Love this description by Venkatesh Rao of the colonization of time and perspective by corporations.

At the Embassy SF our goal is to manifest community as a platform, and to continually be pushing the boundary of new ways of sharing and transparency. Part of that means redirecting any surplus income back into the community.

Historically, that would have meant that a small group would make informed guesses as to what the broader community wants. There are certainly merits to this, but, a suite of new approaches, enabled by technology, are radically changing the landscape of how participation can be built into our organizations.

A suite of new approaches, enabled by technology, are radically changing the…

We have an exciting new coliving house opening next door to Embassy SF, and one of our guests will be moving into this house. Yesterday we stood around the kitchen and discussed whether there was any “hard” advice for starting a successful community. That is, a kind of pattern language for seeding new deeply communal living spaces.

Embassies (and many other wonderful communities with their own excellent culture) are community-managed, mixed-duration coliving spaces. Though houses that identify as Embassies are autonomous and independently run, I would characterize each of them as participatory platforms for creativity, co-designed governance, and sharing. …

When you seek for a project to be collaboratively governed, there is an initial contradiction. Those who start the project inherently have more information and usually more power. In a hierarchical environment, removing yourself from the power role can be addressed by hiring someone(s) and “assigning” that power. But if you seek to cultivate a team where power and responsibility are genuinely distributed, hiring a team simply transfers hierarchical power and reinforces your authority to make that decision.

I’ve been on the founding team of at least 4 residential communities (most recently, the Embassy SF, the Red Victorian, and La…

We have a pervasive notion that excellence requires exclusivity. This probably comes from a time when opportunity really was scarce, and, as a result, did require some amount of exclusivity. We built not only institutions around that fact, but narratives. And after narratives, identities.

Today, access to opportunity is everywhere. Though it’s still far from being evenly distributed, so many people have access to being excellent, that the idea of it being exclusive— and more so, the constructed, institutionalized opportunities for cultivating and recognizing that excellence, vastly underrepresent those who are actually or possibly excellent.

One of the questions we…

July 3rd, 2013 3 minute read

I never thought I would have a strong opinion about affordable housing, but I’ve been really surprised time and again to see people dismiss “affordable housing” in favour of “Affordable housing.” We live in a house where there is a mix of income levels and housing costs — sort of a “mixed-affordability” deal. Our most expensive accommodation is $2100/month; our cheapest is in a shared room with bunk beds, in the master bedroom of an opulent victorian mansion with about 4000 sqft of shared common space. We are in a central location in the…