Cohousing-L Mailing List: Common Meal Software (was Re: how many people for common meal...)

There is a programming effort underway now, at Pleasant Hill Cohousing
(California), to produce a web-based common meal signup and billing system.
The web site will be password-protected and will enable residents to sign up
to cook, clean, do child care, and/or eat via their computers. Cooks will
enter their expenses online, and the computer will generate the information
needed for billing. (It may generate and e-mail the bills themselves in a
future version.) We're going to place a donated computer in the common house
as well, so people can sign up there if they prefer.

The meal system it's being designed to run is this: meals are scheduled by
the person volunteering as head cook, who also determines the menu. (We
generally have vegetarian options and simple food for kids as well.) One
assistant cook and two cleaners then sign up, and if cooks or cleaners have
kids needing child care, one child care person can sign up. Whenever someone
works one of these jobs, they earn a number of "tokens" (six, I think), and
eating a common meal costs one token, as well as the money to reimburse the
cooks for ingredients. Kids and guests accompanied by a community adult
don't cost tokens, though they do cost ingredient money. Tokens can be
gifted from one adult to another, to help with hard times when people can't
work enough meals. Cooks will be able to print out a page saying who is
attending a meal, their menu choices (turkey vs. veg or whatever), and who
else has enough tokens to sign up last-minute, if there's enough food and
the cooks agree.

This is a modification from our previous system, in which there was an
expectation that people work one meal in each three-week (six-meal) rotation
if they wanted to eat in that rotation. We decided to try the token-based
system to deal with various difficulties, including people whose dietary
needs/choices or work schedules meant they could seldom eat at common meals
-- so they ended up working almost as often as they ate if they followed the
expectations, whereas other people might work one meal and eat five or six.
This has discouraged participation from people with those kinds of
constraints.

The hope is that we can maintain a schedule of at least two common meals per
week, though version 1.0 of the system won't actually enforce that
constraint. One of the cool things about the system is that if people want
more meals per week and are willing to work on them, it can happen
organically. The reverse could also occur, of course -- though there are
software features not yet implemented that could encourage cooks to schedule
dates more densely and thus help with maintaining our current frequency.
(More personal appeals may also be effective -- we're not trying to solve
all our problems with technology, just let it help!)

I'm writing about this so that if others are working on similar programming
efforts and wish to correspond, that will be possible. We're nearing
completion of version 1.0 at this time. Also, in the future, it's possible
that this system will be available in some form to other communities, though
we want to work out the kinks here before deciding how to do that.

The programmer for this system is Tim Mensch, my husband. If anyone wants to
correspond with him about it, you can reply to me and I'll forward your
message for a direct reply.

-Deborah Mensch
Pleasant Hill Cohousing
Pleasant Hill, California

On 8/16/06, R.P. Aditya <aditya [at] grot.org> wrote:

Common Meal Software (was Re: how many people for common meal...)	<– Date –> <– Thread –>
From: Deborah Mensch (deborah-04bitgems.com)
Date: Wed, 16 Aug 2006 15:10:40 -0700 (PDT)