To be clear, I understand that it is a wonderful feeling to find a home if you haven’t known one before.  In 1997 during my first visit to Burning Man, I felt like Gonzo in Muppets from Space when he (spoiler alert!) first meets his extended family.  His unique appearance had made him feel utterly alone, until a spaceship full of Gonzo-looking aliens landed on earth and explained that he was one of them.  The realization that he was not a freak outcast but part of a vibrant community is the same that many first experience at Burning Man.  I first experienced this sense of inclusion there, and it has undoubtedly transformed my life for the better.  It is a deeply powerful experience that continues to be extremely important for a great many people.  But why does it need to be rooted in a wasteland in Nevada?  Why not bring that feeling to your real home?

My challenge is this to everybody who considers Burning Man their home: How can you bring what you love about Burning Man into the other 51 weeks of your year? What is so immutable about your regular life that you can only feel comfortable 2% of the time?  Is that dusty dusty place really so special that you cannot bring its culture home in a sustainable way?  From personal experience, I think not.  It might take years, but you really can take the things you love about Burning Man back to your regular life. Let’s go through some of the features of BRC that many people find wonderful and discuss how to recreate them in the real world.

At Burning Man, I get to spending lots of time with my friends

One of the simplest pleasures of That Thing In The Desert is that you get to spend an entire week hanging out with your friends.  Vacations are great, right?  Well here’s an idea: go on a camping trip with your friends closer to home.  Or how about arranging a weekly gathering to play board games or cook dinner together?  Creating sustainable community activities is completely possible at home.

Or convince your friends to go somewhere new for a vacation.  Sure, BRC is a wonderfully amazingly different place (at least the first several times you go), but so is much of Africa or Asia.  It’s not like a trip to BRC is cheap either — on average people spend over $2,000 for the whole thing (ref: BRC Census).  Compare that to a plane ticket across the globe.

If you really like being around your friends all the time, how about actually moving into a house with them?  That’s what I did.  It’s called co-housing, and it’s awesome.  Every morning when I get up and every evening for dinner I see my good friends milling about living their lives, and we enrich each other.  I highly recommend it.  If that’s too intense for you, figure out how you and your closest can live within walking distance of each other.  It takes years for neighborhoods to coalesce, but when it works it’s wonderful.

At Burning Man, I’m surrounded by cool art

If this is an excuse for why you can’t feel at home in your regular home life, the irony is thick.  First tabulate how much time and money your camp expended on your last vacation in the desert.  Break that down into the part that was spent on personal comforts (i.e. making BRC more like home) and the part that was spent creating cool art for others to experience.  Now try harnessing all that creative brainpower which went into your project, and divert it towards doing something awesome for your local community.  A few quick ideas: a mural or sculpture in your neighborhood or a new community P-patch or a collective third place for your friends.

Sure it’s a different kind of challenge.  Most cities have more rules about modifying your surroundings than Black Rock City.  But as the years go on, the differences are shrinking.  BRC has strict fire codes and (less strict) building codes, and as the community expands, increasingly restrictive community decency standards.  You can always put up your own Jiffy Lube sculpture in your back yard.

At Burning Man, I can be myself

“Radical self expression” has been one of Burning Man’s philosophies from the beginning.  The ability to be yourself in your normal life seems on the surface like it really should be easy, but is often extremely hard.  What’s preventing you from being yourself?  Often it’s social inertia.  People who expect you to act a certain way — a way that maybe you’re tired of and want to move on from.  If this is the case for you, I’ll offer some bold advice: try spending less time with those people, and more time with people who reinforce the version of yourself you prefer.

If on the other hand you enjoy being somebody different only while you’re in the desert, then you have a harder choice to make.  Is that other person who you really want to be?  Perhaps they’re just a costume you enjoy wearing like for Halloween.  But if that other person has a real home, and you are living as an outsider, then this choice bears consideration.

At Burning Man, strangers are friendly and awesome

This one can be hard, especially for people living in certain cities.  After my first burn, my campmate and I decided to try to bring some of the playa attitude back to Los Angeles.  We attempted what we later termed “attack smiles” because their effect on sidewalk passersby was the exact opposite of what we hoped.  Within a year we both left LA for friendlier pastures.  So in the “tough choices” department, moving is always an option.  You might not feel at home because your home isn’t a very friendly place.  But I wouldn’t jump to that conclusion too quickly.

It might be cliche, but scientific research has shown that good moods spread through social networks.  Happiness is contagious.  Especially amongst friends.  So spend more time with your friends and friends of friends, and bring that same energy you bring to the desert.  Build community. (This is the simplest, strongest advice I can give.) Bring the cultural principles that you love into your 98%-of-the-year community.  It’ll take a lot of work over time.  But I bet your friends will be on board to help, and the end goal is absolutely worth the effort.

So you’ve found some folks you think you might want to live with.  Or maybe they’re awesome friends whom you’re super excited to live with.  Either way, before signing a lease (or a mortgage!) it’s important to do your due diligence and try to figure out how well you’ll get along living together.

If it’s somebody you don’t know very well, the need might seem obvious.  But if it’s an old friend, I posit it’s even more important to check your homie-compatibility index.  Being friends and being good housemates are not the same thing.  When considering co-housing, probably the most important thing is picking the right people to live with.  My very wise housemate Heater developed this list of discussion topics to go over with potential roommates.

• Communication style
• Occupancy dates
• Noise
• Guests
• Parties
• Food
• Regular meetings
• Use of the Common Spaces
• Substances
• Nudity
• Sex
• Scheduling use of space
• Cleanliness
• Utilities
• Methods of rent
• Parking and neighbors
• Rooms
• Pets
• Kids
• Temperature
• Decor
• Chores

We recommend scheduling 2-3 hours of uninterrupted time together to discuss everything on this list.  It takes a while to talk about everything!  Discuss each topic, and write down your expectations for how a household should work.  This forms an informal social contract that you can refer back to.  Make note of differences of opinion.  Decide how you’ll deal with them, or recognize that the barriers to a happy house are too large.

• Hosting any kind of service person – plumber, electrician, cable, etc
• Grocery shopping and cooking
• Gardening
• Dealing with house insurance
• Maintenance such as painting, roofing or windows

The key here is that the amount of effort required to do this for a large house with say 2xN people is less than twice the amount of effort required to do this for a normal house with N people in it.  In some cases it will hardly require any more effort at all for a large house.  But even for something like waiting for the cable guy, the amount of effort required will probably increase slightly for a large house — because the large house will require somewhat more cable services than a small house would.  But generally, the bigger house is more efficient.  My simplified representation was “effort = tasks / people” which is reasonably accurate for a number of useful cases.

There are some ways that economics of scale can work against you.  Specifically with utility prices.  Utilities like water get more expensive the more you use, as a way to discourage people from using more water than they need.  This works against you when you have many people living in a single house which the city classifies as a “single family house” and charges penalizing prices when usage goes above what they consider reasonable for a single family.  Right now, I recognize this as a limitation that I’ll just deal with because the absolute cost is not very high.

Another factor that scales badly is relationships.  That is to say, with lots of people around, there are many relationships to be maintained.  Every additional person you bring into the house forms a relationship with every existing house member.  Each relationship has a reciprocal pair — I have one with you, and you have one with me.  So the number of relationships in a house with N people is N*(N-1).  (This assumes your housemates are sane enough to not pick fights with themselves.)  If any of these relationships sour, then there’s a problem which can make the whole house uncomfortable.  For this reason, it’s valuable to pick housemates who are low-drama.  This table numerically lists the number of opportunities for drama as a function of number of residents in the house:

There’s another limiting factor in increasing the size of a house, which is decreased responsibility of ownership.  When a valuable object is owned by a single person or two people, they typically take very good care of it.  They know that if anything bad happens to it, they need to fix it, or deal with it being broken.  But as the number of owners increases, the sense of ownership and responsibility that comes with it diminishes.  At the extreme end of this are publicly owned goods like subways or parks.  As your house gets bigger, people will care less about taking care of it.  There are aspects of our house where we feel that we are bumping up against this limit practically speaking, and if we took more residents on, we fear the quality of life would degrade.

Although I’ve been talking about this kind of ideal since the 1990s, I am not nearly brave enough to try a life-defining social experiment like this without some evidence that it can actually work.  Fortunately, some of our friends are braver than me.  A few years ago we watched two couples both with pregnant wives buy a house together with the intention of raising their kids together.  It has worked out fabulously for them. They have been an inspiration and a model for many of us who have followed.  I put together this map  on the right to demonstrate how the idea has spread.  The green points show houses just like ours — where multiple unrelated / unmarried people have come together to co-own a large supposedly single family house (with a single kitchen) with the intention of raising their kids together.  The blue dots are houses of friends of mine whose that are very similar but don’t meet all those criteria.

I seeded this map with just my friends’ houses around Capitol Hill.  If you know of others and want to add them, feel free to go edit the Google Map yourself.  For security reasons, I haven’t included any identifying information about the houses, and have only located them as accurately as the closest intersection, and I encourage you to do the same.

The point of all this is to show that we might be crazy, but we’re not the only ones.  As another point of support, the map below comes from cohousing.org showing the locations in the greater Seattle area of larger planned cohousing developments.  Click through to find similar communities across the country.

The style we have is a single large house with with lots of people living in it.  Amazingly, this almost 7,000 square foot house is officially zoned as a single family dwelling.  I really like the single family who lived here before us, but I have a hard time envisioning how they used all the space.  This is the densest, most communal style of housing.  We effectively all share a single kitchen.  There is a second kitchen in the house, but  it gets used maybe once a month.  Whether or not you share a kitchen is a critical differentiator in the level of intimacy of a household. People need to eat every day, and so people are always going through the kitchen.  Sharing a kitchen means we’re always seeing each other and interacting.  If we had our own food storage / preparation areas, then we could and likely would spend far less time interacting with each other.

We also considered buildings which in many ways look and act like a single large house, but where each family unit has their own dedicated space, including a small kitchen.  This style allows for much more isolation and privacy within the house.  Not having to interact in order to eat means that you can spend much less time with the other people in your house.  I was originally a proponent of this style.  Partly because I think it makes for a more liquid ownership structure — if you can sell somebody what’s more like a condo unit in a fairly intimate condo building, the transfer is likely going to be much easier.  Now I’m glad I did not get my way because I love the intimacy of our household.  I know of groups who have purchased entire apartment buildings together, with some units dedicated as common areas.  This is an easy way to re-purpose an existing structure towards a co-housing  purpose.  A benefit of this strategy is that it’s easier to find people who will want to join, because of the reduced intimacy.

Going further in this direction there are a variety of ways to build sets of independent, nearby houses which are optimized for use as a community.  The website cohousing.org offers a bunch of pointers to communities of this kind, which are surprisingly common.  Houses with a common walk-way in the middle and a group meeting area with an industrial kitchen for example.  This style marries many of the advantages of owning your own house (privacy) with some of the advantages of living in a close-knit community.  This style works well for professional land developers, because it requires buying a large chunk of land and building lots of houses.  Some of our early plans explored a small-scale option of this kind, which again I’m glad we didn’t do because I don’t think as a group we would have survived the design and construction process.

At the far end of the spectrum there’s the option of literally just buying existing single-family homes near each other.  My previous house was within a few blocks of a great many of my friends.  This is a traditional neighborhood, but done right if you’re actually good friends with your neighbors.  I also know a group of folks who bought a set of houses which are literally adjacent to each other, making it much more like the planned communities above.

When considering the options here, the basic trade-off I see is between intimacy and privacy.  It’s tempting to say that more privacy increases re-sale value, but I think it’s more accurate to say that more privacy makes the investment more liquid.  Intimacy brings all sorts of social benefits, and one of the largest determinants of intimacy is the extent to which you share a kitchen.

Our house actually operates on consensus for most decisions. Operating on consensus is short-hand for everybody has to agree before something happens.  Another way to put this is that everybody has veto power over everything.  It is this fact which most leads to the slowness of decision making that I alluded to.  It can take a long time to reach consensus on issues.  But people are generally happy when they do.  The biggest source of stress is often that things aren’t moving quickly enough.  This leads me to joke sometimes that an issue is “working its way through congress” before it gets decided, which I think contributed to me mis-representing the governance system that we use.

We do have a separate politburo-style committee which is responsible for financial decisions.  For issues like when to refinance it makes sense for only certain members of the household to contribute: those with a direct vested interest in the outcome.  Maintenance and repairs of the house similarly get dealt with in this sub-group, not because other residents don’t have a vested interest, but because it’s our responsibility and we generally figure the other residents would rather not deal with things like hiring a painter.  Even if they did, their incentives would differ slightly.  Sometimes meta-issues around residency like how many people the house should have sometimes get taken up by the politburo, but we do our best to keep these discussions open.

I know of other group houses which operate with similar multi-tiered governance systems.  The hierarchy often seems to follow legal ownership of the house, which makes sense.  Sometimes more power is reserved by the owners.  Clearly there’s a continuum of possibilities here which would get unhealthy on either end.  A strict dictatorship by the owner would probably make all other residents unhappy fairly quickly.  On the other side a house where the owner has no more power than the other residents, and gets out-voted on issues pertaining to physical maintenance could lead to the house falling into dis-repair.  I’ve heard that the Evergreen Land Trust model sometimes has this problem.  ELT is something I don’t know very much about, but deserves its own write-up.

One closing comment about house governance relates to communication.  When decisions need to get made, how will your house communicate the discussion?  We use a combination of an email list and periodic in-person house-meetings which are fairly formal and infrequent.  I know other houses rely fairly heavily on SMS, or chance discussion.  As in most things with co-housing, there are many right answers.  The key is finding a system that works well for everybody you live with, and being open to change if it seems not to be working.

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 Commons contract
• How to get a crazy loan
• Living with lots of people
• Governance systems for a house
• Capitalist vs Communist chore systems
• Gamifying chores
• Hiring a housekeeper
• Economies of scale in a group house
• How cooking scales up
• Sharing food in general
• Limitations of accounting
• Letting go of control
• Mis-behaving furniture

And when I say “touch on” I mean it.  Each of those topics are lucky to get a full sentence in my 5-minute talk.  There’s so much more I had considered including, but with an Ignite talk, you’ve got to make tough choices about what gets included.  I could write an entire blog post about each of the topics above, and I just might.  (Leave a comment if there’s something in particular you’d like to hear more about.)  Here’s the list of topics I had included in earlier drafts of this talk, but all got cut before the final version:

• How relationships scale in a big group
• What does privacy mean, and what really matters
• Analogy to college dormitory lifestyle and its limitations
• Personality traits to seek or avoid in co-housing partners
• Social vs. Legal Contracts and what belongs in each
• Balancing preservation of house sanctity vs. owners’ rights in contracts
• Financial ownership models and associated accounting techniques
• How living in a group can minimize interpersonal differences
• Wanderlust in desk accessories
• Analogy between marriage and co-housing
• Personal efficiencies through livability sustaining systems
• Techniques for dealing with clutter
• Architectural features that support group living

And each of these could easily get a 500 word essay as well. Encourage me, and I’ll write them! :)

Hello Board of Directors,

I am writing to express my deep concern with your active support of Estrella Creamery.  I have been a long-time supporter of yours going back to the central co-op days.  But the issues with Estrella have me currently avoiding your store.

I see two fundamental values of the co-op at odds here.  The co-op wants to support small and local food producers.  Great.  But the co-op also has a mission to provide healthy products to its shoppers.  Estrella has a very troubling trail of documentation showing that their food has not been reliably safe.  But the co-op is choosing to place more weight in the local/community value than the health value.  I find this extremely troubling.  Having a pregnant wife, I refuse to shop at the co-op until this issue is resolved satisfactorily.  In fact I am actively discouraging my friends from shopping there as well.

I have heard many weak excuses for why Estrella’s food isn’t that dangerous.  For example “nobody has been proven to have gotten sick from our food” is a claim they’ve made.  This does little to bolster their case — tracking food-borne illnesses is difficult even for large national producers where dozens of illnesses help mark the trail.  Additionally it demonstrates naivete in how risks should be assessed.  It is analogous to saying “I never wear a seatbelt but I haven’t been hurt in a car accident.”

I’ve also heard arguments to the effect that people should have the right to choose to eat high quality but dangerous food.  That is a fine argument.  But it goes directly against the co-op’s mission to provide healthy food.  I loved the fact that the co-op avoids stocking food with high-fructose corn syrup and trans-fats.  I thought that by shopping with you I could spend less time worrying about what I was putting into my family’s bodies, even if it cost me a bit more.  Your vocal support of Estrella has destroyed my trust in your store to put my health first.  Clearly healthfulness is just one of several competing priorities for you.  I wish it weren’t.  Health is far more important to me than supporting the artisan lifestyle.

Please recognize that your own stated values are in conflict here.  Whether you realize it or not, your store is at a turning point in defining itself.  You are likely to lose customers either way you decide.  But I strongly encourage you to do so deliberately, with a sense of purpose.  Selfishly, so that I may again have a great store in the neighborhood that I trust, I hope you choose health.

Sincerely,

Leo Dirac

December is often a time of reflection, with good reason.  It's a natural opportunity to consider how things are progressing on a longer time-scale than we often do.  For me, 2009 was a year of making long-term commitments.  I made two huge ones, and I'm extremely happy with both of them.  The process of making these commitments kept me quite busy for almost the entire year.

Most significantly, I married the most amazing woman I know.  Maegan Ashworth and I permanently committed ourselves to each other on September 19th.  Our promises to each other were conversational, humorous, long-winded, personal and deadly serious.  We made them in the most public way we could manage, and were still sad to miss the company of many important people in our lives.  I could fill a book with everything I love about Maegan, but that's even more self-indulgent than I'm willing to be right now.  Suffice to say I am confident this will turn out to be one of the most important positive changes in my life ever.

The real planning for our wedding was compressed into just a couple months because it was difficult to focus on the ceremony while the other major event of the year was uncertain.  But in July we moved into a new house, ending 8 months of ambiguity about where we'd call home.  The process started in November 2008 when we first became interested in the house.  (Just before Maegan and I left for our bicycle tour across Vietnam, where we got engaged.)  It took months to reach agreement with the sellers and then months more to finish the process.  

I went in with a group of friends to buy the house together.  For years we had dreamed of living together in something like an "urban kibbutz".  I've liked that phrase ever since I read it applied to Barack & Michelle's early domestic life.  But for a more complete description of our situation, see our co-habitation blog.  (currently unpublished.  sorry.)

Getting a mortgage was particularly complicated.  The global financial crisis obviously did not help, but our situation was especially difficult.  Living comfortably with lots of good friends requires a big house, which means an expensive house.  In real-estate, expensive is also referred to as "jumbo" meaning that it's too much for any kind of government guarantee.  So banks would either need to make a long-term commitment to us themselves (a so-called "portfolio loan") or re-sell the mortgage to another bank on the secondary market.  We learned that the secondary market was "frozen" to use the popular vernacular, probably at about the same time as one particular bank which had all but committed to giving us a loan.  Another complication was that we needed 3 unrelated applicants to demonstrate our collective ability to pay back the debt, which was unusual enough to make many mid-crisis banks feel extra skittish.  I spent a large part of 2009 working on different aspects of how to finance this house.

Happily the stars aligned one evening when I was walking over to the house of my then-future, now-current roommates.  It was quite common for me at the time to walk those several blocks to sign yet another thick stack of papers to give to some agent or broker or other helpful professional.  Along the way I noticed a four-leafed clover in the grass, and picked it up.  In grade school I spent a surprisingly large amount of my recesses scanning the lawn for these botanical mutants, and once had quite an eye for finding them.  So it wasn't an unusual or significant event for me, but it had been years since I'd found one.  We taped the clover onto the application-du-jour which was going to a small local bank, in an act that signified frustration, exhaustion and powerlessness more than hope.  This bank ended up financing our house.

So that took up most of my year.  Trying to buy a house for about the first half, with moving and settling.  Then a wedding followed by a fabulous honeymoon.

http://www.yellowpagesgoesgreen.org/stop-yellow-pages/

and stop the unsolicited deliver of unwanted phone books.  Even if recycled, these books waste resources through paper processing, transportation and the recycling process which produces a lower quality paper, supported by inefficient advertising.

While I’m on the subject, if you haven’t tried Google SMS, it’s a great way to look things up.  Just send a text to 466453 ("GOOGLE") with the name of the business you want, and a location specified in writing or zip-code and it’ll respond with what you’re looking for.  It does all sorts of other good things too.  Works on all phones.  I’m a big fan.

Steve Martin was very excited to get the new phone book because his name in it meant he was somebody.  But in 2007 when 10 pounds of dead tree show up on my front porch, I’m just annoyed.  The phone company wants to deliver this to me because their advertising rates are based on the number of phone books they deliver.  It doesn’t matter that there is zero chance I will even open the thing.  I take it straight from my porch to the recycling bin.  Like many things, the internet has made these objects obsolete for many of us.  But the old business model tries to hang on anyway.

So I decided to do the planet a favor and help support the robolucion and try to get them to stop sending me these things.  I called…

…which was printed on the front of the bag, and after navigating their phone tree managed to speak to somebody who was happy to take my name off their distribution list.  I encourage you all to do the same. It was painless.

The conference is small and invitation only, and pretty much everybody there was happy to be invited to spend a weekend with such a carefully chosen group of thought-leaders.  I was personally quite honored and surprised to be invited back this year because last year it was made quite clear that we shouldn’t expect to be invited back since keeping fresh opinions around is important for the function of the event.

This year I met far more people than last year, and felt much more comfortable striking up a conversation with whomever happened to be standing next to me.  Part of that is of course my own attitude, but based on others’ comments it sounded like a lot of people had similar experiences.  Several people remarked publicly at how uncharacteristically social they felt.

I suspect that a big contributor to this effect was a comment that Tim made on the first day during introductions.  Tim said to not just talk to your existing friends, and that we were all more likely to get invited back if we were more social with strangers.  He said that we were all invited for a reason, and so we all had interesting ideas to share.  This concept helped me break down shyness and intimidation barriers.  Later Tim made an analogy to making new synapses in the global brain.  (I rather like the idea of being a neuron in some huge hive mind.  I’m excited to read Toby Segaran’s upcoming book on collective intelligence, and really enjoyed meeting him this weekend.)

If the causal relationship I’m hypothesizing here is real, I see it as a great example of the economic principal that incentives effect behavior, and more specifically how small incentives can shift social dynamics.  I didn’t get a chance to ask Tim how deliberate or off-hand that comment was, but I’ll encourage him to repeat it next year.

I’d like to take a few moments out of my busy schedule to apologize in advance to anybody expecting a polished coherent lecture from me.  I decided to take an extra class at school this quarter, and midterms are on us in a big way.  That combined with a great wilderness first aid class that took up my entire weekend, I’ve been averaging less than 5 hours of sleep each night for the last week, and it’s starting to limit my critical thinking abilities.

This format is also completely absurd.  But I think that’s part of the idea.  My friend Barry is taking a rather sensible approach of repeating a few slides with minor variations — a sensible cop out if you ask me!

Still, I encourage everybody to come.  It’s starts at 6:30 PM at CHAC which is at 12th and Pinke.  It’s going to be a fun information-rich geeky thought-provoking chaotic time.  For my loopy part, I’m embracing the chaos.  Go team!

The last Ignite Seattle event was tons of fun and highly educational.  A really good crowd of people — a great way to meet like-minded geeks in town that you didn’t know existed.  I wrote about the bridge breaking competition.  There will be another Make Magazine competition this time around, but I won’t spoil the surprise.  Brady and Bre have promised us more space since it was so packed last time around.

So if you’re in town and want to hear me blather, come by the CHAC next Tuesday, February 13th at 8:30 pm for talks.  (Or even better, at 6:30 for the Make Contest which should be rad.)  Hope to see y’all there!

What is Dodgeball?

If your friends have discovered dodgeball, I’d guess you’re probably in one of three states:

• Infatuated with this neato service that broadcasts SMS text messages to your friends when you go out
• Wondering what your friends are always doing with their phones under the table and what the big deal is
• Sick of dodgeball spam to the point of being about to cancel it, or having already done so

For those of you lucky enough to have never experienced dodgeball, here’s how it works: every time you go to a bar or something like that, you send a text message to dodgeball telling it where you are.  Then dodgeball broadcasts that out to all your friends.  You can similarly send out non-location messages like "Anybody want to see a movie tonight?"  As a dodgeball user the result is that most evenings you get some (sometimes several dozen) text messages about what your friends are doing or thinking.  So many, in fact, that you will likely start to take the buzzing in your pocket less seriously than you used to.  At this point the service’s name and logo start to make some sense:

You see an innocent guy who’s just been hit in the back of the head with a ball.  Again.  It’s hurts.  It’s not much fun.  But at least he’s used to it.  And for some reason that he doesn’t really understand himself, he continues to put up with it.  Seek it out even.  The SMS noise on my phone now sounds like the "Bonk!" of a cherry ball striking the base of the skull.

Dodgeball Abuse

Knowing that your friends are hanging out at a bar is great.  That’s what it’s about.  These kinds of dodgeballs are intrinsic invitations to come hang out.  But if your friends are at all like mine, pretty soon you’ll start getting dodgeballs reporting that they are "on a small boat in the middle of lake serene" or "in a seaplane over Puget Sound."  These kinds of posts are much more bragging than invitations to join since clearly there’s no way to get where they are.  Private parties, distant airports and obscenely expensive restaurants are similar.  Also, sending messages like "my parents are driving me crazy" or "I’m stuck in traffic" really don’t add value for your friends.  Unless you’ve got a crush on the sender, they’re just whiny and annoying.

Several times in recent months, my social mailing lists have been filled with pleas for restraint in sending this kind of dodgeball, with only limited results.  Generally the consensus seems to be that you can always cancel the service if you don’t like it.  I find this somewhat disappointing because I think there is a good way to use the service. 

I consciously choose to put up with the perpetual annoyance for a couple of reasons.  Most importantly, the extra messages aren’t much of a burden for me — I’m not charged for them and my phone is "smart" enough to handle them.  There’s also some entertainment value in keeping in closer touch this way.  But most importantly it’s because about once a month I’m involved with a positive serendipitous social interaction from the service the way it was intended.  I’ll be walking down the street and my pocket buzzes and tells me that a friend I don’t see much is a block away, so I drop in and say hi, or vice versa.  That makes it worth while for me.

Managing Dodgeballs

A lot of these problems could be avoided by dodgeball adding a few more personalization features around delivery.  Right now you can completely block a user.  The so-called ex-girlfriend feature allows a user to appear to be your friend in the social network, but not exchange any messages with them.  This is a good way of dealing with friends who send lots of dodgeball spam.  Another mechanism that some of my friends have chosen is to have all dodgeballs delivered via email to a dedicated address.

But a better way for those of us with "smart" phones would be to segment which of our friends’ dodgeballs get delivered via SMS and which get delivered via e-mail.  Then certain A-list friends could actually send you text messages, and everybody else’s dodgeballs would get queued up in a place where you could see them, but wouldn’t get interrupted by them. 

Until the newly indocrinated googlers add this, I think there are some guidelines we can all follow to dodgeball responsibly.

Proper Dodgeball Etiquette

It’s become quickly obvious to my group of friends that the only obviously appropriate time to dodgeball is to report your location when others are welcome to join you.  (My friends have collectively chosen to ignore this guideline about as fast as they identified it, but that’s a different issue.)  Saying you’re at a bar or a concert, or even "in bed" are all totally valid dodgeballs, if used when others are welcome.  Sending messages like "drinks for happy hour?" or even "the sunset is absolutely gorgeous" are also completely socially responsible, IMHO.

The question of dodgeballing on a date has lingered as an interesting one.  Some of my friends like to dodgeball as a record of the places they’ve been.  But if you’re hanging out with just one person, do you really want company?  Rose, social genius that she is, figured out the right protocol for that one when she asked me "should we dodgeball?"  Recognizing that a dodgeball is an invitation for company, she asked me if I felt like inviting others to join us semi-serendipitously, or if I’d rather protect our hard-scheduled time as one-on-one. 

Really, asking first should be the standard protocol for dodgeballing.  When you’re with a large group of people at a bar, there might not be a point.  But if you’re over at a friend’s house for dinner or a movie, asking first is the responsible thing to do.  Otherwise whatstheirface might show up.  ;)

Now go forth and dodgeball responsibly.

Why?  To slow down traffic of course!  How does paint on the ground cause people to drive slower?  I’m not really sure, but it sure does.  I see cars slow down and even try to "go around" whatever this thing is in the middle of the street.  I think the fact that it’s so unusual is enough to make drivers question what’s going on.  It reminds me of the uncomfortable feeling I get when I see a car driving the wrong way down a one-way street: "Something’s wrong here.  I’m not sure what’s happening.  I’d better slow down because who knows what will happen next." 

I understand they’ve done two of these now.  And I understand they have further plans for this intersection.  If these street murals become commonplace they probably won’t be so effective.  But for now it’s a beautifully creative and constructive way to address a local community problem.  And now that I know about the fantastic group in my neighborhood, I’m looking forward to participating in future projects.  Go team!