Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: web based communications; meal accounting

[Tim Mensch (tim-coho-l]

Lynn Nadeau wrote:
> Lynn here, RoseWind Cohousing, Port Townsend WA.
> Nobody seems to have yet mentioned this wrinkle: there are communities such 
> as ours where one or more households cannot or will not use the Internet for 
> community communications, including email. Email, one can at least print out 
> a copy and deliver it to those people, or post it at the common house. But 
> ongoing stuff is harder that way. 
>   
Only slightly. At Pleasant Hill, someone donated an old laptop computer, 
which I set up at the common house right next to where people would have 
needed to physically sign up for a meal. Anyone without computer access 
can use that to sign up for meal, for working at a meal, or to reserve 
the great room.

Certainly different people have different needs, and if someone in your 
community can't use such a computer, or simply refuses and blocks the 
decision, then you wouldn't be able to adopt a system like this without 
an additional volunteer to print out calendars and enter data for the 
people on the other side of the digital divide. However, as you point 
out, at RoseWind you already have someone who enters everyone's data 
into a spreadsheet; wouldn't entering a subset of that data be less work 
than entering it all?

And for those users who do access via computer: The convenience of being 
able to sign up for a meal, or even create, organize, or modify the 
details of a meal from work or on the road is really hard to beat.

But what it comes down to is: If you want it in your community, you're 
welcome to my code. It sounds like things are working smoothly at 
RoseWind, so there's no motivation to change; I can tell you that I've 
talked with enough cohousers to know that many common meal systems are 
not so happy, and the system I designed can actually (theoretically) 
help maintain participation. My system is also designed around fairness: 
Every time you work you earn a number of "tokens" that you can spend on 
future meals, so if you only eat one in ten meals, you can work far less 
often than someone who eats every meal. If a community simply requires 
that everyone works every rotation, or wants to use some other system, 
then my software wouldn't be a good match out-of-the-box, and if you 
want a custom system maybe you should talk to Ken, or one of your own 
community web-gurus who can take my code and change it.

If anyone does want to see it, I'll be posting it soon, along with a 
demo site.

--
Tim Mensch

In contract to sell a unit at Pleasant Hill Cohousing (CA), though accepting 
backup offers: http://phch.org/2230

Currently at Wild Sage (Boulder, CO): http://www.wildsagecohousing.org

Founding member of Tumblerock, a Boulder, CO area community in its forming 
stages: http://tumblerock.org