Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: community communications: how to do it

[Ellen Keyne Seebacher (elle]

On Sun, Oct 31, 2010 at 10:29:50AM -0400, Sharon Villines wrote:

> The one thing we did at Takoma Village that has helped enormously
> was to establish one bulletin board in the frint hall of the CH as
> the place where all current and emergency information that is
> relevant to everyone can be found.

Wow.  That would so not work at Mosaic Commons, where we have members
who are world travelers and some, like me, who are lucky to get to the
Common House once or twice a week.  (I live in the farthest unit from
the Common House and I'm partially disabled, so incentives have to be
fairly high to get me to limp over there, especially in bad weather.)

We use email for almost all Mosaic business, and we're lucky enough to
have the equipment and the technical know-how to run our own servers,
so we're not dependent on a company like Yahoo! for archives or list
management.  It also helps that almost everyone in the community is
reasonably comfortable using email.

We have an extensive Web site with some member-only sections; a wiki
for team use, commuter info and agenda items for general meetings;
a database server for keeping track of marketing contacts and our
decision logs; and Google Calendars for reserving spaces in the Common
House.

We also have (in addition to cubbies for households and boxes for US
mail) mail slots for inter-household use, and a credenza in the Common
House "Hub" where people leave brochures and the like that might be of
community interest.  There's a bulletin board in our Hub, too, but
it's mostly used to sign up for meals and cleaning shifts.

> We have some "email should be absolutely banned from the face of the
> earth and is the source of all evil" and some "email should be
> required because it is inclusive and is the reason we are able to
> tolerate diversity at all" people. The evil power that is ascribed
> to email is matched only by the glorification of face-to-face. The
> contradictions in the logic I find mind-boggling.

I don't understand that either.  We have one ad-hoc team where some
members insisted that it was impossible to transact that project's
business via email, but none of the face-to-face-is-better folks
seemed eager to hammer out a single meeting time that would
accommodate everyone -- so that project's been sitting on a back
burner for months.  I believe we could have settled the whole thing 
via email in a week or two. :(

Also, this fall the community decided that every one of our lists
should have its Reply-To: settings changed to reply to the poster,
rather than the list.  While this has cut down on random "me too!" and
"thanks" clutter (and meal signups sent to everyone, instead of the
chef), it's also cut down significantly on group discussion, because
comments moved off-list.  Several times in the last couple of weeks
I've had to say "did you mean that for just me or for everyone?";
it'll be interesting to see if that continues over the longer term.


        Ellen Seebacher
        Mosaic Commons / Sawyer Hill Ecovillage (Berlin, MA)

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