Count me in.

I've been rallying my friends to the idea of establishing a neighborhood in Seattle as the place in Seattle to relocate to. I I strongly believe that each city can have a center for geeks, freaks, futurists, gamers, weirdos, and what have us. It is a simple matter to network our locations, co-host visiters from other townships, etc.,. The benefits are obvious and astonishing.

This is clearly something that we can and must do.

One of the reasons I started working on communications systems for the Internet, was so that I could live college again. I don't know what burning man is like, because I have not been there, but from what my friends tell me, it's basically like what college was like for me.

The great sadness of college, for myself and many of my friends at least, is that we can meet all these exciting and great people doing interesting things, at college. And then at the end of four years, we explode out in all directions, only to meet similar people at occasional gatherings, or whatever. That's just sad.

So I notice something in the Internet that my old college was like, and the major barrier is that our communications software sucks right now.

But I think we need to go beyond just building the best freakin' Internet software- I think we also need to live next and around each other, and what not.

So: Full speed ahead. I'm right with you. I'm willing to relocate for this. This is something that I want to do. This is something that we need to build.

There are no major obstacles. This is just something we need to do.

I'd like to dedicate more effort to talking about this later; I'm busy working on a project right now.

There is already a neighborhood that people in Seattle relocate to (actually, there has traditionally been two):

Fremont for artists and hippies
Capitol Hill for goths and gays

Why create another?

Paul: I got the invite, I'll join the list.

Al: We don't necessarily need to create a new neighborhood. Fremont and Capitol Hill are great. (I lived in Wallingford, for a while.)

What I do think we would need to do, is to get a little more aggressive and direct in our relocation strategy. Get organized.

Incidentally, there's a Seattle wiki you may be interested in.

Paul: BTW, I can set up a wiki for Future Hi, if you like. I don't have the time to tend it, much, though. It would be futurehi.wiki.taoriver.net. I already host a bunch of wiki.

Hi, Paul.

I did a lot of work in the area of community-building a couple years ago. We had a great team of very talented people and learned some very cool things that seem obvious now but were definitely not easy to uncover at the time.

First, all communities have some kind of glue that holds them together. If the glue is conversation and idea sharing, the community will tend to be casual and weak regarding turning ideas into action.

If the glue is action, the action needs to be clearly defined for much of anything to get done. In the business world, this is the role of the project manager who organizes a project as a series of tasks with timelines and owners in prusuit of a tangible set of goals.

Turning conversations into action is tough work despite the almost universal frustration that eventually emerges from the lack of action that comes out of conversationally-biased communities. At a meeting of one such group, just for fun we suggested that the group make a commitment to a specific course of action that would require a minimum investment of 40 hours total from each person. Some people nearly hit the door running!

An alterntive is to hand-pick people with specific skills to do specific actions. When the vibe is anyone can participate, then nobody tends to. From what I have heard of Burning Man, even this seemingly amorphous, spontaneous event is in truth a collection of projects, big and small that require at least commitment to do some work.

- sean

Man oh man, I'm so totally interested in this stuff. I have a lot of thoughts on the issue, but right I'm a little spread thin.

I'd like to be on that mailing list, tho.

Damn, now I kinda wish I still lived in Seattle =)

I went to Evergreen, another "counter culture" college and have sorta been feeling the same way since graduating.

1. Wiki's are good, with the blog going as sort of a frontend. Mailing lists can be a pain because all the info ends up so scattered, and busy mailing lists can be daunting.

2. I'm not sure, nor am I sure that complete autonomy is possible or even necessary or desirable. I don't necessarily like the idea of isolation. Keeping a community open and networked with other communities seems more sustainable. I'll think on this, though.

3. Geography's a big one, especially somewhere like Seattle where there's no mass transit and traffic is so congested taking a bus across town could take hours. Just up and moving to a new neighborhood's not necessarily a possibility for everyone... one solution to create networks of smaller communities. Flop houses all over cities, marked with chalk and/or wireless geotags.

Not to mention that for many of us (myself included) moving to a major city is not an option.

4. My instict is to say yes. There's the above mentioned lack of connection with the ouside world, and the geographic problems. That said, "working within the mainstream" seems to be a flawed way of thinking about these types solutions. But community service of the community as a whole, not just some sort of neopsychedelic underground, should be the aim.

One last note: look into Copenhagen's Christiania commune, if you haven't, for an idea of what's possible.

Point taken about autonomy not necessarily meaning isolation.

But I have a couple other general issues with making autonomy too much of a goal: it requires a lot of time and energy that could be spent working towards other goals and I'm not entirely sure being autonomous is synonymous with sustainable. Look into Christiania... they're quite autonomous (and to their credit, inclusive), but on the verge of being shut down anyway (may have been shut down, i'm not up on the news).

I'd say: being adaptive and post-geographic are more important than being autonomous.

Here's an interesting document on post-geography, BTW. I don't really understand how the implementation works, but it seems like it could be relevant here:

http://extremedemocracy.com/chapters/Chapter12-Greenfield.pdf

Check this out, from Portland, OR

http://www.cityrepair.org/about.html

I've heard great things about this project. At Tribes it is easy to see where "city repair" overlaps with various subcultures in the Portland area, including trance folks, pagans, polyamorists et al.

Check out Lewis Hyde, The Gift

In this work, Hyde lays out the basis for the gift economy. This piece has influenced my thinking about "alternative currencies", having participated in the past in such schemes.

I think that establishing local "gift economies" are a great way to shift paradigms while building community.

I'm a reiki teacher and my teaching work is firmly set now in the gift economy and is evolving into a community as more people are certified. The pace is right. A team of us are now teaching and we are evolving ways of working in a collaborative enviroment. Sometimes I think that the work of evolving the "model" is just as important to sharing the gift.

There are a couple of yoga teachers in Seattle who do the same thing, teach their gift, and in turn small healing communities are being created.

Christiania's getting shut down because the Danish government have realized that it's an expensive piece of real estate and they want to sell it off to the private sector (even though years ago they'd agreed to give the land to Christiania). Christiania's hash has made them an easy target (though they voluntarily demolished Pusher Street).

Same problem with artist squats in Europe, the one I know about specifically is one in east Berlin in an area that's become quite trendy. So the original owners are trying to get it back.

As such, legal ownership of space will be important, as well as any the ability to exist without a centralized physical location.

I think that a worthwile project would be developing technologies and methods for creating self-sufficient yet open and networked communies that fulfill peoples basic needs (i.e. food, clean water, power, medical care, housing etc.)

It would be really interesting to create two sister communities, one in the developed world, and one in the developing world (where this type of infrastructure is most sorely needed). People, skills, culture, and resources could migrate back and forth, possibly even through some sort of d.i.y. transportation system. This could provide an alternative to neoliberal, capitalist development models for people in the third world, as well as preventing the first world community from being merely a yuppie tourist attraction. It would also combine local organizing with involvement in the struggles of folks in the global south.

Anyway, this idea just now came to me, so I apologize if it sounds kind of incoherant...

The problem is stablizing the energy.

College works because it's a relatively value-free space: four years, external sources of money, little decision making beyond which courses you do, and massive, huge, incredible social license.

Plus the school administration giving your life a basic shape and purpose.

With all that stuff as energy inputs lots of people are capable of being wonderful. Then they get out into the real world and fall back on the coping skills and patterns of their parents, and the wonderful game falls apart. People gradually go offline without some form of strong spiritual practice, be it meditation or psychedelics.

But psychedelics cause damage. Not much damage, not significant, but over years unless people know how to stay psychically healthy they begin to pick up more and more scars and bruises. Burned in bits of trip memory, or wounds that got opened up and never quite closed, stuff like that. It's hard to stay fully healthy as a long term user of psychedelics, and most of the brightest, shinyest people seem to trip only rarely past about thirty, with certain incredibly obvious and powerful exceptions.

"Getting the magic back" requires raising energy. Spiritual energy, you know... juice. The kind of openness to god, to eachother's hearts etc. which is easy, oh-so-easy as youngesters, but is so much more difficult and complex when relationships begin to presage babies, and mortgages make more sense than renting. How do you love everybody when you've got this kid who's so much more important to you than the rest of the world combined, really, when it comes right down to it?

I'm not saying that it can't be done, but I am saying that the main obstacles are spiritual, not material or even emotional. Extraordinary power and circumstances need to combine to keep that kind of openness to the world going in large communities which aren't made up entirely of mid-20s or younger folks.