Cohousing-L Mailing List: Info Management for a building Coho

[Stuart Pettygrove (gspettygrove]

I am looking for cohousing communities that have recent experience in
creating a system for file management and online file archiving. If that's
you, here are my questions:

   - How do you archive your records and other files?
   - Are the files under the care of one individual?
   - How do you educate old and new members on how to store and retrieve
   items?
   - Do you have an Information Management team -- which in my mind would
   not exactly be an IT team, but more like a document management team or
   library team perhaps with 2 members.

Background:  Our community, Washington Commons in West Sacramento CA,
expects to break ground in spring 2022. We currently have 22 households
with 33 individuals who are scattered about the US. We will be adding more
over the next year. We now have 4 standing teams -- Development, finance &
legal, Process, Membership & Marketing, and Steering.  We are archiving all
the community and team files in Dropbox. We also use Google sheets for our
meeting agendas and some meeting notes.

Our system has developed organically, not with any forethought or expert
advice.  Some members don't/can't use Dropbox. Not everyone has a google
account. Our members possess a wide range of tech/internet and document
management skills from almost none to medium--high.  We probably should
create an FAQ doc on this topic for our incoming members.

Stu Pettygrove
gspettygrove [at] ucdavis.edu
Washington Commons
washington-commons.org