HOUSING SECTION

Do something personal with social impact in the locality where is the house that welcomes you

Visitors welcomed in the houses of the network, in exchange for the stay, participate in tasks that generate a social impact in the town or city where the house is (besides the contributions to the houses themselves). Other active hospitality networks do not have such reach. There are global hospitality networks such as couchsurfing, or the more politically minded like trustroots (activism) or servas (peace). There are also regional networks such as the Iberian Ecovillage Network, or activist networks related to urban social centers, but workaway.info and woofers are the best examples of formal networks to be improved.

Woofers have a filter for the projects to be related to organic agriculture, and their adverts are quite reliable, but every host pays 20 or more per year of being published there, and it doesn’t involve other areas of action besides organic agriculture. Workaway.info does involve broader areas of action and contributions given, so it is a better network to be improved. None of them specify a maximum contributing time owners can ask for, so they may be unfair for the guests.

This section want to simplify volunteering, foster more collaboration between this type of projects so that the there is more contribution to them. A network of houses organized with a desire for external impact to the house, better prevents some unsocial behavior from the guest and or owners, and so both parties feel that this house is not the only one where the guest can be. It is always better for the guest to go to another house before creating trouble in the one (s)he is at the moment. Also the fact that a guest contributes to the development of a common project that goes beyond the improvement of the house itself, helps improving the coliving by establishing a common referential outer purpose, therefore it transcends the house relationship vices between owners and volunteers, thus prevents potential problems from being experienced or personalized.

The interested purpose for the network itself is to help as a common trustee for both parties and give the best recommendations for guests routes and tasks. By matching where would the guest better fit, the guest is more calm and happy in his-her daily life so that (s)he can devote his-her talent to develop social projects, where this section of shared residences would be an obvious candidate as a task itself.

More sustainable and pleasant co-livings

On the one hand, we can help many people who are willing to do things they do not know where to start or are ashamed to contact the projects and need a hostess to accompany them at the beginning. There are also activists who do not have a stable house, want to move and there are many people who are simply looking to live for a while in environments where everything is more shared. On the other hand, there are many other people who already have a house, they would like to share it more and also they would like that to leave a good mark on their environment, but they have trouble finding the right people to make it happen.

We are aware of the problems of co-living that are generated when interacting in homes, but we are also aware that many of them could be avoided with a better specification of the conditions of use of the house and more specifically, with the house being part of a network of houses with social impact where there is some other houses (and spirits!) watching out there.

This is how you get the guest to have the permanent research to know if this is the best house where to develop your skills for an improvement of the house and society, while also encouraging the friendliness of the landlady to want the guest choose to be in his house and not in another.

Networks mediation tools

We like the simple life, but we also have offer to formalize any relationship with some type of contract and guarantee, if the owners or the volunteers so wish.

Some owners may want additional guarantees about the guests. Some of them may want   guarantees that the guest accepts an authority of an agent on behalf of both, so it can ask him-her to go somewhere else without the owner having to bother to tell him-her so. There can be many decentralized types of doing this backing, but it is also possible and wished to automate it (make it completely decentralized, only based in relational data).

Standard for shared residency offers

We specify this standard of residence offer where other possible exchanges related to the residence are proposed, but also limited. We do it to be transparent with our ideals, and so, if an owner wants to say «this house is shared» (without more conditions or without belonging to the network of residences), that the applicant knows what he is offering in particular .

Our proposal is that without counting as beyond the hours contributed to the needed for the feeding, cleaning or basic maintenance of the space, the maximum request that the owners should offer to the guests would be:

2 hours = Sleep and basic breakfast

3 hours = Sleep, breakfast and lunch

4 hours = Complete diet

In a more formed network, we would like to be the ones who would supplement the diets and even small rents to the voluntary guests.