In a community where a single dinner easily results in nine newly registered domain names, there are bound to be some projects that fall by the wayside. Not everything is permanent and that’s ok. However, while some projects may fail for reasons outside our control and while others were never meant to last, there are many that are viable but have been abandoned by their founders.

When our personal goals are no longer aligned with the things we are working on, we should be able to leave them. But our departure should not automatically relegate these projects to the cemetery of broken hopes and dreams. There are often people in our community happy to pick up where we left off and it often takes just a few small interventions to ensure that the endeavours we poured our heart and soul into will go on to outlive our involvement.

Unfortunately, once we are about to abandon a project, our motivation to onboard new stewards is rarely at its peak. Instead, ‘onboard new steward’ is quickly added to our ‘should-dos’ - the bottom parts of our to-do lists where ‘drink less’ and ‘sleep more’ also reside. Better, therefore, to plan for our disappearing act in advance, at the very moment we conceive of a project.

So, how can we ensure our projects live to see another steward? Following are a few things we could do to make sure that new collaborators can easily access the information and tools they need to contribute and/or become the new drivers of a project. I’m sure there are many other strategies that should be added and welcome any suggestions you may have!

One final note, when a project turns out to not be viable it makes sense to write up a post-mortem so that others with similar ideas could be inspired to take a different approach (i.e. learn from your mistakes).

• Passwords
  Store passwords in a location that is both safe and easy to reach, so all team members have access to them: https://www.commonkey.com/. In addition, instead of creating a bunch of passwords, it may be easier to use a single Google account to login to other services.
• Github repos
  Software we build should sit in an organisation Github repository, which multiple collaborators can access. The repo should have clear and up-to date instructions for how to install and run the program. For instance, you could set a monthly reminder to see if the instructions are still valid.
• Cloud storage
  Do not email documents back and forth, or share them in slack channels where they may become hard to find later. Instead, have a Google or Dropbox folder that stores all the files. There’s two main ways to make sure files are findable:
  1. A strict and transparent protocol for where to store files. This could include templates for how to write memos and documentation (depending on how relevant this is for your organisation).
  2. A master document that serves as an index and links to all the relevant files
• Contacts
  Make sure contact information is shared with everyone (for instance in a spreadsheet, or a common email account)
• Email
  Only email from team accounts, so there’s a easily accessible history of past communication.
• Design
  Keep a one pager with all the color codes, fonts, logos etc in your Google or Dropbox folder.
• Process
  Trello makes it easy to see what tasks are prioritised and which ones are being worked on by who.

How to make yourself dispensable was originally published in Embassy Network on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Over the years, the embassy community has been lucky to generate enough funds to put energy into projects we really care about. We have used the funds to create 2K in subsidized housing funds for people who need it, we have created a Solidarity Fund, we have organized free anti-violence & conflict resolution training, we have raised $800 in funds for therapy for those who need it but can’t afford it. We have helped fund security deposits for people in need (moving costs are abominable when you are living on the breadline), we have put 1000’s of dollars towards legal fees for our Second Life humans. This has been one of the ways that through collective living, we have managed to be greater than the sum of our parts, and this is how we do it.

Ceci n’est pas un hotel ❤

Our medium term guest program (32 consecutive nights or over) serves many functions, which I consider to be integral to our project. Guests coming in keep fresh ideas and life blood flowing through the place. They help ensure that the embassy is a node in a network with genuine flow, not a house with closed doors. We form deep bonds with many of our guests, and so many of them go on to be founding members of new and other spaces. Thus our guest program ensures that there is communal life blood flowing through the great artery that is the commune. Moreover, our guests really hold us accountable to what we say we are doing. They often want to question our carbon footprint, hear about our decentralised systems and governance, they ask us the probing questions that we need to be probed on, and have great ideas about how to solve them.

In addition to this, our guest program serves as an income generation stream. Our financial model is roughly such that residents cover the cost of running the commune, and surplus from our guest stays goes towards our social impact funds. In practice this isn’t always the case, at times we under budget / over spend for the commune, and income from the guest stays subsidizes things. We’ve had some ‘ceiling falling in’ disasters that have cost a fair bit and didn’t leave time for us to save, and in those times, having guest income and savings has been a real bonus.

We use a platform called cobudget for this collaborative funding. Collaborative funding is a way for people to influence decision making about how collective funds are distributed. By giving decision making control over the budget to the people who put those resources there, we all share control and responsibility for how those resources are used in a fair, functional way [You can read more about collaborative funding in Jessy’s post here].

Communal income generation is amazing (totally different from work)

What has been surprisingly moving for me is the process of collaboratively generating communal income. That is, collaborating to generate funds that you know isn’t going to be spent on yourselves, but on people and projects that really need it. This is an amazing way to garner agency back in a disempowered world, and to be able to shape the world around us.

I found that I enjoy the process of curating the guest experience even if that is doing laundry and making beds, in a way that I do not when working in a hotel, knowing that my time and labour is going to fund meaningful projects. I find joy and meaning in ensuring guests feel welcome and are also questioning both their and our norms through their stays with us. This is a wildly different subjective experience from usual alienated labour that many of us engage in for our means to earn a living. I say this to make the clear distinction between a commune paying someone to do a job so that they have the means to pay their bills and survive, and a commune paying someone one to perform a task that supports communal income generation in order to engage communal impact and empower others to do the same.

Then of course, the process of collaborative spending is also wonderful. But more than that, the process of having collaborative impact, is deeply meaningful for many of us. So here then, are a few of the projects that we have funded over the last few years, with the income that our much treasured guests:

Thank you to all the guests, that have come through our doors, and have contributed to these projects:

Empathy & conflict resolution workshop // Funding Target : $750 // Accepted Funding : $547

“We are hosting a two day workshop on Mindful Communication and Conflict Resolution at the embassy this weekend. The facilitators are doing it bc they believe in the anti-violence training so much, but I’d really like to be able to pay them properly.I am collecting donations but would love some more so that we can make this sustainable.

Event blurb Mindful Communication and Conflict Resolution is something wall need to work on. Our facilitators have been trained as Alternatives to Violence Project (AVP) facilitators, and aim to will bring a new and distinctive style of workshop to the community. About Micheal A one-time graduate of MIT, Michael Brodheim ended up spending nearly 35 years in prison. While there, he encountered a conflict resolution program which forever changed his life. He emerged from prison a better person, not bitter in the least. One of his goals in founding MiCore is to create a prison-to-employment pipeline for formerly incarcerated men and women who, like himself, have been trained as conflict resolution facilitators.”

Prison Books // Funding Target : $300 // Accepted Funding : $53

“I am spending a fair bit on sending books into jails and prisons, and would love some help! These are a mix of their personal requests and also those listed on our Prison Syllabus”

Embassy Free Store // Funding Target : $80 // Accepted Funding : $80

“Coat hangers to be installed on walls outside of the embassy to freely distribute clothing (from lost and found and other items)”

Dinner funds for the John Muir School // Funding Target : $100 // Accepted Funding : $100

“John Muir students and their families need either a $100 donation so they can buy ingredients for Back to School night. This will buy 10 lbs. of salad mix 12 lbs. of carrots 1 case of mixed bell peppers 1 case of mixed citrus 1 case of cucumbers”

Contribution to the EN Solidarity Fund // Funding Target : $500 // Accepted Funding : $369

“The following are priorities of the Solidarity Fund are

1. To create a financial commons where residents can come together organically to support each other financially
2. To alleviate the stress of financial hardship and provide a supporting framework for self-reliant recovery
3. To disperse the risk and uncertainty of lending
4. To replace the oppressive mechanisms and agreements of lending with unwavering trust and acceptance

The Embassy Network Solidarity Fund is a completely open and transparent pool of money that anyone can access. Anyone may contribute, and anyone may take. This allows individuals to write their own rules around contribution and taking. The fund will have two stewards from each participating house to facilitate the transactions. The recommended concept behind contributing to the fund is that it is a donation to the commons. You are allowed to withdraw it in the future if the money is available, but it may not be. The recommended concept behind taking from the fund is as a loan up to $1,000. This fund is able to be perpetual if everyone uses it to overcome temporary hardship and pay it forward.”

Subsidized Rent Fund //Funding Target : $1,000 // Accepted Funding : $1,000

“I thought it would be nice to be able to offer a subsidized bunk for people who wish to stay with us but can’t afford it. We’ve done this a few times in the past and was previously been used. If we can do this regularly, then we can build up a little reserve for this!”

Second Life @the Embassy // Funding Target : $150 //Accepted Funding : $150

“As some of you know we’ve been building home with the Prisoner Rentry Network. So far this is a twice monthly D & D night, which has been really wonderful. The formerly incarcerated people (a.k.a. Second Life humans) have started coming to our group muse events and lectures also. I’d love a small budget just to order dinner together, buy resources for them and so on.”

Help Zhenya Fight the Venezuelan Food Crisis //Funding Target : $500 // Accepted Funding : $500

“I am working on a farming project in Caracas that will help set up rooftop gardens for families struck by famine — so they can grow their own food. Venezuelans have been living with hideous food shortages for the past 18mo and the government has halted all food imports. Urban communities have suffered the biggest impact of this politically created famine.

I am going to Caracas on August 1st with an organization called Regenerate to do nutritional assements and help local physicians address malnutrition in the urban slums. I will be advising Regenerate and local communities about the types of food that should be grown to meet the nutritional needs of the population.

As close friends, you may understand that this topic is near to my heart as I myself grew up amidst a severe food crisis in the former Soviet Union/Russia. Thank you so much for your support!”

Therapy fund for those who need it // Funding Target : $400 // Accepted Funding : $400

“There are lots of people in our community who could really benefit from some professional care but don’t have insurance. In the past, this has been paid for by housemates in an informal way, here I am asking for $400 for a specific person in need which I think will pay for 2 months of therapy.” [we did this twice, hence the $800 in total]

Creating an Anarchist Library // Funding Target : $200 // Accepted Funding : $200

“The idea would be to select 10–15 books from the book collective on Haight and to host a remote library in the house. My hope is that it will be educational and interesting, create awareness for guests around some of the things we read and study as a group, and will also drum up awareness about the book collective”

Communal income generation was originally published in Embassy Network on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The nineteenth and twentieth centuries witnessed the development of unsustainable modes of meeting needs. With industrial development came increased expectations concerning quality of life. Houses got bigger, families increasingly expected to possess their own plot of land, and the resultant growing need for transportation yielded autonomous and mechanically-powered cars. In the twenty-first century, ecological and economic constraints on this expansion became necessary. How can we preserve (or even advance) the quality of life while reducing the footprint and cost of our enjoyment?

Ironically, the things that were meant to make us happy (our own homes, our own cars, private gardens etc) by giving us generous amounts of space have left us isolated and alone, raising the barriers to fulfilling social existence. By living together in groups, we arguably come close to solving many of these issues around atomisation and social isolation. In fact, for many of us, living in high density and nomadicity, tends to overcrowd our social lives, and we must face the fact that we need different ways of operating, in order to preserve elements of the private sphere that we need, whilst not prioritizing less useful aspects of privacy.

Our communes provide us with access to unique types of spaces, which in contrast to the homogeneity that results from the mass-production of our built environment, and in turn gives us access to vast degrees of different types of common space. With this veritable surplus of space, we can explore the ways in which the way we structure home modulates our ways of existing together.

Is the single-family home, the last vestige of a space that we can define as ‘private-private?’

https://medium.com/@heyjudesue/private-private-spaces-and-private-public-spaces-ba1c15cf690a#.m7ziwjedi

Communities within the Embassy Network are interested in the explorations of this kind, and at the Embassy SF and Red Victorian, these kinds of explorations have been underway over the last year. One of the things that happens when you live in social abundance, is that you quickly realise the value of private time. As we have all adapted to ways of living together we have also discovered new ways of using space. We have actively been experimenting with the dissolution of private space, and returning much of what we tend to think of as private property, to the commons.

Houses within the embassy network are specifically interested in exploring how the use of space changes our behavior, and how our behavior changes the way we use space. Here we describe some of the ways that we have done this.

1. Private and common space

Making private space common

In our early days as a community, we at the Embassy SF together read Ursula le Guin’s ‘The Dispossessed’. Inspired by the ways that the novel describes the allotment of private space according to needs, rather than according to principles of ownership, we decided to try and be conscious of when we use possessional language. The longest standing example of this, is that we gave resident rooms names, and referred to rooms by name, rather than by ownership. For clarity, we encouraged people to say ‘the room which X person most often uses’. We took all the door locks off the doors, and encouraged people to leave their doors open during the day. Unused rooms are made available for use by others when there is no one in there, for reading, for phone calls, for hanging out, and for sleeping or taking partners (a couple of residents live in shared rooms).

Rendering private space common

Similarly, we have thought about what it would look like to keep personal items in common space — communal wardrobe as an example of how we can create new norms around sharing through space. Our communal wardrobe is not a freebies box, the items in there are much loved items, that people wish to retain access to, and have maintained. So this is certainly a test of our trust, especially in light of the fact that our houses have regular guests coming though. However, so far so good.

In both of our spaces, we have been able to experiment with the creation of unexpected private spaces in common areas. At the red victorian, public utility spaces have been converted into private nooks, for reading or for intimate conversation, that are shared by all. These sit in easily accessible locations throughout the building, and yet are hidden from obvious sight, meaning that whilst all have access, it is unlikely that one using them will be disturbed.

2. Private and common time exploration

As communal living starts to solve many of our most pressing issues around social isolation, we instead find ourselves facing different issues. For us, one of these has been, how to protect private time, without depending on retreating to private space?

“Public-public spaces are not ‘spaces with no rules.’ In fact, public-public spaces are often designed to have their inhabitants move, act, and hang out in a very specific way. Some of this is reinforced through the physical architecture of the space, and sometimes through social codes.”

Our home is often used as a commons; we host discussions open to the public that welcome aspects of the ‘public sphere’ in to what would normally be considered private space. The result is that our commons is busy. At any one time there is a diverse set of people present, some of whom are present to delve into discourse, some of whom are retreating into quite hours of their day. How to navigate in these new and complex social waters?

One approach that we have tried is to set norms about how to engage with other people during certain hours. Between 6 and 8pm in one part out home, we delineate as quiet time; the norm is ‘feel free to join but please don’t speak to me’. Another approach spearheaded by a fellow space is to use visual markers to indicate that whilst one might be inhabiting common space, they are interested in preserving their private time. We have attempted to use this also by providing a set of ear defenders that serve as indicators that, when worn, say ‘please don’t interrupt me’.

Perhaps there are other, more comfortable or less invasive ways — perhaps just setting the norm of checking in during conversation, that someone wishes to continue.

Our explorations continue..

Experimenting with space and time was originally published in Embassy Network on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

In the middle of last year, the Red Vic was running as a half-home and half-hotel. We had residents living there as well as a hotel manager, (the incredible Brittany Ferrero, who steered the great ship Red Vic for two years and built out so much of the rich culture that remains today) and a number of work trade positions that helped run the hotel side of things. The collective had already gone through the earlier phases of governance shifting.

For various reasons, in September 2016 it was clear that a shape shift was in store for the Red Victorian. At that time, we were eight residents, four work trade hosts, and the rest of the spaces were hotel guests coming through on our custom built booking system (thank you Jessy Kate!). Whilst the Red Vic was culturally thriving, it was not financially surviving and with Brittany wanting to move onto other things, and it was the natural time for change. In a group huddle one evening in the backyard of the Embassy (our sibling house), all residents, hosts and lovers of the Red Vic gathered to plan the next phase.

The options on the table seemed to be either we lean towards full blown mega hotel, or we hunker down and birth a Haight St mega commune. Whilst both options got a lot of air time and generated a great deal of excitement, the Red Vic was home to many and an almost unanimous vote led us to commit to mega commune. We gave ourselves a November 1st start date — one month to move from a centralized system of governance over this part-hotel, part-home, to a 20 person collectively run commune.

It was energizing to see residents rally around this. A core team of people gathered who put their names down to take responsibility for making this shift happen, and this team began beavering about putting things into motion. The core team comprised a supportive structure (as opposed to an authoritative one), the goal of which was to steward and manifest the vision of the collective into being. Lots of people have asked me over the year past, ‘who’s in charge’? We have been explicitly moving from a somewhat centralized model to a decentralized one, which means that the core team is here to take responsibility for making sure that we pay the bills each month, that we have enough money to do that, that we can all eat and so on. Their role would speak to what is and isn’t possible financially speaking, but were not there to dictate how things should go. There is still no single person who knows how to run all the things. Some of us have access to the finances and bank accounts, others know how to change the door locks and make changes to the website or order food. Roles are flexible and dynamic, even if sometimes it takes a while for them to shift. While we all contribute in different ways, and to different degrees, with perhaps differing levels of voluntary responsibility, this community is and would remain, cocreated by all the individuals in it.

In the coming weeks, spreadsheets with participation levels were shared (thank you Autumn!), pros and cons listed, governance structures proposed, a flurry of people started working on financial models for the future of the Red Victorian. We spread the word that we were transitioning and we screened and searched for the right residential contributors for this next phase. We went from seven residents to twenty two in just four weeks, transitioning a large proportion of the hotel space into residential space. We dissolved the management structure, and cut back on hotel operations.

We built a financial model that leant a bit of the hotel side of things, to make the finances viable for residents, but with the hope that, any extra income generated by the remaining guest spaces or events would form our social impact funds. By shutting down most of the hotel we have gone from 58% guest occupancy to nearly full, all the time.

Development of the Hive

Six months on, the Red Vic has been a veritable hive of activity. With more residents, the building has been totally transformed. Honoring it’s history as an art space, the corridors and rooms are a trove of experimental decor. The third floor boasts a resident lounge with loft spaces and hang out zones on multiple levels, an indoor sauna and DJ booth. The winding corridors are filled with contrasting light sources and portraits of the residents. The back stairs have been transformed into an accelerationist staircase — a monument to the demise of capitalism. Utility closets have been turned into secret wood paneled reading nooks and harry potter closets. The main space has continued to evolve, and residents have build an led breakfast bar, a DJ booth for instant raves, an indoor beach and some beautiful bike storage space. They have built speakers and a bubble machine out on the the street, so they can host spontaneous parties for passers by who stop to dance outside under the pink lights of the Red Vic store front. Residents have built out a bunch of beautiful loft beds using the amazing Red Vic woodshop (courtesy of the amazing Kyle Stewart) and designs from Eric Rogers. The building feels like it’s alive, ever changing, ever breaking but always growing.

Development of the Swarm

More than this, residents have formed their own social processes, around accountability, participation and finances. These have been used with great effect, and have served to hold them all accountable to their shared agreements, to distribute financial responsibility and to ensure that they are able to emotionally look out for each other. They have created a thriving Citizenship system such that non-residential contributors can feel empowered to be more actively involved and use the space. We have explored living with younger people, taking on the amazing Felicity, who has only 13 years on this planet but the experience and wisdom of someone with much more. We have learnt about intergenerational living and hopefully have paved the way for more diversity in our residents in doing so. These developments have been remarkable to observe in just a matter of months.

“True consensual ownership is an evolutionary process, not something you install”.

Emotional ecology
The community has a steward of emotional ecology, who makes sure that emotional needs are being tended to, who assigns everyone a steward to go to if they are struggling. We have a captain of crucial conversations, who is an external party who’s role is to come in and figure out what conversations need to be had but aren’t being had, where the break points are, and to feed this back to the group. They are given permission to be able to say the hard things, and can feel safe in doing so without jeopardizing their sense of home.

Decentralised Finances — can it really work?

We have set up the finances so that each budget allocation has it’s own bank account and it’s own debit card. The residents look after the cards and cheques for these accounts and so have totally agency to spend their allocated funds as they wish, are are only held accountable by their peers. We loose the cards, fairly often :) but aside from this, it’s working nicely.

There is so much more that this group of people have created in their short time together. Mutual support circles, the critical hedonisms event series, a solidarity fund, and guest experiences. Between themselves, they are managing a hotel that brings in around 15K a month. There is no management, no one has final say on all things. This is a fully functioning decentralized collective.

The Red Vic is a forest, grown from the seeds of many generations of residents. On reflection, it seems that the breathing cycle of the Red Victorian is a six monthly one. Each six months another creaky breath is taken and the creature gambols forward a little further. Perhaps this is driven by the seasonal cycle of hotel guests, that fill up our beds in the summer, perhaps it’s something about the emotional boom and bust that comes with such a passionate project. But there are deep threads of continuity also — seeds sown by each generation of Red Victors still shape things deeply. Artwork from Grizzles is still scattered on the walls, murals from various residents, furniture and decor from previous Red Vic heavy weights. Chore allocation and participation structures proposed by Max inspired by the systems they have seen in the Berkeley coops, built on by many, iterated and honed.**

** This isn’t to say that all of this hasn’t been without hardship of course. In the last month, we’ve dealt with a lot, many of our processes and learnings have come with overcoming these struggles. I’ll be attempting to describe some of these hard things and learnings in a incoming post.

It’s been an honor to bear witness to this metamorphosis and I write this to pay tribute to all of those who contributed to this project, and to also to have it known, that indeed, a swarm of humans who haven’t known each other for very long at all, can drive a $54,000 a month project, and do so collectively, with great care and elegance. They have shown that they can protect their commons, all the while being open and inclusive, experimental and reflective, compassionate and assertive.

As I leave (I have three weeks left in the US), an even more remarkable event is taking place. Residents have self organized to take on liability for the project. Four residents will soon become officers of the Red Victorian LLC, and will share the responsibility of the longevity and viability of the project. Nothing could leave me happier than to leave seeing this evolutionary phase of the Red Vic - a mighty oscillating, evolving experiment in place, in social dynamics, in care, in critical thought and intentional living.

This collective, in all its phases and generations, has been a wonder to be part of. My heart soars at what this group are capable of doing and what the future holds for humans that will come to reside in the heart of the great Red Victorian.

Thank you to all that have made this possible — Jessy Kate, Brittany, Kyle, Molly, Jacob and so many more.

Support us here: https://www.patreon.com/redvic

The Red Victorian: A Metamorphosis in Governance, and so much more. was originally published in Embassy Network on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

We have a pervasive notion that excellence requires exclusivity. This probably comes from a time when opportunity really was scarce, and, as a result, did require some amount of exclusivity. We built not only institutions around that fact, but narratives. And after narratives, identities.

Today, access to opportunity is everywhere. Though it’s still far from being evenly distributed, so many people have access to being excellent, that the idea of it being exclusive— and more so, the constructed, institutionalized opportunities for cultivating and recognizing that excellence, vastly underrepresent those who are actually or possibly excellent.

One of the questions we try to explore at the Embassy SF is whether we can create an almost radically open community that still sets a high bar for excellence and ambition. People ask how we manage to maintain this “high bar,” or “choose only the best people,” and some even say they like the fact that it feels special; that they had to “apply” and that there was some mysterious process to that acceptance.

Opt-in Exclusivity, not Scarcity

The application process we have is actually about creating a new narrative around excellence.

Identify the conditions that make you excellent, and then surround yourself by people who will support and reinforce that. Be comfortable asking others to be excellent, and let them opt-in to that ask. At best, they’ll be inspired to Say Yes. At worst, they’re aware they can ask someone else to be excellent, in a way that’s more meaningful to them.

Believing you will find excellence in people requires taking some responsibility for finding it. When it comes to community building, my feeling and experience is that we all like to feel part of something, and holding the space for that “something” to be about excellence, is one of the simplest and most powerful things we can do. That’s the only, possibly special thing we do at the Embassy. “Possibly” special because, if it is, it shouldn’t be.

My old Crossfit gym is a great example of this. They set the bar high — like, make-you-cry-and-bleed type of high. This setting of the bar wasn’t for everyone, and some didn’t stick around. Moreover, not everyone who stayed actually met the bar that was set — most didn’t! But you can bet your money, though it was sometimes through gritted teeth and self-doubt, that we were able to do more pushups and pullups, and lift more weight, than we ever had at another gym.

That is to say, that in these times of (relative) opportunity and accessibility, creating scarcity around excellence is one of the worst social myths we continue to propagate. And while celebration is an important ceremony for human societies, it’s not for some finite group to achieve an arbitrary level of excellence as deemed by the Association of X funded by Y, but that each of us has a net positive delta from where we started — that the overall state of world is better than it was before.

That can only be achieved if we let go of the notion that excellence is scarce, and realize that it is as simple as asking it of people, and holding space for it to happen.

Excellence is everywhere and it’s looking for a Home was originally published in Embassy Network on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

One of the Red Vic Lectures last year, was given by an attorney, Jared Rudolf, on the History of the California Prison system. It was a fascinating talk and as we all got into the questions towards the end, it became clear that some of the attendees, were themselves formerly incarcerated individuals. They were there speaking from their perspective and found a space where they were heard. As we got to talking about their experience, I asked them what they were lacking. At that point, their answer was ‘a place to be, and to build community’. The thing they asked for was a place to play Dungeons and Dragons, a game that had been their primary form of escape and relief during their years inside. Now on the outside, facing all the pressures of life, they had nowhere to play. Being part of a network of intentional communities, space is abundant, rendering this a simple thing to solve. And so it was that the ‘Second Life’ project was borne: our attempt to create community together, a collaboration between the Embassy Network and The Prisoner Reentry Network. We gather together each week to play. The games are attended by formerly incarcerated lifers, residents and community members. And no one need ask who is who. We leave our backgrounds at the door and join each other at the table as equals. We build life together. We cook, eat, talk about the struggles of life. I am still learning to play D&D (a truly remarkable experience). Despite the vast differences in some of our experiences, there is much common thinking, and shared strife also. We became part of the same tribe.

The games were the platform by which we got to know each other, but the group started to attend our other free events, salons and lectures. They came to, and took part in our story telling events, and became loved and valued active members not just passive participants. When Trump was elected, they joined us in our protest reading of Foucault’s “Society Must Be Defended”. It was, and remains, a beautiful, reciprocal growth process.

This is not philanthropy, this is a step toward healing the rifts of a lifetime of separation, that began so early in all of our lives. Whilst most of us were finishing school and deciding where (not whether to, but where) to go to university, these humans were facing not only the tragic ethical consequences of their actions, but also the full force of the criminal justice system. And they faced it alone. Most of them went inside as teenagers, and receiving life sentences, spent around 20 years inside, before being one of the lucky few, who were eventually found suitable for parole. The chances of a new life, a second life, are abominable.

Mutual Aid

This month our community has been tested. Two members of our Second Life group, violated their parole. This is so easy to do, especially when you have been inside for 20 years and are not given any guidance on how to exist in the world, not only under the everyday struggle to survive, but also under the extreme conditions of parole. The terms of parole are strict and put them in a highly precarious position. The consequences of parole violations are a return to prison, to serve out the rest of their indefinite term life sentences. In terms of freedom, these are the precariat.

The first time one of our group violated the terms of their parole, I was distraught. They had recovered from cancer just a month before. I was with them in hospital as they had their chemo pump removed a few days after Christmas Day. We watched Harry Potter on the hospital TV and quietly breathed a sigh of relief. For him, being released from prison and then from cancer, this was a second, second chance. When I heard he was in jail for his violation, I wrote letters to the judge, hoping for another chance. But I had no idea how to navigate the court system. After a three hour hearing, the judge sent him back to serve out his sentence. He is now back in Deuel prison.

The second time it happened, a month later, we were ready. We had our letters for the judge prepared, and the community rose up. We found out how to contact the public defender and around 20 of us turned up to the first hearing. We raised the money that we needed in the end to get a private attorney, as the consequences of failing were too high — a return to life sentence no less. It was clear from the judge’s response that people showing up to court, writing letters, made all the difference. ‘Injustice happens in empty courtrooms’, Jared Rudolf of the Prisoner Reentry Network told us.

The situation is ongoing and devastating. Not only for these two people that we love, but for everyone in their position, and for the people that love them.

What can we do?

Put into an incredibly precarious path through life, with only tenuous freedom, this group has so much to offer, yet their continued presence with us is fragile. These are issues that should be dealt with by the state, but that can be provided for by the community. Our intentional communities are a rich ecology of emotional, logistical and financial support. We run mutual aid support circles, that are free, open and welcome to all. We have a solidarity fund for those who need it. We have a continually renewed fund for therapy for people who don’t have health insurance, and for subsidized rent. Our tribe has social workers, medics, lawyers, people with experience of mental health issues and sobriety, all building together. As a collective, there is a lot of mutually provided support and accountability, that might be something this group of humans can contribute to and participate in.

Learnings

What has this done for us? We’ve learnt so much from this group of people. Each has a unique form of wisdom, drive, commitment. A deep sense of morality and ethics, cultivated partly out of a need to take responsibility for harms by their hand (something many of us never learn), partly out of personal suffering. A respect for the process of forgiveness, whether applied to ourselves or to others. For me personally, I have discovered a genuine sense of shared values, a critique of the system, a healthy inquiry into the forces that led us to where we are. As a collective, this collaboration has brought us together in a new way, with a shared goal of fighting for this group and a manifestation of our fight for all people.

The future holds what I hope to be a collective vision for our work with this group of people, and with the Prisoner Reentry Network, who are doing such incredibly important work. We will continue to build community for those who want it, and create spaces for garnering agency, for learning and co-creation. Our way of life, and the riches it brings, must be open to all who are ready to contribute to it. We are looking to begin raising money to employ formerly incarcerated people to build this project out. If you want to support us in this, please do get in touch.

What have I learnt? Go and do the thing that you feel is right, even if it feels alien. See the people that the world is keeping from you. Build life with those people, remember that you are the same humans, just dealt different cards. Fight for people, the way that you hope they’d fight for you, and fight even harder to change the circumstances that meant they needed to be defended in the first place. They might be the people that you change the world with.

“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.” — Margaret Mead

Donate to the Prisoner Reentry Network here

- For Bert, and for Raven ❤ -

Second Life at the Embassy was originally published in Embassy Network on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Why doocratise?

Not only did we want to minimise information and communication overload, we also felt an appeal to the fluidity and agency that doocracy encourages. Some would argue that we currently exist in an “age of total bureaucratization”[2] and we wished to resist excess legislation. We wanted to try agreements and norms that minimised barriers to doing.

“Bureaucracy comprises one of the “instruments through which the human imagination is smashed and shattered.”- Graber, ‘The Utopia of Rules’s

This approach markedly reduces overhead to taking action. It minimises the stages between thought and action, and allows people who are enthusiastic to act, leeway to do so. We have found that making space for decisions made in other ways that by-committee often leads to more creative solutions; group decision making can lead to diluted outcomes, that contain elements of group opinions, but are not quite satisfactory in their entirely, to anyone [For related resources on doocracy, see Adhocracy].

The Embassy is an intentional community filled with busy people, and our aim is that through living together, we reduce the amount of domestic time required to live, and in doing so create more time for socially minded endeavors. Therefore it is crucial that we not use that time for too much inward facing processes, and for us doocracy goes some way in minimising this.

What is perhaps distinct about our version of doocracy, is that our process is not structureless — we depend on communication and transparency. Before doing, we ask people to highlight the issue, propose a solution and the time frame in which they are going to put this solution in place. This way if anyone wishes to contribute they can, but in a way that doesn’t hold up action. We have found that this added aspect of communication and invitation to participate increases the likelihood of the group celebrating the action that you have taken, as opposed to feeling resentful that change has happened without consent.

Embassy doocracy
Over the following year, we thrived under doocracy. At the same time we encountered a number of issues that the doocracy failed to address (see our failure modes below). Despite the fact that some interesting institutions operate under this mode, there is relatively little written about doocracy. Here I aim to touch on some of the learnings that we have come to.

1. Transparency means letting people know what’s happening, in a way that they can get involved if they want, and if not, allows you to proceed knowing they are informed.
2. Communication means inviting feedback before taking action.
3. Reversibility — The threshold of taking doocratic action is reversibility; that is, only take unilateral action if your action is reversible, and you are happy for others to iterate on or disagree with your decision. Otherwise, wait for feedback and consent.

Precursors for a successful doocracy
As time has gone on, our doocracy has evolved, the process has become smoother and cleaner as trust is built between us. One thing that I have noticed is that for smooth and respectful doocractic processes to occur, the group needs to have a good degree of trust in each other (by trust, here I mean social buy in — for example — ‘even though this action might not have been how I would have done things, or my preference, I am happy that someone has done this, and respect how they have done it’). It also thrives when members believe that each person is trying to to the best thing by the group, and not trying to use doocracy to make self serving decisions. Doocracy is ‘centered around respecting the work from those who do it. How you get to this point is hard to say, but my advice is to overtly make this state of trust a goal for early community building. Some have suggested that a period of consensus based or collaborative decision making are necessary precursors to doocracy, and perhaps it is in this phase that trust is built.

Setting some norms can really help with freeing up the decision and action space for more interesting things. For us, we try to limit ‘rules’, and stick to guidelines for a healthy commons. These include seemingly smaller issues such as ‘always do your dishes/ leave all spaces better than how you found them’, all the way to more serious guidelines such as our attitude to consent.

Experiments with collaborative decision making

We have been experimenting with participatory decision making for larger or irreversible decisions. In participatory or collaborative decision making, feedback is invited from the group. During a given period of time discussion is welcome and actions are borne out of the discussion. This process need not always have consensus, but often does. We opted to use Loomio as a platform for this. It was an interesting experience to try a new form of communication, and to use voting for decision making. Pretty soon, we the tension between doocracy and collaborative decision-making was felt. We fell into the trap of discussing everything instead of just doing things, and we quickly came to the conclusion that we needs to carve a space around what fell under doocracy and what kinds of decisions should be participatory (also what kinds dictatorial, more on this another time!).

We have moved to enclave our doocratic decision making for actions that are reversible. For those decisions that cannot be undone, we use collaborative decision making using loomio. This is working well for us and limits the amount of discussion that goes into running our community and its associated projects. Having both processes has been very rewarding, in that doocracy supports cooperation, in that it prevents your vision from being compromised by the group collective process. Collaborative decision making on the other hand allows us to steer the ship together for the larger decisions.

Consensus, we discovered, is expensive specifically in an existing high trust environment, relative to the efficiency gains of a system such as doocracy. We have found that in addition to this, “pure” consensus can still be really useful when applied to select situations, for example when you want to be extra careful to make room for differing voices, when the consequences of the decision is high, when you want to make room for all voices to be heard in order to surface the unspoken or hard to say things. It’s worth considering what kinds of decisions you are ok with being doocratised, and which want something else. And it is likely that no one system suits all types of decisions.

Failure modes of doocracy

Some of the failure modes of doocracy to be aware of: Doocracy without communication becomes ‘Tyranny of the Proactive’ [see 3]. It can concentrate power in the form of circumstantial institutional knowledge and alienate potential other doers, creating a reinforcing feedback loop of “doers that do” and others who don’t. Doocracy without reciprocity can also lead to some power imbalances. We are still working on ways of acknowledging the inevitable imbalance under doocracy, but our intermit solutions have been to provide clear communication of what you need from people to facilitate getting help from others; people often want to help but don’t know what to do and institutional knowledge can be a gatekeeper to power. If you are someone who has always done X role, perhaps you are the only person who knows how to do that thing, and unless you make this knowledge freely available, others cannot get involved. Providing lists of jobs/projects to contribute to should they want to is also helpful for new people joining an established doocratic system.

Another failure mode that we have experienced, we term ‘Doocratic Thrashing’ — when two people are do-ocratically doing and undoing each others’ idea in too short a time frame. We have found that a solid solution to this is to set a norm whereby any changes are left for a week, then as a responsible dooer, your role is to actively check in with people to see if they like it. We ask that the dooer doesn’t leave it to others to give feedback, but rather are proactive in attempting to genuinely enquire whether your actions have made peoples’ lives better. Belated feedback can also cause problems for a doocratic process. Our solution to this has been to set a timeframe during which feedback is welcome and a specific time when the action will be taken in the absence of feedback e.g. ‘I’m going to put this thing in place in a week, please let me know if you have thoughts. If i hear nothing back I will doocratise it’ It’s also worth finding out out what each person’s minimum time frame is — some people only check their emails once a week. A complete absence of feedback can be hard on both a doocratic system and on active dooers. In the absence of feedback, sometimes the action and accuracy of proactive do-ers is taken for granted. Doers can feel alienated when their contributions are not critically engaged with.

It is commonly thought that doocracy is necessarily structureless, as it holds it roots in the US Libertarian Party, however we are finding that we can both encourage and make explicit certain structures. Jo Freeman, famously critiqued the rejection of structure, following the idea that structures are inherently oppressive [3]. The main thesis is that there is no such thing as structurelessness, and that failing to acknowledge structure can be more dangerous than structured power because it is hard to see or define and therefore challenge, ultimately “structurelessness becomes a way of masking power”. Thus in our community we are in the process of attempting to observe our structure and power dynamics, on our way to naming it. I believe this is crucial at this stage of our community, and hopefully we will have some lessons to share on this in a year or so.

References

[1] Irvin & Stansbury (2004), Citizen Participation in Decision Making: Is It Worth the Effort? Public Administration Review 64(1), pages 55–65.

[2] The Rules of Utopia — On Technology, Stupidity and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy.

[3] The Tyranny of Structurelessness — Jo Freedman

How to Nurture a Living and Evolving Doocracy was originally published in Embassy Network on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Historically, that would have meant that a small group would make informed guesses as to what the broader community wants. There are certainly merits to this, but, a suite of new approaches, enabled by technology, are radically changing the landscape of how participation can be built into our organizations.

A suite of new approaches, enabled by technology, are radically changing the landscape of how participation can be built into our organizations.

Today, we are able to involve the members of our community directly in allocating net profit, through a process called collaborative budgeting. Each guest, member and resident of the Embassy is allocated a proportional share of this net profit, as a function of the number of days they spent in the house that month — even if they only stayed one month.

Collaborative budgeting was initially popularized in Porto Alegre, Brazil, and has since spread to cities around the world looking to engage their citizens more deeply. Those are primarily municipal-level convenings to facilitate citizens voting on spending priorities.

On a smaller scale, community groups like POC 21 and Ouishare, and small businesses like Enspiral Services, Loomio and Robin Hood Coop are experimenting with giving people direct control over certain dollars to spend for the organization.

How do we achieve this on an operational level? What processes and tools do we use, and how can we simplify and automate as much as possible so that it’s not taking up valuable, and limited, human resources to manage the process?

How

Between guests, residents, and other community members, we have several dozen unique people staying in our house each month (not to mention events, attendance at which we don’t track yet, but which total in the hundreds). Each of these people contributes to the house culture and projects, using the different spaces, observing and ideating together. In most cases, they have also made some financial contribution through the course of their participation, whether through rent, guest accommodation, or a membership fee.

If these financial contributions result in a net surplus, then that surplus goes back into our community. It’s like a fluid cooperative dividend, one that changes every month without requiring people to buy or sell a formal share. Technology lets us do this in more fluid, flexible ways.

It’s like a fluid cooperative dividend that flows with the people who were actually there.

(Note: the definition and calculation of things like “net profit,” “reserves,” etc. will be a function of your organization’s operating model and cash flow profile. Deciding on an approach to these questions is outside the scope of this article).

Calculating Allocations

We are lucky to have an operating model that makes it easy to have a crude sense of time people spent in our house over the course of the month. Our website gives us occupancy data for our residents and guests, which we export as a CSV file. That file tallies the total days of occupancy by each individual, which can then be used to calculate a weighted allocation (see image).

For example, let’s assume we had 10 full time residents in February, and 1 guest who stayed 5 nights. Then the total “person nights” would be 10*29 for the residents (it was a leap year), plus 5 nights for the guest, or 295 “person nights” total. If we have $1000 to put towards cobudget, then the guest’s share will be (5/295)*$1000, or $16.95. Each resident would end up with a larger share, because they spent more nights. Each resident’s share would be (29/295)*$1000 = $98.30.

Once the totals are calculated, the CSV is uploaded to our Cobudget group, where it updates the allocations of each individual and invites any new users.

Managing the money behind the scenes

Internally, we transfer the amount we’ve allocated for cobudgeting from our main checking account, into a separate bank account. This keeps it separate from other spending and ensures that it’s not accidentally spent on operating expenses.

Since people are not required to spend their money right away, these funds might sit for some time in that cobudget bank account. That’s ok. As buckets get funded in cobudget, we create a placeholder invoice in our Xero account from the bucket sponsor for the bucket amount. The invoice sits in Xero until the bucket has actually been completed and invoiced, and the exact cost is updated. There may be a small difference between what was actually spent and the funded bucket amount. Any small difference goes back into (or comes from) reserves.

Policy Questions

As a community, there were a few questions we had to answer from a “policy” standpoint.

Which of the many different potential ways, should surplus be allocated?

• We decided on a proportional weighting system, as described above, but this is just one approach. We could have decided to make it an even split, we could have expanded or contracted the people invited to participate. We’ve also talked about allocating in proportion to work we do for the house. These are all viable options.

What happens to unused allocations for each category of recipient?

• Residents and coworkers can leave money unallocated, until/if they are no longer residents, at which point it would be redistributed among other residents. Unallocated guest money, rolls back into resident allocations after 3 months.

Do we give an allocation to comped reservations?

• We decided we would choose this case-by-case.

What if people don’t want to participate?

• We don’t have a great solution for letting people opt out yet. We can create a do not contact list, but this will have to be managed manually for now. Ideally, we’d like a workflow where the recipient can click a button to either accept their funds, or, optionally, allow them to delegate their funds to someone else, liquid-democracy style.

How do we manage partially funded or ongoing buckets?

• Some buckets, like scholarship funds, may be ongoing. If we spend from these buckets before they’ve been fully funded, what is the best way to do the bookkeeping on these while keeping the bucket open?

What

So what kinds of projects are we funding?

As you can see, buckets can be anything. Most importantly, they needn’t be about the house itself. The money in cobudget can support day to day house needs, but what’s even more interesting is when it’s used to support people and projects out in the world.

Tony K. Lai on Twitter

Just facilitated a "Last Will and Testament Brunch" @EmbassyNetwork @LawGives -- 9 new wills made today!

For example, our good friends at Legal.io hosted a brunch at the house to help people use open templates to develop customized “last will and testaments.” Now we have a bucket to pay for their time writing a blog post, describing how to create open source marriage contracts.

Why

Embassy is just getting started right now, but in communities such as Enspiral, we are allocating many thousands of dollars at any given time, and there are people who make significant portions of their monthly income through this direct allocation process. The Embassy SF has been extremely fortunate to learn from the years of experimentation and boundary pushing that Enspiral has done in this area.

There is an explicit decision we are making here — we want to open ourselves up to the unforeseen directions and diversity of ideas that collaborative funding enables. We are not optimizing for predictability or focus, but rather for generative acts of co-creation and direct acts of mutual support.

Many communities shy away from the money side of things, but collaborative finance is a pathway for us to get smart about how we spend more than our time. It’s a tool to up our game in the world around us, and take greater responsibility for supporting one another. Together, we can resource the world we want to see.

Collaborative Finance at the Embassy: A Case Study was originally published in Embassy Network on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Embassies (and many other wonderful communities with their own excellent culture) are community-managed, mixed-duration coliving spaces. Though houses that identify as Embassies are autonomous and independently run, I would characterize each of them as participatory platforms for creativity, co-designed governance, and sharing. They are spaces to prototype new ways of doing things, to incorporate social justice and innovation in their own image, and to share those experiments back with the outside world through events, activities, and operational transparency.

These are communities, not services. They are not “hacker houses,” group houses, nor micro-units.

When we talk about “successful communities” we usually mean a community with great culture — one that is critically engaged with its own project as well as the world around it; is accessible, fun, and somehow conjures a sense of possibility and something bigger.

If there is just one thing that I think differentiates these ‘je ne sais quoi’ communities from others, it’s co-ownership. It’s agency over, and engagement with, the project of the community itself.

How do these emergent, generative cultures come to be? Here’s a handful of observations from our experiences at the Embassy SF, the Red Victorian, Rainbow Mansion, and others.

Choose with intention, and prepare for initial vacancy

At the Embassy SF, we borrowed money to get the house started. It was a 5 year loan at 5% interest from friends and family. We accounted for a 40% vacancy rate over the first 6 months in the amount we borrowed, expecting that it would take us a while to find the right residents. Building it into the loan meant that we could amortize the cost of that initial vacancy over many years, and helped keep our focus on the long game rather than stressing about the money in the short term.

Also once the house was up and running with a good culture, paying back the loan became much easier because the demand for long and short term accommodations was there.

At the Red Vic, the team took advantage of this vacancy by inviting artists to do residencies in the rooms.

Place, then People (not the other way around)

Often groups will recruit their residents while they search for the perfect place. In the absence of a physical space to focus on, the group spends a lot of time thinking about values and ideals. Expectations are set.

At this point it’s very difficult to agree on a house. Rarely do the set of people you have selected due to their abstract ideals map onto the people who would select a specific physical space. Groups can spend years looking for the perfect place before they ever get to the concrete business of living together. In many cases they just peter out.

The key insight is this: the total number of all people you might want to live with, is larger than the set of people that a given property will be suited to. If you start by getting very specific with the community, the probability that that specific subset will agree on the building selection, is quite low.

Start with a small group — 2–4 people, select a place, and then recruit the remaining residents. (As a side note, I would say 2 is the minimum; a single founding resident is going too far in the other direction — it’s very hard to distribute leadership if you start with just one person’s vision and energy.)

Design for sharing

Food is purchased centrally by the house, and residents simply pay a monthly fee. At the Embassy each person contributes $200/mo towards food, and we have a budget of $2500 — $3000/mo which feeds 15–20 people a day. We order from wholesalers where possible (or Amazon Fresh or Instacart) and all the food is delivered to our door. The veggies are mostly local and organic. We also build the cost of food into the pricing of our guest program. This means that anyone who stays in the house, guest or resident, has free rein of the kitchen and all its ingredients, and are invited to use it as they would use their own kitchen. It’s easy to share meals, to join someone else in cooking, to invite friends or colleagues over.

Space as Platform

Create reasons to spend time in the house. Find a place with good common space. Common space is where the collisions happen, the organic interactions and unplanned conversations.

If there’s no common space, it’s hard for this to happen. If there’s too much common space, it’s also hard for it to happen, because the density is too low for the unexpected! At Rainbow, about 40% of the ~5100sqft. is common space. At Embassy, about 60% of our 7500sqft. is common space. At Red Victorian, it’s about 25% of 10k sqft.

There’s something about diverse types of common space that is powerful also — we have many different nooks and corners the serve as behavior platforms for whatever is emergent. Some commons spaces invite intimate collisions, others large scale collisions; some invite formality and others informality, some invite alone time or group time due to size.

Expect a reshuffle in 6–12 months

Despite all the work you do interviewing, taking recommendations from friends, preference surveys, human spectrums, and bonding, the reality is always different than the idea. It’s pretty natural for a new community to have a kind of cohort shift after it settles into its identity. In my opinion this isn’t bad, it’s a sign of clarity. So don’t feel bad when it happens, embrace it as a chance to find new members of your community who will likely be even more values aligned.

Anchor in the Culture

Ensure sure there are enough long term residents to maintain a certain degree of continuity to the culture that develops. This is not to say that the culture should be stagnant, just that ideally it does not have discrete jumps. Communities develop extended communities, which in turn support and reinforce the central community’s culture. Open, participatory communities result in external members with pride and ownership over the space as well. This is simply not possible if the entire population is changing every 6 months.

Most Embassy spaces have guest spots, but even if you don’t, it’s worth thinking about your turnover. At Rainbow Mansion, we observed that an ideal ratio was about 65% long term residents. This was high enough that the residents had quorum to reinforce the core tenets of our culture, but enough guests to bring new energy and ideas into the house, and prevent too much insularity.

Be Big Enough

Relatedly, there is a minimum size for a space to be sufficiently generative. Below a threshold of about 7 bedrooms, the average occupancy of the house, even between guests and residents, is not high enough for emergent social dynamics — for the unexpected. The number of people physically present in the house is a function of travel schedules, work deadlines and social lives. If that takes out 50% of your population, with 7 bedrooms you might be talking about 3–4 people in the house on average. That’s just not big enough.

For us, including a hostel as part of our guest program did wonders for this. Not only did it increase our density, but it also provided an affordable way for people to stay with us.

Participatory Decision Making

Asking each other what the vision of the house is requires asking “why” — which in turn engages us with the broader question of our goals and ambitions, how our community can serve and amplify that, and how we can do that for each other. Without the “why,” we are simply consumers, and that comes through in the way we treat the space, the activities we host, and the care with which we strive to design and execute the structures that shape our experience.

Ownership over these structures creates a positive feedback loop between creativity and management, enabling residents to optimize the structures of their home for their current projects and needs. Participatory communities are more dynamic, and certainly more work, but also more closely aligned with their members’ values.

Participatory decision making can involve something as simple as meeting on a regular basis. Many communities now use tools like Loomio and Slack to facilitate participation by geographically diverse, part time, or extended community members, or those who simply communicate differently.

Many smaller communities that I am familiar with have adopted some variant of a “do-ocracy” for their day to day management. This can easily be misunderstood as “do whatever you want,” but in actuality it involves 3 core tenets: take action, yes, but only with transparency, communication, and reversibility.

Do-ocracy: take action but only with transparency, communication, and reversibility.

Do-ocracy combined with regular in-person touch points and a commitment to transparency is a pretty good starting point for a lot of groups that are comfortable with emergent dynamics. It is relatively low overhead, places agency with the individual, and keeps progress happening, while allowing for feedback loops and learning.

Design for Surplus

Many communities fail to engage deeply with finance. In some cases this comes from a fear or aversion to finance rooted in politics, other times a lack of experience and literacy, or both.

The key takeaway is this: Don’t design your budget to break even — design it to more than break even. This will give the community a set of resources to allocate together, providing opportunities for projects, collaborations, and to support projects you care about. Engineering for surplus creates engines of creativity. This is true even for not-for-profit communities such as ours.

At the Embassy and Red Vic, our guest program exists first and foremost for the sake of culture and collaborations. We don’t have the guest program for the sake of making money, but we still designed it to net out on the positive side financially. Sometimes we put that surplus right back into offsetting rent or guest stays for people who can’t afford it — but we’re doing so from a position of stability and control.

Your surplus needn’t only be financial. The Red Vic has an instrument library, a book library, and a maker space, all of which involve items that belong to other people. Our surplus of space (which, ok, is ultimately backed by a responsible financial model) has led to tools and instruments being brought together in ways that invite people to get creative and make new things. Not only is there access to a new abundance for those who wouldn’t otherwise have access to these resources, but for those contributing their own resources, they now have access to a community to make things with.

This collection is always evolving and I’ve certainly missed plenty. What design patterns can you recommend for seeding successful communities?

Design Patterns for new Coliving Spaces was originally published in Embassy Network on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.