Cohousing-L Mailing List: Wiring the community

[Jim_Snyder-Grant . LOTUS (Jim_Snyder-Grant.LOTUS]

We have often spoke of wiring the community for email, intercoms, etc. The 
committee to work out the details hasn't been created yet, nor have have we 
attempted to work out the cost or achieve consensus on what to do.  

The architect has included conduits to ring all the buildings, so that we can 
install what we want. The phone lines are speced on the engineering plans to go 
through the common house so that we can do any sort of centralized switching 
that we want to, if we decide to.

Some of us used to call New View "Nerd View", since so many of us were in 
high-tech firms -- one of Boston's largest industries -- so the conversations 
about this were inevitable. When we used to have lunches in Kendall Square 
(high-tech hot-spot near MIT, Lotus, etc.) I think we had almost 8 of us 
showing up.

People there spoke of video conferencing, newview.org, virtual committee 
meetings, a Notes server for New View, our own dish & cable system, 
1-800-NEWVIEW, etc.

We will eventually need to go through the sorts of economic analysis that any 
small organization needs to to make good decisions about technology deployment, 
and we will probably pick some small useful subset of all the possibilities, 
and build things so that we can expand in the future.

-JSG