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A group of people stand in an unbuilt plot of land in an urban context. Some of them hold maps, and they are intently observing their surroundings.

Four things I learned building a cohousing project in Brussels

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I am part of a group which is building a cohousing in Brussels. It’s a risky endeavor but I could just not resist it: I dislike how the real estate market has financialized the right of humans to decent housing, and I dislike how the manner of building homes have made us lonely, alienated, surrounded by strangers. As an economist, I also find modern housing incredibly inefficient, because it does not produce public goods – like common spaces and communities – that are, by definition, the most efficient goods there are. And so, after many years of longing and reflections, in late 2021 I found myself in a small group willing to try it out, and took the plunge. Our cohousing is called The Reef in tribute to the diverse webs of cooperation and competition that exists in real coral reefs, and also as an act of remembrance should all coral reefs in the world die, which is not unlikely at all.

It is an incredibly rich, life-changing experience. It is also the second most difficult thing I have ever done (the first was founding a reasonably successful punk-folk band), and the one with the first-highest stakes (for most of us it is all of our lives’ savings). Yet, I never posted about it before, with one exception at the beginning of the journey. Frankly, I was not sure of what lessons one could draw from it: we were certainly working hard, but were we getting anywhere? Were we on our way to success, or just deluding ourselves? I could not tell. In the legal framework and economic landscape of Belgium in the 2020s, building a cohousing is a highly uncertain affair. At every turn, you face another obstacle that has the potential to stop the entire project dead in its track. Will we find a site to build the cohousing in? Will we be able to work together in reasonable harmony, or will the group collapse under the weight of interpersonal conflict? Is there even enough demand for cohousings to complete a group? Will the war in the East make construction materials unaffordable, and our project with it?

Still, people around me are interested in learning about cohousing. Many have encouraged me to start sharing my reflections about it. And it is the right time: the project has reached a degree of maturity where, I think, we can start drawing some lessons from it – though it could still fail, of course. There is a lot to share, but I am going to start with only few of the clearest learnings so far.

1. Self-managed projects are surprisingly efficient

Over the years, I have spoken to many people that dream of living in a cohousing. Despite this, it is almost impossible to just go out and buy a house or an apartment that is part of one. There appears to be what economists call a market failure: there is a market demand for a more social way of living, but no supply. So, if you want to live in a cohousing you will most likely need to start a group, or join one, and have your cohousing built to specifications. Groups must make a choice as to how to organize themselves. One possibility is for the group to directly take charge of the project management: find a site to buy, negotiate with the owner, purchase it, hire an architect and a construction company, organize the financial flows and so on. The other is to hire a company that will take care of the project management for you. In Belgium we are fortunate that there exist two such companies.

The Reef chose to be a self-managed group. In practice, this means that a bunch of random people, none of whom is a real estate or construction professional, is now running a 9 million Euro real estate project. Counterintuitively, this is working better than we had any right to expect: processes are transparent and relatively fast. We learned to work as a team quite quickly, and there is a high level of accountability. The Reef is a healthier, more efficient working environment than many professional spaces I have worked in. We have to work harder, but that work will pay for itself in terms of added trasparency and fuller ownership of the project. There is pride and joy in working together as a group to build our future home, and we believe that doing it this way will make our little community even more cohesive – and we save money.

2. Building community comes natural

Most people in our group did not know each other before joining. Most of us joined not based on previous friendships or family ties, but because we are drawn to the idea of cohousing itself. Some of us thought this might pose a challenge: in this kind of project people are making large investments in an endeavor the outcome of which depends on their cohousing mates playing nice. A lot of trust is needed. Among the many challenges of cohousing, this one turned out to be fairly easy. Common involvement in this kind of project builds mutual trust, even friendships, relatively quickly. This is because the project itself gets you into repeated interactions with each other. Reputation is obviously valuable, so people do not like to drop the ball on one another other. In a short time, you realize you can trust these people after all, and start to relax and enoy their company. I have no doubt that The Reef will be an imperfect but functional, and even beautiful, community.

3. Process and information tidiness are critical

In 2021, as a prequel to the formal start of the process of building The Reef, the founding group spent a few months researching cohousing. We read up on everything we could find, and engaged with extant cohousing groups to learn from their experiences. We also arranged to visit several already-built cohousings. All sources pointed to how critical good process is.

The reasoning is straightforward. Building a cohousing takes 4-7 years. During this period, you will be doing weekly meetings plus individual- or small-group work. All of this effort is unpaid, and you will still have all of your personal and professional responsibilities. You might even be asked to step up a little to cover for your cohousing mates: for example, in our group parents of small children are given a pass, and just asked to respect the deadlines and otherwise do what they can.

In a situation like this, it is super important to be methodical and efficient, or you will become overwhelmed. The Reef is very methodical, on two fronts. First, we are organized according to a variant of a model called sociocracy. This means plenaries + teams that report to the plenary and do the heavy lifting of preparing the decisions for the plenary to take. All meetings are facilitated (by a Team Facilitation, whose members took trainings in sociocratic methods). The entire group took trainings in non-violent communication as a measure to prevent the escalation of conflicts. This method is very efficient, and it saves time on decision making that we sorely need for operations. For example, while searching for a site we scouted the entire city on bicycles and on foot for six months, mapping and evaluating 170 potential sites. Even with a fairly large group of a dozen active adults, you see why efficiency is so important.

Second, we take information management seriously, and adopted ways inspired by the open source and open knowledge movement. All information is public by default, and protected only if there is a need for confidentiality. A very successful move was to ban emails completely, and instead move our communication onto an online forum. This reduces Inbox stress and allows people full access to every communication, letting them choose what they want to engage with. It also makes past communications very searchable (we even use tags consistently, something that I have not experienced in any other working environment). Do not underestimate the impact of using good forum software over email – let alone stuff like Facebook or Whatsapp or Slack groups, which is not, repeat not, optimized for economical and accountable communication! Our forum as of now hosts over 10,000 messages, and has over 300,000 pageviews, and the fact that it allows access while not flooding us with notifications is valuable. Transparency is also important

From open source culture we also learned the importance of good documentation: for example, we have a guide to The Reef’s digital assets, one to using tags and groups in the forum, one to making changes to the website, a manual to onboard new members, a governance document. Each one of these shares knowledge and empowers everyone in the group, removing organizational bottlenecks, at the cost of having to write things down in a clear and accessible format.

4. A cohousing ecosystem is coalescing in Brussels

Self-managed groups like ours need not be navigating uncharted waters all the time. To our surprise and delight, cohousing is something like a movement. People support each other, mostly with information that can save us enormous amount of time. The advice we received from our sister cohousings at the beginning of the journey was invaluable. Also, there are now a few professionals in Brussels that understand cohousing and have experience of building them: the architects’ studio Stekke and Fraas has already built three cohousings in Brussels; Mark Van den Dries, a retired entrepreneur that has led several successful cohousing projects (he lives in one) and now offers himself as a coach; the Namur notary Pierre-Yves Erneux. A Dutch-Belgian bank, Triodos, offers mortgages adapted to the reality of cohousing.

All this means that we have it much easier than first-generation cohousings. Like all economic movements, cohousing is cumulative: if you were to start a project now, you would face fewer uncertainties than we did, because you could build on our experience. And if you or someone you know did start a cohousing, I would be interested to learn about it, be it through a link you share or by sharing war stories over coffee.

Photo: The Reef’s group explore a candidate site for the cohousing project in summer 2024. CC-BY The Reef Cohousing

The Edgeryders team at the unMonastery: left to right, Matthias Ansorg, Nadia El-Imam, Alberto Cottica, Noemi Salantiu, Arthur Doohan, Ben Vickers. Photo: Sam Muirhead CC-BY

The business corporation as a symbiont to a community: Edgeryders crosses a watershed

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Last week Edgeryders LBG, the company I co-founded, closed its first substantial deal. We are going to be working with the United Nations Development Programme, scanning the horizon in three countries (Armenia, Egypt and Georgia) in the hope to detect trends that will shape our common future as they start to unfold. We are very excited: this is exactly the kind of cutting-edge work we aspire to do, and Giulio Quaggiotto and his posse at UNDP-CIS are exactly the kind of people we aspire to work with.

This deal marks a watershed in the Edgeryders trajectory. We were a joint project of the Council of Europe and the European Commission from launch in late 2011 to sunset at the end of 2012. In January 2013 some of us, enamoured with what we had come to see as a uniquely valuable community, stepped in and spun it off onto a newly built online platform. In May 2013 we founded a non-profit social enterprise, Edgeryders LBG, to provide the infrastructure and the sense of direction we felt were needed to keep the community together.

We wanted to do this by providing work opportunities to our community on the edge (many of us are close to uncontractable for various reasons: too young and unexperienced, too old, too minority, too anti-authoritarian, too inclined towards being self-taught rather than academic achievers…). And not just any work opportunities: meaningful ones, cutting-edge, high-risk, potentially world-changing, one-step-removed-from crazy work opportunities. We want to be the skunkworks of the global society, the Foreign Legion of social innovation, the people that have little to lose, and so can afford to go to the ugliest places and take on the scariest work.

We would do this in part directly, by going out and pitching our community as a “distributed think tank” that swarms near-instantly around any interesting problem you throw at it; but the most innovative part of the model was that we would also help members of the community to provide those opportunities for themselves and each other. To secure this, we built our company so that it can serve as a vehicle for anyone in the community to use. This way, people would be able to quickly prototype their ideas without worrying about having to start a company: if they needed an incorporation they could simply use us as a “corporate shell”, an interface towards a world that understands corporations but not communities. Basically, anyone who wishes to do so (with minimal limitations) can put on an Edgeryders hat and talk to potential clients or funders as if representing the company – this makes us the first (to my knowledge) corporation without permission. On launching a successful project, we simply hire them to run them: this is a process we describe as hiring yourself. Of course, we also informally try and help people with ideas and the will to work hard, mostly by connecting with others in the community with relevant skills and experience.

We gave ourselves a year to find out whether this plan had a chance of working. We were not too worried – we had learnt our lesson from the tech industry so many of us gravitate around, and had made it really cheap to fail.

Three months to go to that deadline. Here’s where we are:

  1. On the corporate front, we have secured the UNDP contract. Two more contracts are in the pipeline, and we expect them to come through well before May.
  2. We have secured a deal with the Italian city of Matera to provide a (spectacular!) building and some seed funding for the world’s first unMonastery, a project of some visionary edgeryders led by Ben Vickers. After much preparation, unMonastery Matera went live on February 1st.
  3. We have served as a corporate shell for several community projects. Two of them succeeded in raising seed funding: these are Matthias Ansorg’s Economy App, winner of the first European Social Innovation Competition in 2013, and David Bovill’s Viral Academy, recipient of a Nominet Trust grant on digital innovation in 2014. I am confident that many more will come through, for reasons explained below. Another project just launched is Said Hamideh’s EdgeLance, a communication agency that leverages the unusual brand of creativity of many edgeryders to build cutting-edge communication services. Said, a professional freelance communicator, has chosen wrap EdgeLance into the Edgeryders LBG corporate shell. News of more initiatives are coming in daily.
  4. Meanwhile, the community has thrived despite the end of the Council of Europe’s tenure. We have been able to organize, with no funding at all, the third Living On The Edge event, that gathered over 100 edgeryders from all over the continent in the (then unfinished) unMonastery premises. Over the past year, the community has gathered 700 new members and produced about 1,000 posts, wikis and tasks and well over 3,000 comments.

My conclusion: our proof of concept is done. Edgeryders can indeed be a viable business. But we are well aware that proving a concept is not the same thing as making it work in practice. We may be fast and smart, but incumbent consulting conglomerates are big, and scary. Can we really carve a niche for ourselves, expand it and keep the McKinseys, Accentures and Gartners of the world away from it?

Time will tell. But we do have one thing we have going for us: we are not a predator, we are a mutualistic symbiont to our community. We don’t just recruit the smartest people from the community; we hate digital sharecropping, and try very hard never to be the slightest bit exploitative. We invest in the community and serve it as best we can; we believe we can only be a viable business because we serve it. Investments in this community pay back tenfolds, because it is so smart and fast as to be almost frightening. New conventions and tools continue to be proposed: some are adopted and spread, like the community call, the “call a human” button, the Twitterstorm, the Task Manager.

Among the potentially most significant are the FormStorm and its Recycling Bin, dreamed up by Ksenia Serova and her crew: the idea is to socialize application writing, helping each other take part in contests and competitions. This was tested very successfully with the European Social Innovation Competition: the community got together (virtually) and produced 13 applications (about 1% of the total applications submitted throughout Europe). Two of them, Giacomo Neri’s Moove and Epelia’s Food Supply Unchained, were shortlisted for the semi-finals (Lois is prototyping the latter in unMonastery Matera, another sign that a whole ecosystem is emerging from what we do). More, much more is cooking.

While many edgeryders are individually very smart, we believe this kind of performance to be an emergent property of the whole community, with its tools and its values. It is, truly, collective intelligence.  And if this is what happens with fewer than two thousands registered users, we can only imagine how fast this crowd can move as that number scales  to a mere twenty thousands. We can’t wait to find out.

A phrase from Chris Anderson’s famous article about the makers movement’s next industrial revolution comes to mind. In that article, he describes his own company, DIY Drones, as a typical small, family-run business, initially run by Anderson’s garage. Then he adds:

But the difference between this kind of small business and the dry cleaners and corner shops that make up the majority of micro-enterprise in the country is that we’re global and high tech. Two-thirds of our sales come from outside the US, and our products compete at the low end with defense contractors like Lockheed Martin and Boeing. Although we don’t employ many people or make much money, our basic model is to lower the cost of technology by a factor of 10 (mostly by not charging for intellectual property). […] When you take an order of magnitude out of pricing in any market, you can radically reshape it, bringing in more and different customers.

This describes accurately what we are trying to do to consulting. We are tiny, barely starting to bootstrap from sweat equity, and yet we are already global – we are doing work in Armenia, Egypt, Georgia, Germany, Italy, the UK; we are negotiating deals in South Africa, Sweden, Uganda, the United Arab Emirates; we participate in conferences in places like Thailand and Montenegro (not to mention the fact that our community lives in 40 countries). We are resolutely open, both in content an in software, hence we don’t charge for intellectual property. And yes, we are cheap, and we aim to get people and orgs who do good work, but can’t afford to pay for standard consulting, to turn to us.

If you like this vision, you can help make it come true.

  • If you run a business, a public- or a third sector organization you can join UNDP as one of our “founding clients”: you will be an early adopter of  our open consulting services, and we will strive to reward your belief in us by overdelivering and sharing with you our learning journey. If you wish to find out more about how this would work, just contact me.
  • If you are building a project for a better world, or want to collaborate to one, consider joining the Edgeryders community. Be sure to contact Noemi to say hello, she’ll help you make the most of the community.

We scan the horizon for UNDP, to discern the shadow of the future. But the feeling is very strong that a warm, glowing piece of future is right here.

Open government Xtreme: when public policy takes to the streets

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Photo by Bridget McKenzie
The Council of Europe has a project called Edgeryders (info). Just as it is drawing to a close, it seems to hold a piece of the future; never before, in my experience, had a rather technical project born of a public institution (producing recommendation for a reform of European youth policy: hardly the stuff of dreams) driven so much citizen engagement, and even ownership.

As part of the project, we organized a conference called Living On The Edge (#LOTE to the initiates), that took place in Strasbourg in June 2012. To my great surprise, about a month ago the Edgeryders community practically summoned itself to Brussels for a #LOTE2 (info), to take place on December 6th to 9th. And here’s what’s happening:

  • people are paying out of their own pocket to participate. Since edgeryders tend to be young and strapped for cash, the community is trying to come up with ways to support each other. Those of us who leave in Brussels are opening their homes to host fellow #LOTErs.
  • the European Parliament stepped in to provide a room for free for one of the days – credit must go to 25-years-old Amelia Andersdottir, MEP for the Swedish Pirate Party, and to her assistants
  • a local artist offered to rent us studio space for very cheap for the remaining days – the poorest edgeryders can camp there, too.
  • one particularly enterprising member of the community picked up the phone and called AirB’n’B. They, too, stepped in, offering a €25 voucher to #LOTErs wishing to stay with an AirB’n’B host in Brussels. Intrigued by the project, they are also sending their experts on community building to the event.
  • all organization is run by members of the community who volunteered. The result is an amazing rainbow of generous, skilled young Europeans. Asta (Icelandic) is sorting out logistics. Noemi (Romanian) and Andrei (Moldovan) keep the website updated and makes sure no one falls through the crack. Giovanni (Italian) acts as media liaison. Matthias (German) Michal, Petros, Mike (Poles) and Eimhin (Irish) are writing specifications and getting geared up to redo the Egderyders website according to the community’s requests.
  • institutions are taking notice. Senior officers engaged and provide suggestions of people to invite. Every day we receive new offers and helpful suggestions.
  • meanwhile Elena – a 23-year-old Russian woman who lives in Sweden – inspired by the project has started Edgeryders Sweden, reusing the Edgeryders name, aesthetic, visuals and mystique (it’s okay – everything is licensed under creative commons). Elena has not participated in Edgeryders – she learnt about it from an acquaintance.

This is a taste of what might happen if we ever got serious about involving citizens in public policy. The Council of Europe is holding its own at its center. But its stake in #LOTE2 has become a strange creature: on the one hand its leadership on Edgeryders as a source of inspiration is recognized by all. On the other hand, however, it has little choice but to go along. The community has pretty much put together a zero-budget event: paradoxically, if the Council of Europe were to disassociate itself from this meetup, #LOTErs would probably shrug it off and go ahead. And why not? “We should think of government as platform”, open government people like to say. And platforms don’t make decision: they enable people to do whatever they want to do in the name of the common good.

It could be the future of government: build platforms for collective actions, then step back and accept that you, as an elected representative or a civil servant, should make as few operational decisions as possible, and let yourself be overridden by ordinary citizens in most situations. On the other hand, it could also be just a golden moment, the last autumn glow: that’s what it will look like, retrospectively, if European institutions don’t see the potential of all this goodwill to generate more goodwill and creativity, or simply can’t bring themselves to give up control for citizens to take ownership. In that case, the system will revert by default (without even needing to decide to) to an administration-driven, top-down mode. Which does not work – just ask disgruntled European citizens what they think of the effectiveness of their common institutions – but is so much more reassuring.