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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.

[PTTG??]

I imagine that once a "model" one was started up, we would be glad to help international sister communes get started.

As much fun as construction would be, it would most likely be too expensive to be practical. Better would be to find an old building- particularly a hotel of some sort or otherwise a large residential building- and renovate it. Think of it as a reclaiming party.

Solifuge, you've hit that on the head there. That's pretty much spot-on what I was thinking of. Do you know if the project is still going on? I'd like to hear about how it's turning out.

As for task sharing, I could imagine that with geeks, there could be a couple of ways to split chores up rather fairly. Perhaps just giving certain tasks "XP" rewards would be enough, seeing how well it seems to work in some universes.

[sonerohi]

Or split it up by money factor: If a geek is not working to financially float the commune, then he must chip in $x worth of labor every week. Dusting, taking out trash, and sweeping? Check what janitors make in the area.

[Kagus]

Interesting idea.  For the sake of my own imagination and naïveté, I'll treat this as seriously as I can, with the hope that it actually goes somewhere.

First off, accommodations.  Having visited a friend of mine in a commune, I can say that it takes some getting used to, but you do get used to it.  On the floor where my buddy was, there were about 5-6 people.  This location included two bathrooms, and the communal kitchen (which was a charming disaster).

The bathrooms maintained a cleaning rotation.  Every day, someone would clean that bathroom (both bathrooms had their own list), and then they wouldn't have to clean it for another five days or so.  This was the system we had at school, and although it's not perfect, you do get used to it.  Yes, some people are better at it than others, but if it's taken on a day-to-day maintenance it really doesn't need all that much each time.  And when the people who are good enough to actually clean the damn place come around, they have less muck to sort through than if the cleanings were less frequent.  Like I said, it's not perfect, but it's not bad.

The kitchen, however, was pretty much a war zone.  I don't know how else you'd handle this than to again assign a cleaning rotation.  You would of course need more than one person each time to cover the whole place, but it could be managed.

Some form of management would be required...  Someone with the place of mind and the authority to badger people into honoring their spot on the cleaning rotations, and to handle the various rent collections and payments.  Figuring out who does this is always a tricky matter, and under certain circumstances it can lead to a certain degree of animosity.


As for gathering money, there is one supplemental form of income that could come about from your normal duties.  First of all, having a personal gaming server would be all but necessary for any geek commune worth its salt...  Opening up spots for either subscribers or just asking for donations from the public can potentially grant a certain amount of revenue.  But it's not much, and quite possibly may not even cover the cost of the server.

The big thing, however, would be to simply publicize the whole affair.  Yes, yes, I know how much you all love having your greasy faces broadcast to the world at large...  But think about it.  Recording the day-to-day madness of a full-blooded geek commune would generate a sizable amount of interest, and if you go public with the idea beforehand I'm sure someone will cover the story of these modern-day techhippies whyoo decided to band together and create the most bizarre and neurotic collection of fools the world has yet realized.

Mythbusters gets huge ratings because they blow stuff up (well, that and the chick), and people always like looking into the lives of other people and seeing how they live.  Due to the naturally high tech, far-fetched, imaginative, and downright chaotic nature of geek groups, you'd be generating plenty of oddball happenings that viewers would eat up.  Whether this is a small-time internet phenomenon or a big-whoop TV show, it doesn't really matter.  Popularity and advertisements are a time-honored recipe for cash flow of some sort.  Again, I wouldn't rely on this as you primary funding, but it's always nice to have a helping hand.  And if, against all odds, it happens to take off, you might be given a greater range of freedom as far as other monetary sources are concerned.

Think about it...  It would be a combination of bombs, medieval warfare, and scaring people as they come out of bathrooms.  There's not a show alive that would beat that.


While a rural or semirural area might be nice for greater freedom as far as mayhem is concerned, I think it might come with a few too many issues to be fully worth it.  Urban situations could go either way, but might end up being a little cramped.  Weigh this against the greater ease of accessibility.  Suburban environs could provide a small yard for those outdoorsy catastrophes, but should still have decent access to utilities such as net connection and electricity (and no geek commune would be complete without a couple mostly-useless homemade solar panels anyways).  I really can't help with this part.


But yeah, this shows promise.  It of course depends entirely on who all decides to hop on for the ride, but I happen to think that there's real possibility in this.

[qwertyuiopas]

You can be a 30 minute drive away from Ottawa and yet surrounded by farmland or forest.

[PTTG??]

Heh, what if we focused the whole thing around filling the thing with internet art geeks? Somebody writes a webcomic, someone does a podcast, someone does some machinama, somebody writes a blog... And having that all on a website with a big "Donate to the Commune" sticker on each page would at least handle a few grocery bills a year.

So, here's the impression I'm getting:
A web-enabled high-bandwidth geek commune/coop on the outskirts of, for instance, Redmond, WA, a college/geek town that, co-incidentally, is nearby Camp Toady. Anyone want fries with that?

[Kagus]

Now, the really important question...   Is a Volkswagen Bus going to be included in this commune package?

[sonerohi]

Volkswagens are evil! We must ride peyote unicorns through the cocaine desert to the commune each day. The Eternal Ghost of Father Stalin would demand no less.

[Vector]

Heh, what if we focused the whole thing around filling the thing with internet art geeks? Somebody writes a webcomic, someone does a podcast, someone does some machinama, somebody writes a blog... And having that all on a website with a big "Donate to the Commune" sticker on each page would at least handle a few grocery bills a year.

Sure, other than the fact that people with similar interests tend to run into similar personalities, so you wouldn't have as much wacky hijinks material.  It's more interesting if you throw in a few mad scientists, and so on.

[Realmfighter]

One of each Wacky nerd stereotype!

[sonerohi]

I am definitely mad scientist for this shit. I recently prototyped a steam powered ballista that rotated while it fired from gattling barrels, like the Scramblers at the fairs. It also used steam engines for reloading, and was pretty boss. If one of you guys has any knowledge in nuclear fission, that would help me out bunches with heating and heat regulation.

[Blacken]

This has already been done, it's called MIT

This has not received the applause it deserves.

[LeoLeonardoIII]

You can be a 30 minute drive away from Ottawa and yet surrounded by farmland or forest.

Same with western Washington.

As for domestics, I like the idea of rotating chore lists. Every day each person has to do one thing, just one thing. That thing is a bathroom one day, the kitchen the next, vacuuming and dusting the next, etc. You basically do half an hour of domestic work and you're done for the day. Hopefully people wouldn't punish each other by making messes. That could be a self-correcting system, where people eventually get tired of cleaning up retributive messes. Or it could devolve into an apocalypse of filth where people comically attempt to outdo each others' nastiness.

Spoiler: You might not want to read this, so I spoilered it. (click to show/hide)

"Did you just poop out that raw egg from the top of the staircase onto the oven?"

As for revenue, definitely do donations. Set up connected blogs so people can read what everyone is writing about, the daily goings-on and little bickerings and projects and such.

Webcams in public spaces like the workshops or the LAN room and such might be a way to go, but someone may come by and try to steal things. After all, they can case the joint remotely and learn the schedules and patterns of people.

You could definitely do a farming thing. Watering and weeding could be a daily chore. Planting would be a group activity, same with the original construction and setup. But if you have dirt delivered, you can dig and plant a garden that can support 7 people in one day, using those seven people. After that, a half hour a day of work by one person can maintain the whole thing. The harvesting and canning / freezing should be a group activity, and it'll take part of an afternoon three or four times a year at most. In terms of money, the initial cost of the seeds is very little, the dirt is also fairly cheap, you don't really need much fertilizer or pesticide, etc.


-----

Any communal thing works best when you have a core group of like-minded people who honestly want the thing to succeed, and are willing to give up something of themselves in order to make it happen. If you start with a group of inherently selfish, greedy, lazy, petty people your project will curdle in the womb. The trick is to plan it out so each person ends up getting so much more than they put in, which isn't possible if there are mostly free riders.

[PTTG??]

Webcams in public spaces like the workshops or the LAN room and such might be a way to go, but someone may come by and try to steal things. After all, they can case the joint remotely and learn the schedules and patterns of people.

Ah, but we'd have cameras on all of those areas!

[LeoLeonardoIII]

I'm talking about at night and such, and when everyone decides to jump in the van and go to the con. Also, is anyone at the commune going to be watching the webcams as security devices? I sure wouldn't.

[PTTG??]

Our loyal fans would... well, probably cheer the burglar on. But probably one of them would call the cops.
 
Well, one of the advantages of the commune would be that, in the event of a burglar, we could simply think of it as either a baby-snatcher that targets computers or else a very localized zombie apocolypse. Either way, we're prepared.
 
Night? You mean when the eye of scalding pain closes and we emerge from slumber to play our games?