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Strike the earth!

Good idea, don't count me in, though.

Meh, I just like to vote. Don't care.

You'll probably have a lot of "Fun*", that's for sure.

GET A JOB, YOU HIPPIES.

[Vector]

You can be rural without actively farming.


This sounds like a cool thing to try for a while.  Maybe not as a life-long thing, but as a bit of a diversion.

[Heron TSG]

It'd be neat, but I personally like some privacy.

[PTTG??]

It'd be neat, but I personally like some privacy.

Please elaborate. I expect that an organization like this could provide at least a generous private room (more than a simple bed+door, but a full-fledged "quarters" model), perhaps slightly more than that. Shared kitchen, dining rooms and studies, yes.

[SolarShado]

It'd be neat, but I personally like some privacy.

This. The "quarters" bit sounds encouraging, but the gf has trouble keeping quiet at times

[Heron TSG]

From the OP, it sounded like it'd be a shack with internet and mattresses. Privacy (in my opinion) requires at least a blockage of vision of everyone else, if not sound. (Although you can buy extremely cheap soundproof panels nowadays, so it wouldn't be difficult to coat a room in them if you were paranoid or something.)

Yeah, the idea of a mattress hall doesn't sound like a place where I'd willingly sleep.

[PTTG??]

Ah, of course not. What I had in mind was that you'd have a private set of rooms and then a few public rooms for cooking and group activities. A dining hall, yes, but everybody would get their own quarters.

For instance, we may look at finding an older hotel and converting it, and everybody gets a couple rooms to themselves. We would not have a Dwarf Fortress style commune going on.

[sonerohi]

Geeks build cool things, yeah? My idea: big plus shaped structure. 2 stories tall, except in the middle. The middle has the kitchen on the ground level. Each tenant gets four rooms: bed, bath, study, and a w/e room for them to put shit in.  It'd be like this:

Code: [Select]

Bath|Study|      open space            | Bath|Study
Bedr|w/e r| kitchen and eating space|Bedr| w/e r

From the side. I cannot even explain this.

Ms paint glory:



Basically, the kitchen also serves as an upper floor communal party zone, and a spot to get some much feared sun. Each geek picks which room is which and where stairs go, like I personally would put my study on the forward ground spot, my w/e room right above it with the stairs there, my bedroom the back upper space, and bathroom as lower back space.

[PTTG??]

That gets REALLY expensive. especially bathrooms. And, let's face it, a bathroom is essentially binary; you're either in it or out of it. You don't need it all the time. Assuming you spend an hour a day in there taken together (counting, optimistically, showers), that's a bathroom that is only 1/24th of maximum efficiency. So, 1 bathroom per, say, 20 members could be pretty generous.

OK, that's a little overboard. A more reasonable figure is one large bathroom for 8 members, and depending on the total number of members, half baths for each unit.

Rather than predefined spaces, I was thinking everyone can get one rather large room and a set of dividers that allow them to break it up. Everyone gets the same square footage, but gets to have a unique space.

[sonerohi]

True enough on cost. But, I would not move in without a personal bathroom. I've got some phobias that simply would not allow me to use a communal restroom. Maybe a bathroom per 2-4 people, but not 8-20.

[Jreengus]

The problem with bathrooms is varying standards and habits. Acceptably clean to you is ridiculously spotless to someone else and a filthy mess to another.

Not to mention no-one likes cleaning up after someone else in the bathroom of all places.

[sonerohi]

Exactly. If the group is too large, it will end up looking like the restrooms in gas stations.

[Vector]

Not to mention that unisex bathrooms are full of suck.


Dunno how well dividers could work--they leave that feeling of things being incompletely closed off, which makes me paranoid and defensive.  Don't think I'd use any...

[Diablous]

This is...interesting. Having doubt it would work.

[Solifuge]

From a standpoint of practicality, you'd need to have something like this well-organized. You'd also want to keep it structured similar to an apartment, in the event that you had "tenants" come and go. It could be a neat place if done well.

This concept reminds me very much of the Coop I was looking at living in for a while. It was a communal living space carved out of a big old 3-story home; the residents were living together, with private or shared rooms and communal living spaces, paying off the cost of the house loan by splitting "rent" between the tenants. With 20+ people living there, they rotated cooking meals, various chores, and improvements on the house (people had positions where they were in charge of organizing things like grocery trips, repairs, etc.) and it was situated in the rural area on the edge of a college town, with all the comforts and options of both. Folks worked and went to school and so on, pooled their "rent" payments, and these were used to cover food, utilities, paying off the house, and for improving the house as well.

You might want to look at Coops as a model, if you're serious about pursuing this idea. Personally, I think it'd be really cool to do for a time, provided that I wasn't tied down with school. I might suggest Washington, on the West Coast, since it's got some beautiful temperate rainforests, mountains, coasts, islands, etc. as well as cities, and has a large artist and geek population.

[Jreengus]

It might be cool to live in but I'd never bother going through American immigrations for it. Now if there was an EU one... Preferably either French or English as I'd hate to go into a country where I can't speak any of the language.