I visited TO a couple of years ago for its annual Communities Conference, and stopped by Acorn, the TO-inspired community down the road.

As a "Cohousing Coach" volunteering on the Cohousing Association (Coho/US) and Fellowship for Intentional Community (FIC) boards, and with family and business taking me to a number of different regions with enough flexibility to take time to visit, I've been able to visit more than 100 different communities over the past decade, mainly cohousing neighborhoods, and lived in two.

In all my experience, nothing came close to Twin Oaks in terms of the deep commitment to community and uncompromising living of values, with appropriately-scaled social and technological systems to support the efforts. From a clothes library (with people getting paid to shop at thrift stores) to innovative community economic development models, from a shared economy that credits hours for childrearing, and evolutionary approaches to life's challenges rather than a doctrinaire one-size-fits-all attitude, the community seems to reflect a real-world utopian vision (however oxymoronic it may be to label a real-world location "noplace"). I don't know how much comes from the founders, but in other communities, the group culture is frequently heavily influenced by the attitudes of those who led the way.

P.S. It's great to see that BB folks have some community-living background.

An unofficial Maker Faire in Austin community-organizing "town hall" gathering will take place this Sunday evening:
http://upcoming.yahoo.com/event/867022

as chronicled on the unofficial wiki:
http://makerfaireaustin.pbwiki.com/

@Eustace, buying property is one tool that can help the process, but not mandatory. L.A. EcoVillage, where the signing will be held Thursday, includes renters as well as co-owners, collaborating together for sustainable community.

I believe that greater long-term success in this realm lies down the path of interdependence rather than "self-sufficiency", sharing skills and resources and time to build greater community resiliency and foster our individual independence from external needs. That's what the cohousing, EcoVillages, and Intentional Communities movements are all about.

(full disclosure: I'm a volunteer boardmember for the latter linked org, and a retired consultant/boardmember for the 2d-to-last)

Now, they have to take the subway on their own or get there via teh internets. Ah, unintended consequences. There oughtta be a law (no relation).

Not directly related, but TSA-flavored: I just got a letter from Southwest notifying me that the TSA notified them that they removed Hazardous Materials (HazMat) from my luggage when I travelled a month ago. No (direct) response to the lost-baggage-element complaint I had filed upon receiving my bag with this item missing. The interesting part will be in figuring out what exactly about a bicycle rack (the kind that mounts on a car) constitutes hazardous materials.

I just flew JetBlue and saw the webpage promoting the BetaBlue service. No predicting whether you end up on the one plane equipped for it, though. It sounds like it's email only, selected providers, at least initially.

Cody's also offered something you'd never find at Amazon: free same-day delivery... by bicycle, via Pedal Express.

@OrangeOrangutan, have you checked gas prices lately? Better make that four bucks.

And since it's so hot, half the ice will melt before you get back, and then half of that, by the time you get it from the car, meaning that either you will always have ice or that you will never get home, if we teach the controversy.

So sad. Steve was a great inspiration to me in the early days of BMUG and later at MacWEEK magazine and the Apple spinoff User Group Connection, through his Apple Library User Group work and the community-organizing work he did. Always friendly, helpful, calm, interested. Ahead of his time in pre-internet visions of a connective, collaborative, community-driven world.

On my way over to the memorial blog to meet mutual friends and perhaps find ways to make sure the spirit of his great work continues...

@Starcadia: Right on! You've articulated some of what I've been pondering re Open Source/CC models and even blogs generally... in terms of the required personalities/organizational behavior for effectiveness, and the trade-offs involved if you're playing in a small pond with potential competitors with unequal market access. I grok the benefits of growing the market and contributing (I helped coin the BMUG motto "We're in the business of giving away information" nearly a quarter century ago), but I frequently find myself re-assessing the opportunity costs of giving things away, in terms of the number of people who start to filter out my contributions vs. the gain of those who discover them.

This sounds like the microcircuit equivalent of junk DNA.

My dad's a patent attorney, so I figure I got into electronics/computers from reading patent applications and court rulings he brought home, and when visiting his office.

In 9th grade, reading the copyright-lawsuit Federal court ruling in Star Wars vs. Battlestar Galactica, was notable/influential for me... especially the characterization of BG as essentially a Western, and therefore not at all the same as Star Wars (not fully referenced here, but couldn't find the fulltext offhand):
http://www.kobol.com/archives/BG-FAQ.html#E21

Glen Larson commented on the differences between the two in Science Fantasy Film Classics (October 1978): Battlestar Galactica is quite different. When it comes to who are our characters and what our story is, I would have to say that if you were trying to compare Shane to Gunfight at the OK Corral, you'd say, "Yes, they're both westerns," but I doubt if you'd find many parallels beyond that.

@25,

The probability that the LHC will destroy the universe is the same as the probability that you will destroy the universe by triggering some hitherto unknown law of physics the next time you cross the road

Q: Why did the botanist cross the road?
A: To destroy the universe by triggering some hitherto unknown law of physics.

Or, for $7 (half that on two-for-one Wednesdays) you can snuggle up with your sweetie(s) on couches and enjoy a drink and fresh-made dinner at the bar at the Parkway and Cerrito Speakeasy theatres:

http://www.picturepubpizza.com/

P.S. No valet parking, but they remind us "Don't park in Kragen lot". Crying babies optional at selected performances, weekly.

She may want to watch out on certain portions of the tracks for WiFi webcams installed in the wake of this incident last year:

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/04/20/BAGG3PCES41.DTL&hw=gang&sn=059&sc=235

After all, railroad terrain is private property, with its own railroad-run police force, and now subject to TSA-ish security measures.. after all, she could be secretly rerouting trains into skyscrapers.

Amtrak security poster

@HundredsOfThousands wrote:

near SF

"near SF" doesn't quite capture it. How about "walking distance from the TED conference main site in Monterey"?

Disclaimer: I'm a speaker. But then, so are you. And you. And you...

@33, There's a book about that.

"Sorry sir, that was intended to go to the ballroom"

Food prices are up

If prices are increasing, then wouldn't waiting a month result in paying more?

The only coupons I've bothered with have in decades been in the local green book, EcoMetro Guide. $20 from local nonprofits (they make up to 50%), unlike the classic regional "Entertainment Guides" these include both national grocery discounts on brands we already buy and lots of combinable grocery discounts (typically $5-10 off on a $50 purchase at some local non-chain groceries, including the incredible Monterey Market) and free and half-price deals on many local performance venues we patronize... it was pretty easy for it to pay for itself in a day without increasing consumption or switching brands or getting junk (right on, @7). The trick, as always, is to stick with only coupon-and-sale items... plus to do independent comparisons to determine whether the coupon value makes up for the price premium of a particular brand.

Full disclosure: After finding that I wasn't alone in enjoying the deals and even buying more than one, I bought a couple of boxes on consignment for a nonprofit I'm part of, and left copies in my cohousing neighbors' community mailboxes with a note, giving them the choice of returning it or leaving a check to the nonprofit. A majority made a contribution to buy the guide.

I'm looking forward to disintermediating my consumption by taking advantage of my membership in the latest iteration of a neighborhood-serving cooperative grocery, where providing a few hours a month of unpaid labor results in low prices in theory. However we do it, local year-round farmer's markets remain our primary source for both veggies and the incredible fresh-baked olive bread from Phoenix Pastificio.

This item popped up just as I was looking at info on a new documentary, Do Not Go Gently, on the power of imagination in aging. It features Gee's Bend quilter Arlonzia Pettway (82), and (AFAIK) some background related to the role of quilting in aging and death. I'll be seeing it tonight (Friday) at the Positive Aging conference at Eckerd College in St. Petersburg, FL, with the Executive Producer and Director/Producer present. Upcoming TV airings include Chico,CA and Anchorage, Fairbanks, and Juneau, AK.

Minor bugreport/advice to users on profile setup: If someone's URL doesn't start with http colon slash slash, clicking on the link gets treated as a relative link on the BB site = 404 city!

Otherwise, nice to see greater community promotion.

I like the framing, and the ability to weight ratings (of yourself) by group. However, even for an "ethical" social network, I'm reluctant to give it my logins to all my other nets and mail accounts for it to slurp out address book contents. I'd be surprised if it went ahead and spammed them, initially or later (as some friends belatedly discovered with at least one service), but I don't want to take the time to create a fake depopulated account to find out.

I like seeing organizations as peers to individuals, unlike most social nets that are person-to-person only.

Interface has some glitches in Safari/MacOS, overprinting in a couple of places like the "definitions" screen after selecting a value.

Like other reputation-aggregation systems, it seems like there is some risk of gaming-the-system and influence, and up/downrating based on other than the named factors... trollrating and friend-boosting, among other behaviors.