Organic Coworking

Introduction

• Create a multi-level, coworking environment using local resources.
• Learn by doing and guide others in doing.
• Coworking meets WWOOF and CSA's
• Build sweat equity
• Rural coworking

Opportunities

• Adirondack State Park

  • Concepts

  • This is a post I made a couple years ago on my fossilized

    http://www.openideaproject.org/ site:

    Organic farming meets Free & Open Source Software? Learn organic

    farming during a "guerilla coding" retreat. Learn programming,

    networking and other home-grown computer skills while building an

    organic garden.

    Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) IS the computer world's organic

    gardening. They would be like whole grain bread and thermal

    grease...perhaps not. Both tend to favor non-commercial, royalty/

    patent/IP safe, collaborative methods.

    Combine these ideas to get geeks eating organic produce and organic

    farmers building wifi mesh networks.

    World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms (WWOOF - http://www.wwoof.org/)

    is an organization that provides volunteers to work and learn on

    organic farms in exchange for room and board.  Programmers and other

    technologists who believe in FOSS often work to fund their

    contributions. Given the opportunity to "code for food", would many

    geeks go for it? Free broadband!

    Host sites would provide room and board as well as equipment,

    materials, and transportation. Some WWOOF hosts are open to volunteers

    even during the winter months. Volunteers, for example, could

    contribute 5 6-hour days with one day a week doing "something else".

    This could help foster a spirit of "knowledge sharing". This could be

    putting up a tower for wifi antennas or deer-resistant fencing to help

    protect crops, teaching a class, firewood fetching, facility

    construction, or other community needs.

    Other volunteer opportunities could exist such as camp staff, tour

    guiding, or custodial work at community sites.

  • From an IRC discussion on freenode's #esp recently:

    "One of the things that came to mind regarding http://wiki.espians.com/Day_Riva

    and coworking, wrt WWOOF, is the aspect of building a location from

    scratch in the "typical" coworking situation as well as harvesting

    trees, making lumber, building structures, and more... really

    bootstrapping, and dealing with the same processes elsewhere."

  • The general idea is coworking to build a rural coworking space in

    rural upstate NY.  It would share the "traditional" coworking day-use

    venue facilities with lodging, facilities for small seminars,

    conferences, and retreats.  There would also be facilities for

    artists, writers, and the like.  The http://wiki.espians.com/Day_Riva_Setup

    page is a list-in-progress of many of the aspects involved in the

    planning and development of the project.

  • Issues

    • One of the goals is to provide work space to artists and provide a corresponding virtual studio for product sales.  Uploading images and other media to a server is no fun over the marginal dialup service that is available.  There is no affordable broadband access yet, but the facilities to really use it aren't there either.

    • The area is popular for summer retreats, and it's ripe for vacationers to need coworking space or general internet access.

  • Everything is in the planning stage, construction of first solar microhouse prototype starting in July.

  • Contact Information

    • Feel free to contact me for more info at jjarchambeault at gmail dot com. I will have a site specific to this project up fairly soon.