Casa Robino

A columnist from the New Yorker came to stay with us in California a few months ago while writing an article about CS. It was finally published last week: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2012/04/16/120416fa_fact_marx?current...

Interestingly, nomadbase got a mention in the laundry list of hospitality networks. It's a rather intriguing name, so I wonder if nomadbase.org traffic has increased at all:

Other networks include Global Freeloaders, Be Welcome, Nomadbase, Tripping, Evergreen Bed and Breakfast Club (for those over fifty), Pasporta Servo (for speakers of Esperanto), and the Hospitality Club, which, with more than three hundred thousand members, is a distant second to CouchSurfing in terms of size.

Our house in California (Ithaka) also got a funny description, near the end.

More importantly, I'm back in Europe for about a year! I'll be in Lyon for a little while, but am pretty flexible. I've got a lightfoot letter to deliver in Milan, and I'll probably come through Amsterdam and Berlin at some point in the near future. But in general, my plans are pretty open-ended. Let me know if you'd like a visit. :-)

Dear Casa Community:

I've been dreaming for the last few years about igniting some casa-style magic in the western hemisphere. I have a sense that much of of the S.H.E. / shared hospitality / post-CouchSurfing / nomadbase energy has been concentrated in Europe. There are reasons for this, to be sure. But I've got what Curious George calls "the casa mind-virus", and it makes me wonder what else is possible.

Taking my break last winter I had quite some free time to float around and recap. So I also used my time to write for shareable.net the article Every Guest a Host on what this casa is all about: What is it that makes me wanna do this, why do people like it so much, and what are the little things that make it a challenge to live here?

But more important, how do I find the right words to actually describe something that is so fluid, so creative and so dynamic? Is it possible? Well, let's say I got pretty far with this article and that for a large part it sums up at least how it feels.

I was delaying the post to the time I had a functional community website. It is now the case so here it goes:

To those of you that didn't know, there is a nomad base in Lyon at Julien and Elsy's place. It is quite different from CasaRobino due to various factors, but hopefully you'll feel right at home if you come.

After much debate, we called it "Casa Bonita" that has quite some cultural significance to us that outbalance the fact that all the non-hyphenated domains for it were taken and it sounds just too much like "CasaRobino".

Website: http://casa-bonita.fr

Who of you lives in New York at the moment, or knows some of the right people who should be connected with the nomadbase initiative?

Valentina took her initiative for a call for a small nomad gathering, at the same time as the SHE conf/ nomad conference in Berlin end of November.

I am sure that within our extended network we know people who are perfect to help enabling a network of nomads, long term travelers, skillsurfers, etc, with places and bases that are open for shared living.

Find the others!

Preparations are ongoing for the nomad conference in Berlin. We currently have many platforms to communicate with each other though: I guess we like to confuse people... ;)

Work is currently being done on organising spaces in Berlin, coordinating people and ideas, website development and some other small things.

Check for the latest the wiki that we are using (for the moment) as a central place to bring together information. If you have any ideas or suggestions, please share. Also, be aware of the new mailing list we have.

A project happening in Boulder, Colorado.

http://boulderhousingcoalition.org/

Last year we had a conference in the Casa about sustainable hospitality exchange (SHE). This was before this website existed. You can find many traces of this gathering all over the house, like the she-mindmap in the kitchen, the four open space principles near the entrance and some other sayings on the wall in the Zula, in addition to some stuff online: http://realsocial.org/she The thing you can notice in the casa the most though, is the way we host and how we resolved the traditionally unequal relationship between hosts and guests, which you come across in 85-99% of the cases you do 'couchsurfing'.

Staying over in Berlin for ten days and meeting people who share the intention of creating, or helping sustaining similar places like casarobino, made me think (again) to do yet another SHE conference.

A collective housing project in Montreal. with love, jer

http://coopsurgenereux.googlepages.com/en

How one connection leads to another. Just when Caroline informed me she did her first hitch in the US, we started chatting and found out meanwhile that "a friend of Lily's who posted a comment on her blog is staying with a good friend of mine in california right now". She then pointed me out which house this is, and I was very nicely surprised by what this house is aiming for. It is basically a great skillsharing house with many opportunities for people to stay over for long-term.