Hey their friend, thank you for your reflective response. I am just now getting around to responding to people and noticed much of your comment overlaps with another one I just finished replying to at some length. I would encourage you to look at the other comments and responses as they cover ~95% of what you typed up and I would prefer no to make duplicate responses for everyone’s benefit.

I am also curious to see where this conversation may go in time, andlooking forward to hearing back from you :)

Ah sorry forgot to answer your last question. Yes, I have experience in intentional communities and governance models. Thus far the first draft of governance documentation is over 150 pages.

The subject of my post is currently under R&D and NDA. So no pilot program for the foreseeable future. I am largely looking for feedback and insights here at the moment.

Question #6 response: Aren’t most of us already forced to maintain a blank check as you say for the majority of our adult lives to make ends meet and uphold some degree of prosperity? Is it not better to participate in a cooperative model through which you have equal share and effort which translates to direct improvements to the quality of life for you and your loved ones? The progression of automation development ultimately results in a transition away from physical labor towards and through cognitive labor and resulting in greater concentrations of time available for learning, teaching, and leisure. However related activities would still be subservient to the communities desired tempo. Intensity of labor is always at and under the will of the collective wants.

Question #7 response: Noted. Would you be more interested if instead the housing addition was as a second floor build as a second residence available to your loved ones with its own entrance? Or maybe some other proportional boon which otherwise offers some form of benefit unrelated to one’s home?

Question #8 response: Are you familiar with the concept of liquid democracy? How much do you know about Dunbar’s number? Even at full community carry capacity there is never more than 300 voters for topics where direct democracy had been chosen as preferable by the community. Someone wouldn’t be voting alongside strangers, but rather their peers who they cross paths with weekly, if not most days. Culture and social utility in such situations enables the leveraging of symbiotic interest, accountability, and understanding toward cohesive governance, solidarity, and responsiveness.

Question #9 response: Clearly it would be much more procedural, guided by policies, protocols, and knowledgeable expertise. Community members would have also mutually agreed on contractual guidelines prior to residence. There are plenty of examples of contract and integrity agreements tied to occupations or residency from which can be learned and borrowed. A community wide vote is reserved as a last resort. It is important for any culture to have unbiased collective methods to address antisocial behaviors and other persistent human fallibility. Some manner of exile when penalties prove to be ineffective or insufficient under righteous just cause is perfectly acceptable and common; often preferable to lawsuits and incarceration even. Liquid democracy offers pragmatic utility among such things as well. There are additionally much which can be learned from the various existing community land trusts and mutual housing associations that have had to deal with all manner of sensitive realities.

Question #10 response: Perhaps a decent way of thinking of the topic is what may come to mind when observing how athletes tend to migrate between sports teams under various circumstances and motivations. Not a perfect analogy admittedly. Imagine one’s personal or professional interest shift over the years as tends to happen throughout life and result in an altered set of preference to what was once held a decade ago? Think empty nesters, long term research partnerships, new domestic partnerships, changes in health, etc.

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I understand if you might not have the gas to continue the conversation, though I would appreciate your further insight as someone who might have another decade or two under your belt than myself.

(Part 1)

Hello Clippy, I see you have been here since around the reddit migration. Something that isn’t lost on me. My account is freshly minted, so please bear with me as I get familiar with the space.

Thank you for the thoughtful response. You bet your ass I plan to give the conversation a similar level of commitment lol. I don’t expect you to respond further in kind. However I do wish to make responses so others can see. If you’ll let me I’d mine you for whatever perspectives you might be willing to offer.

It is important to keep in mind the scale and funding I have been designing around. Three to five billion of non-profit funding deployed to approximately 100 community land trust locations over 5 to 10 years.

Participation would be through what is best recognized as a networked startup business model with a 5-6 year on-ramp/vestment period where 80-120 people utilize approximately 20-35 million dollars to revitalize and improve exhausted agricultural land according to shared principles as well as permaculture, polyculture, regenerative agriculture and sustainable infrastructure guidelines. Just like any startup there would be protocols and policies related to joining, leaving, or such things as medical complications.

It isn’t so much drawing people together under an existing team, but rather collectively offering a set of tools, framework, and mentorship through which it becomes easier for symbiotic relationships to gravitate towards each other. Also worth keeping in mind that about 20-25% of the 400 pages I have drafted so far relate to governance, social technologies, and related frameworks. People would be spending about 1-3 hours a week for 2 months networking remotely with diverse skilled and knowledgeable individuals, then spending a week on site further getting to know each other in person before ever starting to process of making a commitment. The intended framework and progression maintains a failsafe mindedness which acknowledges the potential for unforeseeable and catastrophic failure and allows for rolling back, pausing, or even dismantling at various stages. No one would be facing financial ruin by participating.

As someone at least beyond middle age as you mention, years bear with them a degree of life experience and perspective on human failings which isn’t lost on me. I am aware the pitfall of personalities which represents the one bad apple’s ability to spoil or derail well beyond what most might believe.

I mainly chose to focus on millennials and gen-z as they are likely the most able-bodied available for portions of blue collar work and are typically less set into their lives. Not adverse to older individuals, just aiming at center-mass so to speak. More formal polling will come in time. Right now the feedback vibe is decidedly more a temperature check and first impression.

Question #1 response: Understandable. It is neither a small commitment nor unexpected that someone beyond middle age would have some roots which can cause hesitancy and a degree of risk aversion.

Question #2 response: You would have spend at least 2 months and about 20 hours of loosely guided remote video call gatherings with the full 80-120 people in your cohort. All throughout however would be available asynchronous social media topic discussion groups where everyone may organically gravitate to each other. Housemate pairing would be through a perpetual weekly private rank choice vote and subsequent satisfaction measurement before the recursive voting process cycles back through towards the highest satisfactory measurement. Switching would be possible or even ideal, though may require negotiation with additional others which could necessarily become involved. Perhaps the group would collectively make prior intentions for everyone to swap housemates every X number of months. Plenty can be leaned on from the various conflict resolution processes university housing professionals utilize regularly as well.

It would be a four seasons yurt, meaning insulation, heating, cooling, power, water, shower, etc. While adaptable to most bio regions, my current regional intent is looking at hardiness zones 6a through 7b. Many yurts aren’t just tents, but can be built to permanent housing building codes standards while yet maintaining relatively greater mobility. You pay nothing to participate, having all reasonable living expenses covered. After 5-6 years you are assured lifetime residence in a newly constructed 2,000 square foot passive house built with sustainable materials that has no maintenance cost or utility expenses. First refusal rights would belong to your children so long as they intend to participate as well. Continuing to reside and participate means: free education, free primary healthcare and perhaps more, free fully rounded nutritional needs comfortably met, a stipend aimed at meeting all outstanding debt payments within reason for 5-6 years, and facilities space with utility bills paid for in which you and your chosen startup co-founders can deploy sufficient grand funding so long as your goals are toward the betterment of the human condition in some fashion. After reaching stable business success, opportunities for income expands rapidly and potentially shifts various funding and expense models.

Question #3 response: Off course I’m not looking towards 72 hour work weeks. Life needs balance, also all work and no play burns everyone out eventually. The goal is to do the most with the least. Ideally this means 16-32 hours of combined blue and white collar work weekly with no single mentioned category reaching more than 24 hours weekly. The ranges given are to account for a diversity of abilities and availability As the years get on the hopes are to progressively be able to concentrate more and more time into education and leisure. If someone wants to only work 32 hours a week that is fine. If someone wants to work more than 40 hours a week that is fine as well. Everything obvious would meet labor law requirements. The 8-24 of leisure time is more to so insure no one works more than six days a week, ever, even during the busiest couple of weeks around harvest season. The other side of this is routinely having days where only 8 hours of blue collar work a week during winter is needed. Want to have a vacation? Save up 8 hours of leisure quota a week to be scheduled whenever.

Question #4 response: I partly answer this above. The primary incentives are having virtually zero monetary living expenses with comfortable living arrangements for a minimum of 5-6 years while having access to facilities, funding, expertise, and co-founders with which to turn a startup into a stable business with. Someone who is fresh out of school and owns practically nothing but student debt can literally live rather comfortably. Never working more than 32 hours a week for more than 5 years while ending up a partial business owner on the other side, who has the option of continuing to never having living expenses so long as they continue to uphold the communities social contract.

I don’t believe land should be owned either. The land and select infrastructure is held in a nonprofit community land trust while the houses and facilities spaces are held by a nonprofit mutual housing association. Mostly common tripartite governance with elected community members keeps everything on the level. The community itself sets its own bars and thresholds. The decision and conflict resolution bodies are nested based on the subject and intensity at hand and always maintained through rank choice voted positions. You would be the management, if not directly then by chosen representation. Everyone holds each other to account because the ultimate success depends on the diligence of the collective. You and your 100 closest friends would be building the homes. The stronger the community, culture, and dedication are the greater and sooner the desired outcomes arrive.

Question #5 response: Think of it partly as contractual collective homesteading or business building of sorts where ample leeway is afforded for mitigating and unforeseeable challenges, be they individual or more ubiquitous. Unless someone truly needs to leave a community, their residence is ironclad for a minimum of 5-6 years. This also extends to living expense which are fully covered while a stipend covers all outstanding debt payments within reason for the same period. The model is designed such that members are afforded comfortable living standards while being insulated from antagonistic factors which plague typical western economic models. Admittedly having one’s income tethered to performance such as seen in commissions or proportional business profits isn’t for everyone. Although, I have spoken with plenty of recent graduates who say they would jump at an opportunity to live isolated from financial obligations while building their desired business with the assistance of sufficient grants and investments.

I’m not at liberty to say exactly where the funding would be coming from yet, only that it would be strategically nonprofit investments. The quantity is due in part to the broaders goal of maximizing novel production methods and diverse infrastructure access sustainably, and toward supporting underserved surrounding communities.

Sourcing the right people won’t be simple, though it also isn’t difficult. Part of the model currently in R&D is focused on leveraging existing tools in specific ways which incentivize and draw the right individuals out of the ether. Methods leverage the modern reality of distributed epistemic tribal culture affinities and innate social drives for parallel offline connections. Imagine spending 2-3 months and 1-3 hours a week getting to know your nearest professional peers quite well and the broader group fairly well before meeting in person on-site for a week before making any lasting commitments.

Regarding #5: You and 80-120 people you’ve intentionally spent at least 1-2 hours a week networking with for 2 months choose to relocate to approximately one square mile of exhausted agricultural land. Land which has been acquired by the nonprofit land trust to which you have voting rights. You have 5-6 years to deploy 20-35 million dollars to improve the land in alignment to permaculture, polyculture, and solar punk principles, while also building out 4-8 start up businesses to which you have proportional share through a cooperative model and labor commitment. Admittedly aimed at the entrepreneurial minded.

Regarding #9 It is certainly more nuanced and carries stipulations beyond just a simple voting process. The primarily intent is acknowledging the necessity of protocols for both positive and negative reasons for onboarding or releasing people from the community.

A governance rabbit hole of a conversation for both of these points which is partly beyond my available bandwidth to entertain or intended scope at the moment as I respond to others here as well.

That is fair, I am trying to explain as much as possible without giving too much away for strategic reasons. Think it as somewhat subversive efforts akin to market Aikido that uses its own weight against itself to move towards its broader obsolescence and replacement.

I’ll also add that someone’s early exposure in spending 1-2 months using available social media and video meeting tools to collect and get to know groups of 80-120 people of diverse expertise asynchronously through posts and comments throughout the week, and 1-2 hour loosely guided video meetings. Ultimately turning into a one week trip to intended site so everyone can get to know each other in person before fully committing.

I am also designing the funding mechanisms for all of this. So assume you and 80-120 others would spend 5-6 years utilizing 20-35 million in funding towards actualizing the meritocratic and direct democratic communal infrastructure design.

A brief list of the things to build includes: permaculture, regenerative agriculture, polyculture farming practices, design software, manufacturing software, governance software, education models, aquaponics, animal husbandry, sustainable electricity and other utilities, modular housing manufacturing methods, rapid deploy off grid housing kits, information architecture, and more/