Casa Robino

Two years ago we introduced the concept of "sustainable hospitality exchange", as an approach to understand hospitality and as a framework to see how we can be hospitatible 'sustainably': on a personal level (that we can remain hospitable), on a group level (host-guest relationships) and on a network level (the social networks behind hospitality exchange).

She-Berlin, two weeks of discussions, brainstorming, work, joy, play and fun. A selection of photos that I took during the events.

Things are happening!

We have two beautiful locations, lots of people around and many great conversations, discussions, brainstorms and other social events are taking place the whole time. Weird to see some people still have to make their way here! How can you wait?

Things done so far include brainstorming about legal stuff for nomadbase (social contract for example) and ad-hoc brainstorming and also an action plan for lightfoot.

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.

Ok, so. Dealing with this whole SHE thing. If we want sustainable hospitality we need to start changing the way we eat. No meat is a good start. But we also need to start buying only locally grown organic foods.

It would be nice if we could find a small farmer in the area from whom we could get fresh milk and eggs. A produce farmer would also be nice to know. We could do weekly shipments.

Foods like sugar, coffe, and the like that cannot be bought locally should all be fair trade, in suport of small organic farmers in poor countries.

As we look for ways of bringing in revenue to the house, the question has risen, what is SHE? Are we referring to the act of being hospitable as being sustainable? (Meaning, we are hospitable for an enduring amount of time) Or, is it in the context of environmental issues? Since the current situation is not sustainable financially, it is not the former definition. And in the environmental context, there are much more things we could do differently. Among those briefly brainstormed include producing less trash (opting out of trash bags, avoiding plastic containers, etc).

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.

At the SHE-meeting here in Amsterdam some months back, we had an empty piece of paper with written at the top 'ideas-page'. In the end Dante and I used that sheet of paper for a brain-dump. Now I finally managed to write those keywords down in clear sentences.

Really funny to see also Veit in action by the way. The profit he makes through HC must be dropping. Maybe we should let him know his donation-box is still here in the house?