Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: Intentional community blogs, forums

[Fred H Olson (fholson]

On 5/30/09 Richard L. wrote to ic.org :
>
> The Community Buzz Blog seems to be dead along with just about all
> the other blogs that might cover cutting edge ideas in intentional
> community theory and design. Do you know of any blog or forum that
> has a current, active discussion of new ideas for community design,
> organization, structure, theory, etc?
>
> I don't just want to read books and articles--I want to discuss
> technical and scholarly issues with experts in the field. Unfortunately,
> I am not in a position to travel and attend conferences. I need to find
> a forum for this on the web.
>
> Any suggestions?

Long ago someone maintained a list of community related forums but alas
it's maintenance was not sustained and I am not aware of anything
current.  There probably are some partial lists, if anyone knows of
something please reply with details.

Cohousing-L is a forum related to the topics Richard asked about.
Cohhousing-L ( http://cohousing.org/cohousing-L ) is a mailing list about
all aspects of cohousing tho topics about other forms of IC's particularly
if they overlap cohousing are welcome.

Not sure if anything that rises to the level of "active discussion of new
ideas for community design, organization, structure, theory, etc" comes up
- it tends to be more pragmatic questions.  You're welcome to join and
post a message trying to start such a thread that may elicit a response.
Cohousing-L has about 800 active subscribers, averages about 150 messages
per month and has a searchable archive of our 30.000+ messages since 1993.

Tho mailing lists have numerous disadvantages, unlike most blogs, web
based bbses etc, most subscribers get the messages in their inbox (most in
digest mode) when there is activity so it is seen promptly and tends to
generate more activity as other people are reminded of a topic they want
to bring up.  This does result in an ebb and flow of messages but there's
never been prolonged lull in messages on cohousing-L. Recently
(5/16-5/23 ) there was a lull with a bit less than one message per day
but yesterday had 4 messages and 14 the day before.

A possible hybrid of a more reflective blog with the immediate
audience of a mailing list would be to cross promote them with
a mailing list post about new blog posts or requests for contributions to
a blog via the list.  But this would require a dedicated peson to make it
happen.

Blogs are like online calendars and web sites generally - they are much
easier to start than they are to sustain.

Other related sites:

http://cohousing.org has some blogs.
Note that as of Dec 2008, "the monthly Cohousing Magazine, with its
in-depth articles, will be fully integrated with the website, and replaced
by Cohousing Now" "Now" is an occasioonal email newsletter.

Note cohousing-L is independent of Coho/US tho we do share the domain and
cooperate.

Further from the blog / forum format are
http://www.ecovillagenews.org
and
http://communities.ic.org/

BTW one complaint I have about some of these other formats is the
frequent lack of a date the information was posted so one is left
wondering when references to "recent" etc refer to.

Fred, cohousing-L list manager

--
Fred H. Olson  Minneapolis,MN 55411  USA        (near north Mpls)
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