research-l Mailing List: Introducing Myself

[Sharon Villines (sharon]

I recently wrote the description below of my interests in developing a 
cohousing software. The last time I introduced myself to some of you I was 
doing research on affordable cohousing. After 2-3 years I concluded that 
affordable cohousing was not a problem of construction, there are many 
construction solutions to building a $100,000 house of reasonable size. The 
problem is primarily zoning and zoning solutions are very local. And each 
locality has very different rules. So unless there is a local group committed 
to building $100,000 housing units, there isn’t much I could help with. So the 
website is still there but renamed “Strong Neighborhoods” so I can address the 
successes of cohousing in the context of neighborhoods everywhere.

Now I’m looking at software.

My experience and interests are heavily weighted toward information access and 
organization. I worked in university research fellow in graduate school and 
spent 25 years teaching adult students in independent study. Unlike first-year 
college students, professional adults enter with already developed expertise. 
The first task was to translate these into classroom equivalencies for college 
credit. Some had journals and notebooks, but many had no evidence of 
"college-level" experience. How could a student document their ability to speak 
a now obsolete Irish dialect that they spoke with their grandfather who died 20 
years ago? Or advanced level knowledge of top secret Israeli espionage 
techniques?

As I guided them in researching college equivalencies, talking with possible 
evaluators at universities, and writing essays to reconstruct their knowledge, 
I learned a lot about a lot of things — it was a Wikipedia of life experience. 
I was also active in many protest movements, non-profit and cooperative 
ventures, and upstart alternative institutions that created strategies for 
getting things done based on anti-discriminatory values. I've participated in 
the failed starts of 3 cohousing communities and in the founding a successful 
community where I’ve lived for 22 years. Many of the founding members have now 
died and others have gone in search of the sea. 

In all of this, I've watched how history slipped away because no one recorded 
the details or kept mementos. 

And I've seen how many communities have not kept good records and thus been 
unable to plan or budget well. Or to demonstrate to the outside world that 
their operations were disciplined and business-quality, not just pot luck 
dinners. After 30+ years of demonstrating that people can build and manage 
their own communities, there is no tool designed to actually help them manage 
the diverse activities of cohousing communities: accounting, email, discussion 
forums, meal planning and reservations, and the multiple calendars needed to 
schedule meeting rooms, parking spaces, guestrooms, events, reminders, travel 
notices, and birthday celebrations.

A major undone task is a comprehensive tool for organizing information so it 
contributes to all the facets of cohousing. So my current interest is in 
developing that software. Something cooperative so everyone records information 
and preserves history as they do the other work. And something financially 
detailed enough to manage the affairs of a multimillion dollar multi-household 
housing and recreation complex.

I’m currently look at wiki software as a key tool that can be used to store 
many kinds of information and is designed for cooperative data entry. I’m also 
working with Sean Davey who developed Mosaic and the new organization that is 
forming around Gather, the software Tom Smyth developed. Both of these programs 
are missing elements I think are key.

Nothing is perfect but the idea is a comprehensive set of software modules that 
people can use within a cohesive dashboard on a pick and choose basis. I don’t 
know where this will go but I expect to develop guides to creating scrapbooks 
as well as financial records and task lists that is adaptable to the variety of 
styles of communities.

Sharon
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Sharon Villines
Takoma Village Cohousing, Washington DC
http://www.takomavillage.org