the social skills to bridge differences. Because all of their friendships will be echo chambers. It may be more important in such a world to resist the revealed preference of echo chambers. Would you cultivate a cultural value of open-mindedness and designer tools to encourage that. Our living communities should be diverse. Our neighborhoods should open their arms to people that don't fit them old. We should have public meetups.

a world in which distributed friends continue to crowd out friends of convenience is a more polarized, less diverse world. Society is going to need to encourage these relationships somehow.

Day in the life of an Archive Distributed Neighborhood February 2nd, 2020

This note is dictated and unedited.

So common spaces are going to need to diversify across different people's homes so one home has a study one home has a volleyball court in the backyard one home has the kitchen for hosting and the community is going to have to it's going to be difficult to resist the feeling of ownership over that common space unless you literally didn't own that space which seems impractical You know the house with the big kitchen is going to feel resentful if it's ever left dirtier that they always have to host and then therefore clean and the house that has the study is going to feel resentful when there's lots of traffic or particular startup that they don't that they aren't the tightest with spends all the time working there it's going to be a tough line to walk maybe the houses would have to share in the construction and ownership of a larger home and they split the mortgage payment and the common home would be a common good if you could buy into it or buy out of it it could be used to make rental income it could be managed and run would be a shared house shared house with a large workshop it could be built out as a makerspace ticket just a ton of investment and will be hard to justify if it wasn't like literally next door And even if it was literally next door the idea that you have to leave to go home make that a 5-minute walk would make it a little tougher

Common spaces would be tougher to share, because they'd be your friend's property. Would it feel awkward to invite yourself in and hang out in a Study without making conversation?

It's hard to imagine a makerspace that's even a 5 minute walk away getting as much use as one that's upstairs.

This is the perfect format for 1,000 word vomits I can do this all the time I can start walking home and do 1,000 word vomits and then to steal them into a few tweets The nuggets of Intel in fact this is probably how I could do a Twitter habit is distilling 1,000 word vomits and I could just post these my voice memos maybe I do a 1000 of these in my thoughts get more sophisticated every time of course I need to edit them lightly remove embarrassing reflections selfish reflections. Also I need to remember to add periods.

How's your motives become more commonplace one change you can count on is the rise of distributed workplaces. Colbert and communities will naturally segregate by procedure difficulty. South Park comments being a great example. I kind of community will proliferate especially in places like San Francisco. And so in the future co-workers may not need their own space at all although it would be nice for community it's equally nice to not be so insular but to exist embedded in other communities as well had to have many overlapping communities it could be a fresh source of constant new friends. Living in a nice way of units is nice for other reasons as well You have to like make your own friendships is easier to exist in isolation. The spontaneous interaction doesn't happen nearly as often unless there's an expectation that you can just walk into each other's rooms but walking into each other's rooms and not saying hi is harder to imagine unless you have this culture grow out of an initial phase in a cohaving house.

Coworking communities are likely to proliferate as distributed teams become more popular. Could we overlap with these communities, like we do with South Park Commons? This could reduce the need to provide our own coworking real estate, which we might be able to spend on rarer real estate, like a makerspace.

Might we be able to partner with a local event space?

How's this starting out of cold living houses where you learn more intense principles of code living with each other for example the communication that the community seems like a best practice. Like I would encourage many people to pass through the embassy or many people to pass through the archive even to learn what it's like to live in a cool house. For the residents it's like a good way to onboard go way to teach principals go way to learn what is really like be around people experience the energy and for the residents you also inject energy into the house.

New community members should have coliving experience - even if that means just living in a dense house for a couple months.

notifications about who's hanging out in which common room could add a lot of interest to such a system You could set custom notification preferences which houses you want to hang out with which people hanging out you care about what thresholds do you want and you can keep all of these private to yourself I think flock to be extended in a lot of interesting ways. What you really care about is supporting Chevy so it feels like spontaneous interactions happen as long as you're within walking distance it's possible that literal proximity doesn't matter as much but that's a hypothesis that I want to test perhaps you could do it with Rose or even Jay Jay feels hard to hack and and the other thing is. The other thing is that you don't always want to like make every group interaction public really just interactions between archive people and that could be something that flock supports as well. Hide group interactions unless they're among archive folks don't notify anyone unless it's among archive folks.

Flock could be used to experiment with distributed neighborhoods - we could add Jay and Rose's houses. However, you don't want to broadcast every hangout, just Archive ones, so Flock would have to be extended.

The last piece is probably collaboration shared projects communication channels showing everything with each other. showing investment opportunities. Some kind of financial incentive to keep working together. For example co-managing me archive fund managing deal flow. I could imagine making this unified as a potential way to collect funding. The thing is it's pretty rare for people to like collaborate together today except that they're always running into each other talking about projects they care about. it's hard to imagine everyone hanging out at the makerspace all the time unless there was also really interesting things just that casually happening I think encouraging like public making whenever possible is the right way to encourage a culture for example public instrument recording and get a people appearing as in the music studio. Public work shopping projects together physical things working on burning Man art. Public collaboration between designers and engineers. You could combine these with tandem if they're on their laptop you could show what app they're in you know whether it was pie charm or sketch just as an icon. All of these things would just encourage people to collaborate since the mood. People reading together people talking just a at a glance view of the activity of a community is potentially really compelling and would enable distributed community even distinct distributed community. You could get a sense for how long people have been hanging out there man wow with a sense of how long people have been hanging out you could estimate how long they're likely to continue hanging out what they've been doing during that time. it would be all permission-based only among friends to be an extremely elaborate permissions and privacy layer. but the default permissions will be to reveal everyone within a reveal everything to people within a circle.

HMW build a financial (or other) incentive to collaborate? For example, an Archive Fund, or a BM project.

Flock could add Tandem-like features in which people on devices can choose to share the app they're in, so you can get a sense for what people are doing.

Flock could also show you how long they've been hanging out there, so you can estimate how long they're likely to stay.

Flock will need an elaborate permissions system.

What kind of values would such a community have. Well: making over consuming. Agency believing that you can. playfulness allocating a you day at least every day of the week. Communication honesty forthcomingness. Should have a good set of values that are hard to live by but good. I think there's a real need to articulate these at the archive. Cribbed is a good description of how we exist today more or less. But they don't really guide improvisation they're not hard to live by. I think redefining those values. Things like leaving things 20% cleaner than they were when you found them is the value that's hard to live by. Experimentation is good value. Consensus building. Checking in. It's

Different group sizes are preferable by different people and knowledge of Hangouts prevents FOMO it also enables like more fine-grained control you could whitelist people blacklist people you could define how often you want to hang out with him without them knowing. Imagine a flock setting that's like I want to hang out with this person once a month. And so it shows them all your locations and group hangs until they hit that one a month quota and then it hides you from them for the rest of the month. Get some really advanced fine-tuned control without them realizing. You would still run into each other. Thinking this sense flock not working perfectly is actually a benefit because now there's plausible deniability for hiding people you never realize it.

Should probably have flawless detection and there should be random hiding to encourage plausible deniability of your inability to hide things Were you motivated enough you could probably figure it out You should be encouraged not to do so. Or at least if you do figure it out be understanding and sensitive. Is this in accordance with the values of the community I want to create.? Seems like the answer is no but still it's interesting for a distributing flock more widely encouraging adoption helping people connect with who they care about.

Another kind of sharing I'd like to encourage is sharing networks sharing friends connecting people matchmaking. Flocking encourages that by allowing you to notify other people when a person is hanging out.

go find someone that works at influential and learn how they identify communities or match communities to each other or match people within those communities or influencers it all sounds very interesting and related to matching people up by their interests although more monetizable.

Participation at the Archive, and how to support disengaged housemates September 10th, 2018

This is an excerpt from the Archive's house wiki.

Agreements and housemate participation

One of the unique things about the Archive is that this is a place of focus, and we want housemates to lead their own lives. However, we’ve found that a fairly minimal level of commitment is required to keep the house running smoothly and feeling close:

1. Vote in #the-senate Slack channel so that decisionmakers are unblocked.

At minimum, vote on every proposal in the channel before midnight Thursday nights and Sunday nights.

Votes:

❤️ is fuck yes
👍 is yes
👎 is no
❌ is strong no/veto
🕐 is I want more time to decide
👀 is abstain (defer to others)

Results:

✅ is ratified
💀 is withdrawn
🕐 is we’ll re-propose it later (these posts are pinned to the channel so we don’t forget them)

This system has totally changed the Archive's culture: we no longer need to have meetings (!).

2. Spend an hour doing whatever you want in a common space on Thursday nights.

Specifically, between 7:30pm (House Dinner) and 10:30pm (around when people head to bed). The idea here is to make Thursday night a night for community while still accomodating a variety of schedules. This is primarily for housemates, but significant others are also welcome. It’s OK to miss if you’re out of town (duh) or following your dreams. Also, please respect that others might want to read/relax/be introverted during this time: try to make sure that at least one common space is safe for chiller activities.

Your attendance doesn’t have to overlap with House Dinner, but the strongest community houses do all eat together regularly!

Unless otherwise specified, House Dinner is BYO. (If you’d like to procure dinner for everyone and Venmo them for the cost, check out the Archive favorite orders spreadsheet).

Reasoning:

KJ: *Problem:* Folks have been feeling avoidant of house dinner… we think this is primarily caused by house dinner feeling like an obligation due to being overly structured and restrictive - we all feel obligated to sit at the table, talk through an agenda, take turns talking through hi lo piccolo, etc.
Proposal: Turn House Dinner into House Activities/Hangout/Rest/Self-Care Night (needs rebranding). The only requirement is that we are in the common space from 8-9pm every Thursday if we’re in town, and we can spend that time doing whatever we want - read, work on a project, play a game, talk to other people, etc. This way, we can use it to recharge, we can use it spend time with others, etc. - and we still cultivate that feeling of community. The theory is that this is more enjoyable and more likely to be something you look forward to because it’s pre-carved-out “free time" for you to do whatever you want 🙂
The inspiration for this is that I’ve noticed a few really awesome nights in the house - this past Saturday, and a few other Saturdays especially. The common theme between all these nights is that we were all in the same space, but some doing our own things and some hanging out with each other - e.g. Tom VR sculpting, Jason making art, me reading a book, Arram and Josh talking, etc. - with chill background music.
Note: This can be done in addition to cooking/eating (i.e. folks can eat during this “free time").

If you’re feeling disengaged

It’s OK! A housemate’s energy for the house will ebb and flow as their life gets more or less hectic; this happens to everyone. As long as you’re not consistently missing the above two commitments, please don’t feel guilty about it, and talk to someone who’s been at the house for a while if you do. Alternatively, we might be able to rejigger hangout time to work better with your schedule.

If you are consistently unable to participate, then eventually there should be a conversation about whether the house is meeting your needs. There are ways to participate in this community that don’t involve living in the house - becoming a Fellow, for instance, or moving to a quieter/smaller house nearby - thereby freeing up the room in the main house for another potential housemate.

Tips for when you’re feeling disengaged:

Sharing meals is a great way to stay connected! If you’re eating meals near the house anyway, eat in a common space, even if it’s only briefly.
If you’re feeling overwhelmed, consider posting in #inner-circle to let the house know that you’ll be pulling back for a period of time - we’ll understand and support you.
If there is something the house or housemates can do to better support you, please say so in a channel like #inner-circle.
Alternatively, if there’s something about the house that is making you feel disengaged (we used to do house meetings on Thursdays that felt like chores, for example), then please say something to someone! We’ll most likely course-correct.
Consider inviting housemates to the events you’re going to, if possible.

Reasoning:

Andrea: Once someone feels unengaged, and like they haven't been participating, they feel guilty. So they pull away more, and then they spiral out.
Jason: How do you bring people back in when they're disengaged?
Andrea: Exactly. A really earnest conversation with those people that isn't shaming. If you go down the path of shaming, which I've seen communities do, then they disengage more and more and then they move out.
Jason: What's a good way to frame that conversation?
Andrea: Ask, "Hey - what's going on in your life"? Like, sometimes people aren't contributing because they have so much other shit going on. Like: "We really love when you show up in the space in these ways; the other night, I shared a dinner with you. And it just made me so happy when you did that. Here's what we know you're capable of what you could do more of. How do we help you with that?" Not passive aggressive sticky notes. I've seen like, three different houses go through a leaving notes phase (laughing).
Telling the person that we really appreciate when they show up in this way, and looping them in. And this is where I think it's really bad: if someone needs to take a break, they should still stay on Slack and stay engaged in what's happening. Because if not, when they want to jump back in, they're gonna be like, "Cool! I took a three week break. Now, I'm ready to jump back in", and people are gonna be like, "Oh, we talked about that last week." And then they're gonna be like... OK, I should stay out.
Jason: What do you do if they don't participate even after such a conversation?
Andrea: After a while there should be a conversation on whether this house meeting their needs. Are we cocreating something? There's an opportunity cost of living in community - like, you're taking the spot from someone else. You kind of have to choose there.

Questions to ask other communities September 5th, 2018

Here's an extended version of the list of questions on my main community page.

Guest Ops

Do you let housemates rent out their rooms on Airbnb when they're traveling?

Scaling

Would this actually be better if we were a village of 100-150? I imagine we'd be more stable, and I feel like we'd have super strong "social gravity", which would enable us to attract brilliant and fascinating people from around the globe.
How does intimacy scale?
How do we keep the house introvert-friendly?

Sustainability

How can we make a community that is supportive of big life transitions, like starting a family?

Recruiting

How do other houses manage recruiting?
How do we recruit well?
What proportion of short-term to long-term housemates is optimal?

Governance

What technologies can help keep logistical details low-friction at scale?

Space

How might we design spaces for both extremes of the introvert/extravert spectrum?
What communities have existed in unique spaces (e.g., an old cruise ship), and how has that affected their experience?
What legal structures enable or inhibit communal arrangements?

Culture shift

This lifestyle is fringe, but many would benefit from trying it - how can we normalize and evangelize it?
How might we increase the supply of communal houses?

Impact

What can/should we stand for and what difference can we make in this world?

Culture

Some communities have a culture that says: "you are enough"; the Archive's culture says "grow into your full potential". Both have advantages and disadvantages. Is it possible for both to exist in the same place?

Wishlist

We would benefit a ton from talking to anyone who's lived anywhere like one of these places. If you have any leads, I'd love an introduction: [email protected].

⭐️ Someone on the Berkeley St system of coops
Someone helping set up Agapolis (ask Ellie for a lead)
Someone at a kibbutz (a Gramercy friend offered a lead)
A resident of a very large (50+) rural community
A resident of a very large (50+) urban community
The guy setting up the 90 unit home in Oakland

Interviewed:

Ellie from Agape/Agopolis (not transcribed yet)
Andrea from Embassy SF

Offers:

Tommy from Manzanita
Kate Jackson, who's started a few
Niel Bowerman or housemate from the Lodge, 2212 Parker St, Berkeley
Travis, from Monks of Funk, about Mission Home (Andrea also recommends Davika or James Birch)

Dreamship systems doc August 9th, 2018

This house is so J it hurts even me. Some of these processes don't even seem like they were problems first (like the water boiler) but if they pull it off then power to em.

Some of my favorite ideas from here:

You can miss obligations to "follow your dreams" 😄. We gather Monday evenings to celebrate together and nurture all edges, with a meal from our Chef, Marisa. We start at 8:10pm. Unless you are out of town or following your dreeeaaams, if you are late you will go onto our Shame board. Shame can be repented with procurement of ice cream or wine
House Retro! We meet Friday mornings from 8:30AM to 9:00AM for House Retro, a place and time set aside for us to intentionally come and reflect on the best and worst of Dreamship... we aim to approach these situations with epistemic humility and as a chance to grow and learn
A channel to check while you're grocery shopping: Staples like Bananas, milk, butter, can be purchased for the house out of the Treasury budget. These items were picked because they benefit the majority of shippies. If you notice that an abundance item is running low, post the item in the #abundance channel. If you find yourself at grocery store, you can check the #abundance channel and react to any items you plan to purchase with a ✅
Some items can be refilled with amazon dash buttons. If you notice that we are low on trash bags, tide pods, or cascade dishwashing packs, press the nearby dash button! The dash button will blink green, and the item will be ordered online and delivered within a few days. I love this!! Update: we already have it.

Dreamship systems doc

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1bqtc9GchiqSB13kK1M7Nez9y1U6ZCs_EAYMN7Ahz0rs/edit#

Welcome, to Dreamship, shipmate! Here’s what to know to make your voyage a success: Rent Rent will be $XXX/month per person. In addition, a $300 per person Dreamship All Inclusive Monthly Amenities Fee will cover Utilities, Cleaning, Shared food, and other spending as the house may decide. We c...

The Frequently Overlooked Path to Happiness - Daniel Gross August 5th, 2018

Identify people that excel at the things you want to excel at, and surround yourself with them. Communal living is a brilliant mechanism for enabling this. A good argument for a larger community, in my opinion.

The Frequently Overlooked Path to Happiness

I’ve found that one of the most controllable aspects of my happiness and acumen is the people I spend time with. Because many of us are in a good-not-great situation in this regard I suspect many might not realize how deceptively important it is. I’ve split my interactions with others into three:

Routine People. Those that you interact with without planned effort. Your spouse, co-workers, neighbours and family fall into this bucket. Do you enjoy being with them? Do they motivate you to be better? Think smarter? Be kinder? Most of your life will be spent with these people. You should have extremely high expectations of them. If they aren’t stellar, you should treat that as an urgent problem.

Out-of-routine People. Planned social interactions. For example, dinner with a friend or a trip to see family in a foreign city. Key questions to think about: Do you have a list of people that you’d like to spend time with? How often do you try to meet them? Not sure where to start? Think about qualities you want to have. Then think about the best person who excels at that virtue in your extended friend group. Want to become more empathetic? Spend more time with very empathetic people.

Once you find people that you really enjoy being with, you might figure out how to turn them into Routine People. For example: move near friends so that you can see them causally without the overhead of scheduling.

Out-of-reality People. While not as good as being surrounded by (living) fantastic people, I’ve found that reading about inspiring individuals (Benjamin Franklin, Gandhi, Shackleton) to afford similar advantages. For example, I found I was thinking about leadership principles much more in the week after reading about Shackleton’s Incredible Voyage.

Think carefully about who you surround yourself with. Your time on Earth is a valuable resource — it might merit optimizing.

The Cooperative - Wikipedia August 5th, 2018

Andrea from Embassy SF July 31st, 2018

Andrea is passionate, opinionated, has lived in five communities ranging is size from 6 to 50, and has a unique perspective - in other words, she's the perfect first interview subject. In particular, I loved her nuanced thoughts on diversity, and her exhortation to have a high bar in recruiting.

Topics covered:

A house needs a heart

"There has to be a heart to the house. Community is harder when you don't have one - where you can go into the house, do all your things, and not run into anyone else."

Scaling up to 50
Dividing labor
Community wellness

"I would not start a house where everyone wasn't required to pay into food - that's how critical I consider sharing food to be for house culture."

Impact-oriented houses vs inward-oriented houses

"The benefits of being internally focused is that it feels really nice... but as someone with more of a diverse identity: I honestly couldn't really relate to that. It feels like a super hippie thing to be so inner-facing. As someone who's spent parts of her life at various socioeconomic statuses: to limit our impact to ourselves feels not great to me."

Diversity

"Take diversity only if people can actually hold space for it... Always offering to pay for shit for the one low-income person in the house eventually will make them feel like shit and creates a weird power dynamic. No one wants to be the house's charity person. So are people genuinely going to be cool with not always going out to eat?"

When a housemate is disengaged

"Once someone feels unengaged, and like they haven't been participating, they feel guilty. So they pull away more, and then they spiral out."

And yet: Distributed decisionmaking requires participation

"Everyone should still check Slack. Spend literally five minutes to like, keep decision making going. That makes a gigantic difference. It's when people go silent, silence like fucks with everyone."

Distributed leadership best practices
Have a high bar for recruiting

"Strong gates, soft center. You'll have a lot less rules if you're really strict on who gets in"

All house names other than the Embassy and the Archive have been omitted.

[#]A house needs a heart

You've grown too much when you can no longer host all the people at the same time in the heart of the home. And for your house, the fact that all the kitchens are divided... like, there has to be a heart to the house. At [a past house], when you walk in: it's the kitchen. Here, it's the dining room. It's harder when you don't have one - where you can go into the house, do all your things, and not run into everyone on all the other floors.

Why isn't the heart of [that past house] the backyard?

Well, I think it's both. But it's the fact that it's really hard to go about your day without going through the kitchen. You can go your whole day without being in the backyard unless you live in the cottage. But no one's gonna not go through the kitchen.]

We don't really have that. That's why Embassy has the porch, isn't it.

That's part of rationale. And that's why we're so meticulous about cleaning the common areas. So that's my #1 tip: be careful that as you grow you have a place where everyone can fit.

Right. For us, that's the backyard.

So I would dope out that backyard. Like, buy heaters... and create a house culture where people don't have their dinners in their rooms all the time. Make sure they eat and meet in the backyard.

Where have you lived?

[5 past houses]

What did you like best about living at [a large, fun past house]?

I was actively looking for a place like that for behavior change... like I didn't want to be a workaholic all the time like I was in college. I wouldn't have been able to stay there and have a career, or a relationship. Just maintaining friendships outside of that house is really difficult.

[#]Scaling up to 50

[One of her college houses had 50 residents.] How close were you with other housemates?

Pretty close, but everyone was in college together... so by life stage we were pretty similar. There were some people who were MIA. Like they'd go in through the backyard, have headphones in, go to their room. I would argue that there are some people who are missing from [the Embassy]. And you really feel those people.

How so?

You can just tell when someone's checked out. It makes you less excited about the community. I think a major decision point for you is that as you grow, there's going to be more labor that goes into the house. The Archive has cleaners, fantastic. Food ordering and recruitment are the other two big ones. And at 30 you should have someone doing onboarding (which kind of goes with recruitment). And maybe someone doing events -- like, community wellness.

When you're that big, the people who take up a lot of time putting in - either you pay those people, and that sucks, because then people feel entitled to their time and I kinda don't recommend it - that's how Mission home ended up in financial problems, and I've never seen the dynamics work out very well. I really recommend not having paid labor exchanges between housemates. We do ti here only for guest ops, where what they're being paid to do doens't relate to housemates. Like I'm doing food here, and I'm not getting paid to do it, I just feel passionate about it. So then the doocracy documents help a lot. But if I for instance am coordinating food, and putting in a ton of hours, and then the proportion of people who do absolutely nothing, who just show up and don't even want to have a conversation with me goes up to much, then you're just kinda like - oh, I'm curating an experience that you don't contribute to.

What proportions have you personally experienced, and how did each of those feel?

Well, this and [a past house] were the only houses where we didn't exchange money for that, and at [a past house] we recruited well so it never became a problem. We once had 60 applicants for 1 spot. Strong gates, soft center. You'll have a lot less rules if you're really strict on who gets in. I went through a co-op that went through a strike by those who did the jobs, and that was the worst. It was just awful.

[#]Dividing labor

Here, sometimes it comes up - like, why doesn't this person contribute? It tends to be gendered. The guys here are really good about cleaning up after themselves, but especially the guests - the people staying in the hostel beds - the guys, on average, tend to just leave their shit in the sink and the women don't. I've never lived in a house where there wasn't a gender dynamic around house labor. and that is a tension point especially if it tends to be (and this isn't necessarily always true) male-identified people that are like "my job is too important for me to be cooking with someone or cleaning or helping or doing stuff". If it starts to disproportionately fall on the women, then that's a quick way to end up with a male-saturated house.

What have you tried to fix that problem?

[A past house] didn't have cleaners, so there we tried a job system, where you had chores, and if you didn't do it, you had to pay someone else to do it. We had lower-income people, and they were down.

If you have people who work from home - the Day Crew - then that's another huge source of conflict. If I go to work, and I come back, and I'm exhausted, I'm like - well fuck it, I'm too tired to clean up. If I'm a freelancer or WFH or unemployed and have to look at the disgusting sink from people who left "too busy" to clean up their dish... well, I can either be pissed about it all day or I can clean it. We had to put a name to it at [a past house], and here that's been a source of people burning out. People who work from home do disproportionately more. Even dumb things, like the packages that gets delivered, the food that gets delivered, random people that come to the door, the repair person who comes over...

How much did you pay those people? How did you arrange that?

It was an experiment, really, and I'm surprised that they've kept it and not iterated on it. It's $15, because each task wasn't meant to be longer than 30 minutes, and if no one volunteered then we just called a TaskRabbit. We also logged who consistently didn't do it, and after a while we'd have a conversation about whether you were a good fit for the community. Because after a while, if you're going to be unable to contribute -- even if you're paying for it -- it's like somebody else volunteered to do their community contributions. But I wouldn't want that. If you commodify my time and community contributions... then it would just ruin it. Then I'm gonna compare it to everything else that I do that's monetized.

[#]Distributed decisionmaking requires participation

Is there a good ratio between the doers and the people who are in the ebb of their community energy?

I think it's more about the energy than the ratio. It's part of the reason I left [a past house]. I started to not feel super stoked when new people moved in, I just didn't have the energy.

If you're not excited to do it, then you should like back down, you know, like, they should never feel like resentment. That requires being really honest about when there's too much burden and brainstorming as a community. Just like there's ebbs and flows of people's energies... The problem is that the most difficult times require the most energy. And that's where you need some people that can really keep people motivated.

Conflict is a big one. And then it might be useful to already have a plan for that, like, do we need someone the community to find a mediator to guide us through this? You can request one from alternative justice for free, for example. If not, well, that's what takes a ton of work. Emotional labor is a huge one.

The other thing is, if you're in an ebb phase, the other way to not burn out, is to just support the people who are doing stuff by staying active online. Cheering people on. Everyone should still check Slack. And just at least say, like, awesome, I'm so glad that you're taking that on. Or spending literally five minutes to like, keep decision making going. That makes a gigantic difference. It's when people go silent, silence like fucks with everyone.

Tell me more about your decisionmaking and Slack.

We have an #input-required channel and a #private channel that's for very important things. #input-required is like: you should want to have input on this. Like, "I'm going to invite someone to say my room for two weeks", or "The roof is leaking, I'm callling a plumber." Some people still tap out of those, though. We reserve Loomio for: we're voting on a new housemate; things that would result in a house meeting otherwise because they're so important. #input-required is like: "I'm thinking of changing the couch." And if no one writes anything on Slack, then it just gets done.

We use Loomio maybe once every two weeks, and it's things like new housemates, changing the monthly dues.

How do you do monthly dues? We have people with different willingness to pay and different abilities, different resources

$375. Rent is pretty reasonable, like $1500/month, and it's the cleaners, the food ($2800/month), and the shared alcohol ($400/month).

[#]Community wellness

The food here was super good.

Yeah. I would not start a house where everyone wasn't required to pay into food - that's how critical I consider sharing food to be for house culture.

We have like a shared Thursday dinner, where it's BYO, but they're haphazardly attended.

If people are so busy, why do they want to grocery shop for themselves?

Well, they don't - we have chefs, they eat Soylent.

Well, another thing you can do is camping trips and retreats. [Past house] did a camping trip every two months. I think hanging out together outside of the house is more important than hanging out together inside the house.

That makes sense. We'll do a camping trip ASAP after people start living here. What are the house values of the Embassy?

Doocracy, impact, and experimentation. Experimentation in particular - you can feel it. People are really into testing things. [Past house] was like love, acceptance, gratitude, and sustainability.

How does experimentation manifest?

If you propose anything here, like, "What if all this furniture was on one side of the room?" No one's going to stop you, it's like - yeah, let's see what happens. We also tested governance structures. We tried doocracy, dictatorship, having a CEO, and we tried a matriarchy.

Whoa! How'd the matriarchy experiment go?

My understanding is that it's good that we survived that process. But it's written online.

[#]Impact-oriented houses vs inward-oriented houses

Why do you want to maximize that number of people that come through the hostel?

To increase the Cobudget money, so the money goes towards like community. Part of impact of the Embassy and the reason we want it to look nice is so that people from non-communal living situations see that this is a possibility for them.

I totally worked on me! And here I am, a year and a half later. I came away from my month here so invigorated and inspired.

That's really awesome - it's an Embassy success story!

The Embassy is very outward-facing.

It's funny, though, because I could never see that happening at [two other houses] - those two houses are just too inward-facing for the projects we do. Which is beautiful. And I love being there. Because you're just surrounded by love and hugs.

What impact does it have in house to have an inward-facing vs outward-facing orientation? What are the pros and cons?

I feel like I've been in both, and I think you need both. I kind of came here thinking that part of my contribution to this house would be internal community building, as much as external.

The benefits of being internally focused is that it feels really nice. It feels great to come home to a super strong, huggy community. The problems that I see, is that as someone with more of a diverse identity: I honestly couldn't really relate to that. It feels like a super hippie thing to be so inner-facing. As an immigrant and someone who's spent parts of her life at various socioeconomic statuses: to limit our impact to ourselves feels not great to me, especially when our community tends to not be very diverse.

It also makes conflict way worse, and makes people moving out way worse. You just got caught up! I mean, like at [other house] we'd start fights about where to put the toaster. Every two weeks we'd have a two hour meeting. And when you think about it, that house didn't have any impact. Unlike here: we never have meetings and there's an entire Embassy Network with five houses around the world.

That being said, you need to come home and feel safe and comfortable. I love coming home and sharing a meal with somone. For me, cooking with people and talking in the kitchen is really important. You will burn out of a house if you can't come home after a crappy day and talk to someone.

Part of being able to like co-create something big outside of the house is being in a place where you want to collaborate with people. So I think you need both. But I think you get more diversity when you're at least partially outward facing.

[#]Diversity

What are the pros and cons of diversity in ideology?

One con is that it can be emotionally exhausting. I couldn't live with a Trump supporter. [Other house] is actually less progressive than this house in terms of political views, and that impacts diversity. I've known friends who would have lived there, but they were like, "Oh, I'm gonna be misgendered the entire time I live there". Or people who don't have the best understanding of mental health. Like people with depression tended to move out because others required that everyone be super excited and high energy all the time and they just didn't have the emotional intelligence to hold space for people with depression or introverts quite as well. So it's hard. Especially because once you start to go down a slope, no one wants to be that token person. And whoever leads recruiting can end up perpetuating things.

I think age diversity is really fucking important. You need young people, because they're energetic, and you need old people, because they help you realize that the world isn't going to end like every five minutes. [Laughing] it's true! Diversity in jobs can go either way. If you're all the same, it can be really cool because everyone nerds out about stuff. If you're super diverse, it's really fun.

Take diversity only if people can actually hold space for it. And that takes people like checking in with themselves: "Will I actually enjoy coming home if we have both introverts and extroverts? Or does this space always have to be party?"

How about diversity of socioeconomic background?

Hmm. Important, and difficult. It's difficult because I think income to some degree is kind of cultured. It affects what you eat, it affects what you wear, it affects how you speak sometimes; it affects a lot of things - where you went to school, etc. A lot of times people don't realize that when they say, like "fuck processed food," that someone of a lower-income background might never have had access to anything but processed food, and that you're shitting on their childhood. It's tough to navigate. It can't come from a place of pity, either.

Let's say one of your low-income friends says "I can't go to that party because the tickets are expensive". And there's two ways to be inclusive and respond to that friend. There's an "I'll pay for your ticket", and then there's "Cool, what can you afford to do, and I'll go with you." If you always have people doing the first, it's very mild fuck you. It's like - I'm going to stay on what I have access to, and not take any of the discomforts, and I'm just gonna bring you into my culture and my experience as opposed to like: "to have this friendship, I know that sometimes I'm gonna have to experience your life experience, which is different and means sometimes not going to stuff." Always offering to pay for shit for the one low-income person in the house eventually will make them feel like shit and creates a weird power dynamic. No one wants to be the house's charity person. So are people genuinely going to be cool with not always going out to eat not always ordering expensive food and sometimes cooking? You have to be willing to partake in this person's lived experiences!

Are there other nonintuitive cases in which holding space for a kind of diversity might be a different experience than you'd expect? What's it like for a straight person to hold space for LGBTQ person?

I think that staying on an emotional level on these topics can be hard. Something that hit me recently was that Supreme Court change. It can feel really isolating to have people be like "why is that so awful, don't worry, it's gonna be fine". People taking an experience to an intellectual level is really hard when you just want to like feel upset. Microaggressions don't feel rational, because it's not really about that thing - it's about like a whole other giant thing. It's also hard, because people are curious, too. They're like - "Oh, yes: tell me more about that...", for example, people wanted to debrief and talk to me on an intellectual level about the Orlando shooting. Like I grew up in Florida, and it was a shooting against Hispanic queer people. I just wanted to be upset, not be the explainer person.

On that topic. We have like these casual book recommendations for newcomers - Nonviolent Communication and Crucial Conversations.

Oh, oh - Conflict Is Not Abuse! It's a really good book. Really good book on the role of community and managing conflict. I read it after our shenanigans about kicking someone out of a past community.

By the way, I want communities to start thinking about relationships. So let's say someone has a relationship in your community, and then they break up: like, two people break up, well - who stays in community and who doesn't. So I'm writing community level agreements about what to expect from my community should two people day and go through a breakup.

[#]When a housemate is disengaged

I want to ask you about governance. What are the pros and cons of doocracy, in your experience?

Well - [other house] did not execute it well, and so I used to think, it just didn't work [laughing]. In retrospect, the number one source of difficulty in a big house or in a doocracy is if the disparity of knowledge between people gets too large. Let's say you've been in a house for two years; you've now gone through a discussion about cleaning bathrooms three times over. And then a new person walks in full of ideas and with no experience.

You can burn two types of people out. You can burn out the doers with differences in knowledge, which it's a really bad cycle when someone goes down. Once someone feels unengaged, and like they haven't been participating, they feel guilty. So they pull away more, and then they spiral out.

How do you bring people back in when they're disengaged?

Exactly. A really earnest conversation with those people that isn't shaming. If you go down the path of shaming, which I've seen communities do, then they disengage more and more and then they move out.

What's a good way to frame that conversation?

Ask, "Hey - what's going on in your life"? Like, sometimes people aren't contributing because they have so much other shit going on. Like: "We really love when you show up in the space in these ways; the other night, I shared a dinner with you. And it just made me so happy when you did that. Here's what we know you're capable of what you could do more of. How do we help you with that?" Not passive aggressive sticky notes. I've seen like, three different houses go through a leaving notes phase.

Tlling the person that we really appreciate when they show up in this way, and looping them in. And this is where I think it's really bad: if, if someone needs to take a break, they should still stay on Slack and stay engaged in what's happening. Because if not, when they want to jump back in, they're gonna be like, "Cool! I took a three week break. Now, I'm ready to jump back in", and people are gonna be like, "Oh, we talked about that last week." And then they're gonna be like... OK, I should stay out.

What do you do if they don't participate even after such a conversation?

After a while there should be a conversation on whether this house meeting their needs. Are we cocreating something? There's an opportunity cost of living in community - like, you're taking the spot from someone else. You kind of have to choose there.

[#]Distributed leadership best practices

The other thing that can happen, which really blows, which is why I like that Loomio has a set amount of time for proposals, is that the doers can't work siloed without a set amount of transparency. Let's say I don't tell anyone that I'm thinking of painting the room. And then I go off and buy the paint, do the research, find out what's non-toxic, do all this stuff. And I come back to paint this room, super stoked. And someone raises her hand and goes, "Hey, what about latex paint?" I'm gonna be like, look, I've already bought this, we're not opening that can of worms again. Yeah. And they're gonna be like: "What? Why are you being a dictator?" And I'll be like "you're underestimating that I already put five hours of work into this". So while it's really amazing that people are doing work, you need to let people know what you're doing and give them time to weigh in. Setting a timeframe is amazing. Like, "If you want to join this or have an opinion on this, you have 48 hours to weigh in". And that's when doocracy works well. And it's not 48 hours to shit on it. It's like: 48 hours to decide if you want to be part of the solution.

At [other house] sometimes people would just go rogue. And there wasn't a clear distinction on what needed community consensus and what didn't. Here, if it's reversible, then just do it and we'll test it for two weeks. And then we'll reverse it we don't like it and the doer has to put the energy into reversing it. [At that past house] it was a fuzzy line on which things needed consent - like do we have a family meeting to throw a party, or do you just post about a party on Slack? The line was way too blurry on what was or wasn't reversible.

A lot of things are reversible with enough effort. So anything that you're willing to put in the effort to reverse is considered reversible?

Yeah, exactly. Essentially what's not reversible is a new housemate or property damage.

[#]Have a high bar for recruiting

How do you decide when to let someone in?

Ugh... recruiting is the quickest way to ruin friendships. OK. You have to be super transparent with the people you're recruiting and give rejections in person, if it's someone you know, and honestly. Don't lie to people. I've seen so many people be like - oh it's just like not a good time for us, we're like we're just not accepting more [specific house] people. I had someone do this to my friend: they told him we're just not accepting more [other house] people now and then like three weeks later they did accept another person, and he's like - now I know you lied to me.

How do you decide between this person who seems pretty great but you and you have a lot of information, you could do a vote, but there's only one spot - and then there's someone way earlier the pipeline, on whom we have no information, but they seem amazing.

I think you should only accept fuck yeses. What we do here is that everyone has to be yes and there have to be more "fuck yes, I'm so stoked" than yeses. And as soon as your bar is met you send an offer. Don't wait for someone else in the pipeline because that's a quick way to end up not filling spot. So just like set the bar high and then be grateful that you found one. And that bar's really high.

And you can tell people that! Tell them that the Archive has this arduous recruiting process, but one of the beautiful things about this place is that once you move in you know that everyone in this house was a yes and most were a fuck yes.

How long does your recruiting take? What interviews do you do?

Well, here it's been long because people here travel so much. At [a past house] it wasn't that long. It also depends on how often you're recruiting. It gets harder to get people super stoked to do recruiting when you're doing it all the time, and that's gonna be one of the growing pains. So have a really good written application and don't give everyone an interview - definitely have one or two people filter. And have a champion to each application who's super stoked, who can say "you have to meet this person" - a champion. If you allow every Craigslist person to come over for dinner then you're gonna have people stop wanting to have dinner at the house.

Don't waste your time on people who didn't even take their time on the application. And post it on the Haight St Commons page. Most people who ended up being amazing knew someone else. Yeah, so someone championing the person and then maybe like two or three rounds of dinners, or of coming over and meeting a few people, and if one person is a veto after the first one, then that's it! Just cut the person. And if someone comes over it's okay for someone to say I'm still undecided. I really believe that the person should come over at least twice.

When you interview people, are you looking for different things than in your application? Do you all different requirements?

I think I think everyone's looking for something slightly different. I think it's really good for people to be aligned on what they're looking for. Also for people to be in the mindset of "we're showing off our house and trying to win someone" instead of "I'll see if you're good enough to live here" cuz then a fuck yes does come through and then you scare them off. So becoming good at interviewing and set the person up for success.

I think everyone at least writing down what they're looking for and what questions they want to ask - that will help. Some big ones for me are "How much time do you think you'll be at home? What would be a contribution that you may really excited to do or what's a project you've taken on? What brings you energy?"

Thanks Andrea!

Sounds like the Archive would get along well with the Embassy.

Condorcet voting method – Open Agora blog July 30th, 2018

View More Posts →

Sources, notes:

Agreements and housemate participation

1. Vote in #the-senate Slack channel so that decisionmakers are unblocked.

2. Spend an hour doing whatever you want in a common space on Thursday nights.

If you’re feeling disengaged

The Frequently Overlooked Path to Happiness

The Cooperative

Notable results

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edit
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References

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edit
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Sources, notes:

Agreements and housemate participation

1. Vote in #the-senate Slack channel so that decisionmakers are unblocked.

2. Spend an hour doing whatever you want in a common space on Thursday nights.

If you’re feeling disengaged

The Frequently Overlooked Path to Happiness

The Cooperative

Notable results [edit]

References [edit]

Notable results

[
edit
]

References

[
edit
]