Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: builder contracts

[Craig Ragland (craigragland]

Those who have been on this list for a while know that similar requests for
such shared resources and documents have made many times. Sometimes people
ask Coho/US to play a role in their compilation.

Last month, at the 2008 Natl Conference, Coho/US announceed a new initiative
- to create the new Cohousing Website Members Area - a platform that we hope
will make resource compilations more feasible.

The Members Area is made of up Topic Rooms. The first four are (1) Finding
Community; (2) Technology; (3) Research; and (4) Marketing. Each room is
hosted by one or more people who assume responsibility for moderating and
building the resource for their topic. Within each room you'll find a little
info on the host(s), a Blog of short essays/thoughts related to the topic,
an Online Forum, and the Resources section. Our vision is that Resources
will be populated with documents, links, and information of lasting value.
Whether sample documents are included is up to the host(s). Here's more
information on the Members Area:

http://www.cohousing.org/members

Since launching at the 2008 Natl Cohousing Conference about 200 people have
signed up to be members - membership is free.

"Membership" is really just site registration. This helps us protect our
online spaces from SPAM and garbage postings - which flood our wide-open
entry points, e.g. Classified Ads, Feedback forms, Polls, etc. By requiring
users to log-in, our limited staff time doesn't need to deal with so much
nonsense.

All of our blogs, including ones by Chuck Durrett (co-author of "Cohousing"
and author of "Senior Cohousing") and Diana Leafe Christian (author of
"Finding Community" and "Building a Life Together") are currently available
to everybody.

We hope to add new hosts for Topic Rooms on an ongoing basis. Our goal is
for hosts to have demonstrated knowledge in the topic their room addresses.
This is a bit different from a pure grassroots approach. Coho/US attempts to
balance a grassroots do-it-yourself ethic with the effective use of
professional and commercial resources. There are, of course, many grassroots
resources already available, including Coho-L - and Coho/US embraces these
resources and will continue our efforts to support and extend them. This is
made more possible due to our planning, budgeting, growing volunteer base,
board, and staff.

With the Members Area, Coho/US hopes to create a solid platform that makes
it easier for cohousers to deal with the most important topics required to
successfully find, create, and operate a cohousing community. Today, just a
few of our Topic Rooms have hosts, and, so far, we've compiled very little
content - if others jump in, then the number of and depth of Topic
Rooms will grow in value.

We envision that the Members Area will grow into widely valued resources -
but it will take time to get there. I don't view the Members Area as a
competitor to Coho-L. I see Coho-L as a wonderful free and open exchange of
ideas, information, and opinions - a grass roots, ad hoc place where
everybody and anybody can share as much or as little as they choose. Unlike
Coho-L, the Members Area is about a sustained focus - and an expanding base
of valued resources with some directed organization and focus. While Topic
Rooms can include dialog and interesting interactions, they are more about
their growth into well-organized resources.

At the onset, the Members Area will not appeal to many who enjoy Coho-L. It
will generally lack the immediacy of email communication. Rather than an
open forum, the Members Area is a place where, hopefully,
long-running focused dialogs and resources will grow - over years and
decades. Hopefully, Members Area contributors will find ways to leverage the
vast Coho-L archives - this has considerable potential value.

I hope we see a growing number of Topic Room hosts from those most eager and
able to share about many relevant topics. Through our active recruitment,
Coho/US staff are helping this happen. If able to recruit appropriate people
to step up and assume hosting or co-hosting responsibilities for particular
topics, you'll see more and more of the documents and other resources that
people ask for gradually appear in the appropriate Topic Rooms.

As mentioned above, there are, and always will be alternative grass-roots
efforts. One, in addition to Coho-L, is the Cohousing Wiki, which Fred Olson
initiated:

http://wiki.cohousing.org

It includes some documents:

http://wiki.cohousing.org/Document_Library

Another, similar effort is the Cohousing section of the FIC wiki:
http://wiki.ic.org/wiki/Cohousing

which also includes some documents here:

http://wiki.ic.org/wiki/Category:Sample_legal_documents

Rob Sandelin originally compiled and authored much of the information now
appearing in the FIC wiki - most of what's there now was simply wiki-ized
(with Rob's permission), along with some modest original contributions.

Neither of these efforts has generated much momentum. They are not growing
into valued resources.

Will the new Cohousing Website Members Area become a valued resource? I hope
so - but if not, you can count on the Coho/US Board and Staff to try again -
for it's simply too important for cohousers, cohousing wanna-bes, and
cohousing professionals to have a growing base of well-organized, useful
information. And it is not about a small number of part-time staff growing
this on our own - it simply has to be a collaborative co-creation.

In community,
Craig


On Sat, Jul 5, 2008 at 3:13 PM, <balaji [at] ouraynet.com> wrote:

>
> I completely agree with John.  If any of you have a contract, please do
> consider sharing it -- if not on this list, then to those of us who have
> an interest.  We would really like to see models.  They will help us shape
> our own ideas.  We should not have to re-invent the wheel every time a
> cohousing community is built.
>
> Thanks, in advance, to those who oblige!
>
> Charles W. Nuckolls
> Utah Valley Commons
> www.utahvalleycommons.com
>
>
> >
> > I'm sure it is true that each contract is unique in many respects. We
> > haven't even gotten there in our process so I'm guessing here. But I
> would
> > suspect that it would be valuable to see examples of what is covered in
> > such
> > contracts and at what depth. As you abstract away the differences among
> > the
> > examples, I suspect patterns begin to emerge. That is undoubtedly how
> > contractors and builders operate efficiently--reuse existing pattern
> > and/or
> > borrow it from someone else.
> >
> > Cohousing US could really assist the forming and construction processes
> by
> > collecting a library of such documents and then spending some time
> looking
> > for the patterns they share. Differences among states are to be expected
> > but
> > that, in itself, is useful information.
> >
> > In the mean time, you can try the AIA site that addresses
> > documents<http://www.aia.org/docs_synopses>.
> > On a detailed page, there is a description of the A-series
> > documents<http://www.aia.org/docs_series_a>that are contract forms for
> > contracts between owner and contractor for many
> > different circumstances. That page just contains descriptions of the
> > documents. They want to sell you the document forms for about $10 each.
> > The
> > synopses are fairly explicit so you shouldn't need to purchase many of
> the
> > forms to get a useful one. The forms are MS Word documents but you could
> > use
> > OpenOffice (or NeoOffice on Mac OS X) just as well. I can't attest to the
> > quality since I haven't seen or used them. However, they may provide
> > guidance.
> >
> > Apologies if I have misunderstood your question.
> >
> > John Faust
> >
> > On Sat, Jul 5, 2008 at 12:12 PM, Larry Miller <larry.miller [at] 
> > charter.net>
> > wrote:
> >
> >>
> >> I second Sharon's response. Our contract was more like a book.
> >>
> >> On Jul 4, 2008, at 8:52 AM, Francoise Paradis wrote:
> >>
> >> > Does anyone have a contract with a builder they would be willing to
> >> > share for us to review?  We want to make sure we have all the bases
> >> > covered before we sign one.
> >>
> >>
> >> _________________________________________________________________
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> >>
> >>
> >>
> > _________________________________________________________________
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> >
> >
> >
> >
>
>
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>


-- 
Craig Ragland

Coho/US executive director
http://www.cohousing.org
craig [at] cohousing.org

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