RFCD&P #1: How We Rebuild the Hood, The Internet Way
A Request for Comment, Discussion, and Participation, mrf v1.0
JOIN IN & HELP US FIND A WAY FORWARD TO FIX OUR NEIGHBORHOODS!
We are 25 years into a new millenium, America's 250th Birthday Approaches, and Our Infrastructure is Crumbling Around Us.
Bridges & Buildings are Falling Down, Water Systems are Failing, Gas Mains are Exploding taking entire subdivisions with them, and Extreme Weather is wreaking havoc.
We Have to Rebuild... Everything. We Have to Go Lean, Clean, and Green. And, We Have to Figure Out How to Make it Pay for Itself.
Here in suburbia, a land of subdivisions built in the post-war era, we face the challenge of aging buildings, grounds, and utility infrastructure - as well as that of responding to changing demographics, environmental conditions, rising energy costs, and mandates to shift from fossil fuels to sustainable energy sources.
Cities & Towns have Planning, Engineering, and Public Works Departments to work the problem. But subdivisions run by condominium & homeowners associations - with volunteer boards & committees - face challenges well beyond our capabilities. The marketplace isn't offering solutions, nor is government; insurance companies have already pulled out of 20 states. We're on our own; and we're venturing into unchartered territory.
A legacy of deferred maintenance & patchwork repairs is catching up with us. We face the looming specter of skyrocketing condo fees, major systems reaching end-of-life, and staggering special assessments to head off, or clean up after, catastrophic system failures.
And that's why we're here at This Old Neighborhood - to find a way through this fine mess we've gotten ourselves into. We're starting in my front yard, muddling our way through on camera, sharing our missteps for your entertainment & elucidation; drawing a map for you to follow as you address your own challenges, in your own communities. We invite you along on the journey.
A Bad Attitude & An Organizational Challenge
People know how to redevelop at scale - college campuses, office parks, cities & towns do it all the time. Boston just gave itself a 400 year overhaul & makeover. But suburban subdivisions just aren't equipped for the job.
It's mainly an organizational challenge, and meeting it starts with an attitude adjustment.
For decades, the mantra of volunteer boards has been: Keep it Small; Keep Condo Fees Down: Avoid Big Projects that require rebuilding to code; and don't dare tell owners what to do inside their units.
Now we need to go big, we need to work together, and, we need to find a way to pay for it all in a way that spreads costs & benefits across a mish-mosh of individual unit owners, condominium associations, management companies, and private utilities.I spent the past 50 years building big systems for a living - big chunks of the Internet, military systems, enterprise systems, dispatch systems for big city bus fleets, municipal broadband networks... places where this kind of problem is child's play. Now, I find myself as treasurer of one of four condominium boards, in a 50-year-old condominium complex, sitting on a long-range capital planning committee, with a mandate to plan a round of major repairs, overhauls, updates, and replacements to our buildings, grounds, utilities, and support facilities - with no engineering support, or even basic as-built documents to start from. To complicate matters, we share our sewage plant with neighboring residential & business complexes, and we face a mandate that major construction must be fossil fuel free.
We're under the gun to move forward, to figure out what we need, what we want, how to get there, and how to pay for it. It's an exercise in Reengineering & Redevelopment that must involve all of us, as well as neighboring residential and business communities with whom we share infrastructure. But who's "we?" Nobody has the big picture, and nobody is in charge - we need to come together in something that looks a lot like town meeting & community-wide master planning.
It's a Challenge. It's a Process. It's going to involve a lot of cat herding & tilting at windmills. Hence our efforts here at This Old Neighborhood, to broaden our base, and develop a modicum of process - to bring in outside input & support, to collaboratie with academia, industry, and other communities sharing our problems.
Fortunately, I've done this before - developing & promulgating much of the theory and practice of planning, designing, financing, and developing muncipal broadband networks - and making a bunch of projects happen. My work here, expands on that experience.
I spent the past 50 years building big systems for a living - big chunks of the Internet, military systems, enterprise systems, dispatch systems for big city bus fleets, municipal broadband networks... places where this kind of problem is child's play. Now, I find myself as treasurer of one of four condominium boards, in a 50-year-old condominium complex, sitting on a long-range capital planning committee, with a mandate to plan a round of major repairs, overhauls, updates, and replacements to our buildings, grounds, utilities, and support facilities - with no engineering support, or even basic as-built documents to start from. To complicate matters, we share our sewage plant with neighboring residential & business complexes, and we face a mandate that major construction must be fossil fuel free.
We're under the gun to move forward, to figure out what we need, what we want, how to get there, and how to pay for it. It's an exercise in Reengineering & Redevelopment that must involve all of us, as well as neighboring residential and business communities with whom we share infrastructure. But who's "we?" Nobody has the big picture, and nobody is in charge - we need to come together in something that looks a lot like town meeting & community-wide master planning.
It's a Challenge. It's a Process. It's going to involve a lot of cat herding & tilting at windmills. Hence our efforts here at This Old Neighborhood, to broaden our base, and develop a modicum of process - to bring in outside input & support, to collaborate with academia, industry, and other communities sharing our problems.
Fortunately, I've done this before - developing & promulgating much of the theory and practice of planning, designing, financing, and developing muncipal broadband networks - and making a bunch of projects happen. My work here, expands on that experience.
A Simple Approach: Assemble a Working Group, Start Some Conversation, Rebuild the World
Our approach is simple & time-tested: Bring people together, start some conversations, share stories & visions of possible futures, make some plans, roll up our sleeves, and get to work. The hard part is getting started.
As a species, our superpower is collaboration - when we work together we can accomplish might deeds. John Kennedy pointed us at the Moon, and we went there. We just finished wiring the planet, building ourselves a global nervous system. Disney builds virtual worlds, and now subdivisions. Volunteers lead the way into crisis zones, build houses with Habitat for Humanity, build a city in the dessert every year at Burning Man. Our challenge is focusing our efforts here at home, rebuilding our neighborhoods.
And our experience in building the Internet provides the model. In 1963, JCR Licklider wrote a (paper) memo, to a loose gaggle of researchers:
MEMORANDUM FOR: Members and Affiliates of the Intergalactic Computer Network
FROM: J. C. R. Licklider
SUBJECT: Topics for Discussion at the Forthcoming Meeting
That memo sparked the assembly of various Working Groups, the exchange of Technical Memoranda (later called RFCs - Requests for Comments), first on paper, later by email - voluntary protocol standards, developed by "rough consensus and running code," adopted by vendors, making their way into devices we now carry in our pockets. In 1969, the ARPANET passed its first packets. In 1971 I arrived at MIT just in time for Ray Tomlinson to send the first ARPANET email, enshrine the @ sign in technology history, and kicking off a world of virtual teams and communities, linked by email lists, that now hold our world together. Then, and now, the Internet has grown through voluntary cooperation among standards writers, vendors, network operators, and those of us who buy computers & smartphones and pay the bills.
For history buffs, this mirrors the approach taken by Sam Adams, when he called a Town Meeting in Boston, launched the first Committee of Correspondence, which wrote & distrubuted the Boston Pamphlet, ultimately leading to a Novo Ordo Seclorum, the USA, about to celebrate its 250th birthday. More recently, all it took was for Linus Torvalds to post a paragraph to USENET - asking for input on his new software project - leading to Linux, and much of the ecosystem supporting the Open Source Software we depend on.
And that's how we're proceding to reengineer & redevelop our neighborhoods. We're creating a simple venue (this blog, later some video chat rooms), organizing some working groups, starting some conversations, and getting to work.
This is the first of those conversations. We invite you to join us, through your reviews, comments, and participation in moving the process forward.
Community Development as Event Organizing, Game Playing, World Building, Writing Future History... Floating Loans, and Letting Contracts
Infrastructure Development has a lot in common with event organizing. The engineering is easy. Even the financing is easy. The hard part is bringing people together, coming to rough consensus on goals & direction - and from there, we're pretty good at everything from bringing water & power to a dessert, going to war, rebuilding a continent afterwards, and most recently, building ourselves a global network to link us together.
Licklider wrote a memo, calling together a loose collection of working groups, and we have the Internet. Throw a crisis, and volunteers are the first to show up. Announce a Service Day, or a Habitat for Humanity build, and people show up to support their community. Throw a party in the dessert, and people will build a city at Burning Man.
We're going to throw some parties - happy hours, block parties, a porch fest, a food truck rodeo - and engage our neighbors in organizing the events. We're going to organize story hours & open mic nights, some TED-like talks - we have an interesting & accomplished community - it's time we get to know each other. And organizing social events is an easy way to build a sense of community, and the experience of working together.
From there, we can do what the big guys do, when contemplating big projects - call a bidders' conference, get vendors in to talk about the projects that are going on all around us (e.g., neighborhood scale geothermal heating & cooling - rather than the unit-by-unit heat pumps that are being pushed on individual unit owners).
From there, it's a simple step to collaborative design exercises, perhaps some design competitions, some scenario games: How do we want to be living in 10 years? What do we want our village to look like? How do we get there? From there, maybe a town fair - SciFi Cons, Renaissance Fairs, Steampunk Festivals are pretty popular ways to try out visions of how we want to be living. We bring in vendors to show of their latest & greatest building & energy technologies.
We run a formal acquisitions exercise - the same way the big guys come together to write RFPs (Requests for Proposal), and manage large purchases.
And from there, we can start soliciting serious proposals, including financing packages that spread costs over 30 years, while cutting our utility bills to pay off the loans - treating our Capital Reserves as Investment Funds, not a maintenance slush fund - organizing projects that provide a positive return on our investment, rather than holes into which we throw money.
It's a process that urban neighborhoods have used to launch Community Development Programs, and that I've used to launch municipal broadband projects. It can be time consuming, painful, and political - but that's the nature of the beast.
Shall We Play a Game? Join Us For The Journey, Let's Party!
Join us as we build a new generation of Community Networks, to help us think & work together; and as we launch a wave of Neighborhood Engineering Working Groups to chart the way forward, neighborhood by neighborhood, and then make our visions real. Help us blaze a trail, and draw a map for others to follow.
I invite those of you in our viewing audience, to come forward and share your ideas of how to get started - here on Nagog Hill, or in your neighborhood. What would get you out at night? A party, a game night, a world building exercise? What would you help organize - a happy hour, a story hour, an open mic event, a porchest or food truck rodeo, a block party, ... a chance to tell about your most recent trip, perhaps an opportunity to plan an expedition with your neighbors?
I invite those of you with hands-on community organizing experience, dialogue & deliberation practitioners, team builders & workshop leaders, event organizers, game developers & dungeon masters, and others with related skills & experience to join a fledgling Community Engineering Task Force (modeled after the Internet Engineering Task Force), follow our efforts on Nagog Hill, and form Neighborhood Engineering Working Groups in your own communities. Help us develop the Theory & Practice of Neighborhood Redevelopment through Civic Networking, Community World Building, and Scenario Gaming - and put it into practice.
Jump right in.... follow this chat, post your thoughts, join a zoom campfire when we announce it, organize a working group in your community.
For those of you interested in the more theoretical side of Group Cognition, Civic Networking, and Collaborative Engineering - head over to my research blog, at Protocols of Community & Collaboration
Meanwhile, I'll be organizing parallel conversations - one, collecting & discussing Case Studies of work in various communities that we can learn from, one where Vendors can Show us their Capabilities - with the intent that both of these evolve into a Permanent, Online Conference & Exposition on Community Systems Development… a Future Fair in cyberspace.
And then we'll be actually running the exercise, here on Nagog Hill - where you can follow along, participate as a local resident or business, or a collaborator from our growing Community of Practice.
And for those of you who'd like to get a Neighborhood Engineering Working Group going in your community - we'll be offering This Old Neighborhood, the Home Game - watch for it!And please, share this conversation with those who might be interested, or might have something to offer to our joint effort to ReEngineer the Hood. It’s a Movement… The More, the Merrier!