Embracing Chaos

One of the advantages to group housing is that there are many opportunities to take advantage of economies of scale. That is, there are many required activities that scale non-linearly with the number of residents. A simple example is any activity which is required for the house but only requires a single person to take [...]

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Tonight I’m giving a guest lecture for a class on web development in Python.  I’m talking about building real-time web sites using Hookbox.  It draws on my experience building the software version of the Groovik’s cube. Here are the slides from the lecture: Here are the slides from the talk. I start out talking about [...]

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One point I didn’t get a chance to make in my Ignite talk on Advanced Co-housing Techniques is that we are not alone.  It’s easy to listen to one guy singing on stage about how happy he is in his modern techno-hippy commune and dismiss him as a freak.  While I might be a freak, we are [...]

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I said in my Ignite talk on Group Housing that a primary motivator for us was to build a village to raise our kids in.  There are lots of different styles of villages you can build in a modern city.  Before we found our house, we explored several alternatives.  We also were aware of several [...]

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In my Ignite Seattle talk about Advanced Co-Housing Techniques, I mis-spoke about governance.  I said that our house is run as a democracy, which actually isn’t a very accurate representation.  Democracies are clearly sustainable forms of governance, but they tend to leave a bunch of people unhappy in many decisions.  Up to half the residents [...]

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Here’s my presentation for Ignite Seattle 13.  It’s lessons from the trenches of living in a large group house. The topics I touch on are: Raising kids in a group house Choosing your housemates How to deal with somebody needing to sell their share of a house Hiring a lawyer to write a Tenancy in [...]

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