Issue #47: Hive Minded: A Digital Commons for Machuca Valley
Oh and a bit of AI
We talk a lot about technology here from time to time, usually the underlying tone is that Technology is bad, it grabs our attention and directs it towards unhealthy rabbit holes(I’m looking at you Insta-dopamine), preventing us from being present and connecting to those around us in “real life”. We love how we have a WhatsApp group for everything and we hate how many WhatsApp groups we have. We even have a whole parenting group that started with a premise of “screens are bad for kids” and many of us are in various stages of winning/losing that battle.
This sometimes puts me in an awkward situation. On the one hand, I’m all in on connecting with nature and doing stuff in real life. On the other hand my professional and to some extent even personal life has been shaped by technology. I got my first computer when I was 13, in the pre-internet days and while my parents tried hard for me to become a doctor, I became a Software Engineer and have spent the last 25 years of my career building things on screens(or behind the screens).
So when I ask myself a question of what gifts I have to offer to the local community? Can I heal the physical pains? Can I heal the emotional pains? Can I heal the “g*d damn toilet is clogged again” pains? The answer seems to be No (side note: if you are a high vibrations conscious plumber, we need you!). But I can build things in the digital realm, be it websites or apps or any digital tool really.
Within that broad domain, the one topic that I want to re-visit today is that of “knowledge sharing” or simply put: how we ask each other basic life questions and how we remember those answers so that we don’t have to keep asking.
I wrote about this a year ago, and that article is still worth reading if you haven’t yet:
TLDR: people keep asking about Mechanics, Taxis and Snake Bites on the WhatsApp groups, that information has been shared many times over, wouldn’t it be great if we just wrote it down somewhere once and then people could reference that instead of asking every time?
A year ago we launched a Q&A website with that exact purpose, in fact it’s still operating and you can see it here: https://www.machucavalley.com/. For the most part that 1-year experiment didn’t work as well as we hoped. While there is certainly some good information there, the usage is quite low and people still ask the same questions on WhatsApp.
However, the experiment was valuable in that we learned some things about our needs as well as overall digital literacy. In terms of our Valley-wide needs its becoming clear that it would be good to have the following digital pieces to make life easier:
Communal Directory - remember the “Yellow Pages” or whatever the equivalent was in the rest of the world. Fat book thats local to your area, you open it up, you look for a Mechanic/Plumber/Doctor/Healer, you see the number, call, etc.
Hive Mind - our communal shared brain where all the tit bits of information that we collectively learn can be stored and retrieved on demand.
Village Rhythm(aka Communal Calendar) - an easy place to go and see whats happening where this week/month. While you could scroll endlessly through events chat, there is probably a better way.
Village Voice - a weekly newsletter of communal news and opinions by community / for community.
Depending on where you live, some of these pieces are actually in place. So for example La Ecovilla, Algeria and ESM all have their own Google Calendars where you can see what is going on on any given day/week and there are designated people that ensure those calendars are kept up-to-date.
Likewise there are community-specific websites or google drives that contain some of communal knowledge. ESM has one and Alegria has been developing a Notion-based website that has been steadily growing.
And as far as Village Voice? You’re reading it now - you can even become a contributor.
Of course for the most part, these things exist in “pockets” and if you’re not living in Alegria, La Ecovilla or ESM, you wouldn’t know about that specific knowledge base. While each community certainly needs its own knowledge base for the specific needs of that community, for the most part, we all are asking and figuring out the same things so there is an opportunity to collaborate and share knowledge more widely.
In case you haven’t guessed it by now, I have some ideas and solutions on how to make this better. Let’s tackle them one at a time.
The Communal Directory
Whether you want to know all the local Healers or the Mechanics or Taxis, we actually have a local directory(hosted on another site, but they’ll converge soon) which we just significantly upgraded to be faster and easier to use. Re-introducing https://www.sanmateo.love/, a local community-owned directory:
Notable updates from previous version:
Better UX - much improved user experience with quick searching by anything + basic categories to narrow down + more compact view + modern minimalist design
Mobile Friendly - looks good on your phone
Click-to-Text - those phone numbers are now clickable and open up WhatsApp directly
Website + Google Maps links when available
Link Sharing with searches or category selection saved, so you can quickly share a link with friends
You Control it - you can add / edit / delete anything, no sign-up or sign-in required! (this one is controversial, but a worthy experiment in trust )
Built by AI via “Vibe Coding”, more on that below.
Go ahead, take it for a spin. Add yourself if you’re offering a service or update one and if there is any feedback, let me know. As always, this will only work if we collectively take the time (30 seconds) to add contacts as the questions come up and to point people at this when they ask questions.
Big shout out to Bernat who provided a lot of feedback and ideas to make this directory functional.
Hive Mind
Beyond directory of service providers there is a lot of information that we share with each other about life here, anything from best way to learn Spanish to dealing with mold to construction to snake bites. In some ways the whole internet was created specifically for that very purpose: capture human knowledge and make it available to everyone. It’s no surprise that we have many different ways in the digital world to do just that.
While last year we attempted to solve that with a Q&A style site, after seeing the experiment unfold as well as talking a lot about this topic with Bernat who is spearheading the Alegria knowledge base, I think it’s time to evolve the experiment and try to see if a Wikipedia style site is better suited for this. Introducing “Machuca Wiki”, essentially a collection of pages organized by categories on various topics with an easy way to add / edit anything, again without sign-ups:
Oh, and the directory and wiki are now the same site - sanmateo.love. Just click “Machuca Wiki” or “MV Directory” on top to navigate between the two. Once again, feel free to edit or add a page. This one is definitely in its early stages so any feedback would be much appreciated. MachucaValley.com Q&A site is still up and will co-exist side-by-side with this site for a bit, but if the Wiki approach fits better, I’ll migrate the contents of the Q&A site onto the Wiki site and sunset the Q&A site.
Village Rhythm
Do we need a MV-wide calendar? Imagine if all the events from the events chat were populated there and perhaps we built something where once a week, an easy-to-read image was sent to the Neighbors chat with “Here are all events for this week”? Would you as an event organizer include your events there? There are already community-specific calendars for each community, does creating one more add value or just adds noise? I genuinely don’t know the answer here, but if you have an opinion let me know in the comments or respond to email or just send me a message.
Principles
It’s worth pointing out some principles here, these small tools are built for us and owned by us. This is not a big tech platform with Ads or data collection, this is just a digital communal bulletin board with no ambitions to become anything else, no monetization strategy, fully open source(https://github.com/antong314/chatlist-nectar), in fact if you’re a developer wanting to contribute, reach out. Finally, the point of these tools is to make life better, less noisy, hopefully generating less questions, allowing everyone to be in their flow, getting the information they need, when they need it.
AI - behind the Scenes
The website above, including the searchable directory as well as wiki was built by AI Coding Assistant(Lovable first, Windsurf w/ Cascade using Claude Sonnet 3.7 later). All I did was said “I would like a website for my community that has these features and should work like this” and then iterated with AI back and forth as it built the site and I just watched it do that, without me writing a single line of code. I was just a “micro-manager”, saying things like “move this button here, make this header smaller”, etc. In the current moment this is known as “vibe coding” and is all the rage in the Software industry right now - this trend will certainly evolve and will either mature into the way software gets written in future or possibly fade away as something you only do for simple prototyping or small projects.
At a macro-level, what this means is the cost of building digital tools like above is quickly approaching zero and will surely continue to decrease. In the context of community-building, what this means is that it is now totally viable for anyone to create a website or an app to perform some function without putting in too much effort. Historically any community couldn’t really afford to create its own “App” for “tracking how many carrots we’ve harvested this week”, because the cost of building these things was relatively high. This math has finally flipped, you can create a hyper-specific fit-for-purpose digital tools to solve whatever small challenges you might have. This means there is an opportunity to build things to solve problems that perhaps before were dealt with manually. As always, plenty of people have written much more insightfully about this, check out “The Good Place” section here for example: https://craigmod.com/roden/102/
I’m happy to collaborate on the above knowledge sharing tools or any other idea that you might have.