Community

This is most definitely a "maybe someday, probably not" idea, yet one I am continually drawn to.

While the catalytic cost would be quite high, I believe it is possible to establish a community that exists for the well being of it's members.

Primary Mandates

Well Being of Members

All members are provided with healthy food, healthcare and housing. We also strive to provide facilities like exercise equipment, laundry as well as services like accounting. Ideally, a member should not need to spend any money.

Culture

The culture will focus on social interaction, education and inclusion.

Repeated studies have shown both that social interaction has positive health and well-being impact on individuals yet social fabrics are slowly decaying. We will take an active role in combating this.

Education is to be valued. Ideally learning should be a primary leisure activity. While all education is valued, a certain focus should be placed on hard fields like math an science. All members should be encouraged to have a solid foundation in these subjects. Full membership may even be conditional upon it.

The culture will be focused on inclusion. In-group bias and deference to authority are to be treated as particular risks. Scope of authority should be clearly delimited and foundation of authority should be made clear to anyone expected to follow it.

Expansion

The goal of the community is not profit but expansion. We should try to grow as quickly as we can without risk to the first two mandates.

Economics

The goal is to uphold the mandates; this is merely a suggestion for how it could be catalyzed and maintained. An initial seed group forms the community. They would need to invest both financially as well as put in the work to build the structures. Both forms of investment would be tracked. As newer members join, they would also need to make an investment. This would be set so that at any point, all members have an equal investment. So, speaking strictly financially, if 15 initial investors each put in $20, then the next to join might pay $19 where $15 of that would back to the initial investors and $4 would actually be invested in the community. But now every member has $19 invested in the community.

It should also be possible to produce profits. In order to feed members, food is grown. This can be produced in surplus to provide a buffer and the excess sold. Food is prepared in a meal hall, this can be open to visitors to eat. Classes are taught, enrollment can be opened up. All of these means of income should help the community become self-sufficient and eventually fully pay back the initial investors.

Once this stable state is reached, members will be required to provide a certain amount of labor. New members will still have requirements for admission, but they will no longer be financial.

Services

There are two services I think would be valuable to offer. Accounting and investment.

Accounting for the most part should just mean that all members have access to the services necessary to correctly file their taxes. This will be particularly valuable because membership may complicate that process.

The other is investment. The community should have investments that should cover expenses. This pool should be made available to members. In addition, there should be a clear path to reaching an investment level that will cover all costs associated with membership.

Labor

It will probably never be possible to make the systems fully autonomous, so some amount of labor is always required.

Membership

Once a basic community is established, membership can be broken up into different levels. This should help provide some protection for the culture and provide economic stability. The balancing factor here is that those in the lower tiers should have increased access to some resources, particularly those aimed at full membership.

Education

This is the primary limit. I would like to leave partial membership fairly open, but full membership will require reaching certain educational goals. In particular, much like civics in high school classes, these should give members a framework for participation the governing of the community.

Health

Not sure how I feel about this, but a key goal is to provide for the health of members. The other side of this is that members will need to care for their own health. This clearly cannot be a fixed scale. The first step would be finding doctors to either work with the community or join us. At that point, the relationship between a potential member and the doctor is private, but the doctor will help set what they feel are reasonable health goals (stop smoking, exercise goals...) and when they feel the potential member is committed to those goals, they sign off. So the health information of the member remains private, but their joining does require a doctor to sign off.

Also, related to education, all members should have a solid foundation of health related knowledge. Understanding of diet and exercise as well as first aid.