Humanize the Earth!

A couple of weeks ago I went to the Chicago Conservation Corps leadership training orientation and met some cool people. Tonight I had dinner with Julie and some of her friends connected with Beyond Today in the North Center neighborhood. Beyond Today is a really cool local environmental group. Here are some of my take-aways from our dinner:

• There are people that form corporations so that people can invest their retirement money in real estate (can’t do it directly). Why don’t we do that in a neighborhood and form community-funded co-ops? We can! (hopefully)
• A community calendar is hard to maintain by hand. WikiMaas does a great job of it using a wiki. Cool.
• Hey, and why doesn’t Chicago have a city-wiki. Actually, it turns out that it does: WikiChicago.  Unfortunately, it’s not OpenEdit, which means you have to not only sign up for an account before editing or leaving a comment, but you have to verify an email address, which is really, really annoying and will no doubt reduce participation.
• When two people own a house and also rent to others, not only can they change their percentage ownership from 50/50 to 51/49 or 60/40 or whatever over time if one pays less rent than the other (by prior agreement, of course), but a renter can go perhaps become a partner this way as well.  From 50/50/0 to 49/49/2 over time?  And then 48/48/4?  And eventually 33/33/33?  Or more partners?  Maybe it doesn’t even need to be a co-op?  Can just be a partnership?  Lots of questions.  Cool stuff.
• Beyond Today is a really cool neighborhood organization.  They host green dinners, play soccer with neighbors in the park, organize protests against west nile spraying, have cool website, and much more.  And they can use some basic help that with stuff that I know about.  The wiki calendering above is one.  A wordpress blog is another.  I learned a lot from them.  I love the idea of them hosting related blogs by neighbors, and then having an editor or three distill ideas from those blogs down to very short blurbs for their mainpage, linked back to the source, of course.  Excellent idea.
• I want to show the Upward Spiral movie some more.