Very insightful and appropriate, Bob. I think this hits the nail on the head nicely: I've kind of left BM deployments as "ad hoc" figuring that things would find their groove given time, and I'm very happy to see commercial production, but the moop problem is really a sign that something needs fine tuning.
I love the idea. V> -- *Vinay Gupta * * [email protected] <[email protected]> * *http://re.silience.com* <http://re.silience.com> *Free Science and Engineering in the Global Public Interest* UK Cell : +44 (0)7500 895568 Twitter/Skype/Gtalk: hexayurt "In the midst of winter, I finally learned that there was in me an invincible summer" - Albert Camus On Tue, Sep 23, 2014 at 11:55 PM, Bob Waldrop <[email protected]> wrote: > I am not likely to ever make it to Burning Man although I am quite the > fan and spend a lot of time watching the video feeds. > > But I am something of a maven of what permaculturists refer to as > "invisible structures" and the thing that immediately popped into my mind > is that what y'all need is the Burning Man Hexayurt Cooperative. > > Cooperatives exist to provide a service to their members. If they run an > operating surplus (a/k/a "profit"), then it is refunded to the members in > proportion to their patronage (that is to say, the amount of business they > did with the coop, which means they paid more into the surplus, so they get > back more). Cooperatives are business organizations that can facilitate > the traditional self-help ethos that we see in barn and house raisings and > other such communal efforts. > > People join a cooperative by buying a membership share. The group sets an > initial price, which is usually the expected startup costs of the > organization divided by however many members they think they can/need to > attract to make it viable. The coop is governed on a one member, one > share, one vote basis. When a member leaves, the coop buys the membership > share back (although there can be restrictions on that if the coop is not > doing well financially, most state laws on coops forbid buying back shares > if doing so would endanger the financial status of the coop). > > The whole thing can then be designed to meet the needs of the members. > > I will resist the temptation to give me entire 90 minute "What is a > cooperative" workshop in this email, lol, but I do have such a workshop I > do, as well as a longer 8 hour workshop for groups actually getting started. > > There are lots of resources available to help organize coops. I am not a > lawyer, but incorporating a coop is not advanced legal procedure, and I > have written articles of incorporation for one hybrid customer/producer > coop (the Oklahoma Food Coop, which was the first food coop in the US to > only sell locally grown and made food and non-food items, in business for > 10 years, sales approaching $6 million total), the Oklahoma Worker > Cooperative Network (a cooperative organizing group), Fertile Ground > Compost Coop (a worker-owned coop offering residential compost services in > the OKC area). > > SO ANYWAY. . . I will help if y'all are interested in putting together > something like that. We can do it right here in this group (I'm sure Vinay > wouldn't mind), or we can go into private email or another google or yahoo > group etc. > > The first thing is to decide exactly what it is this cooperative can or > could do. This storage and transportation idea is one. > > But another issue I keep hearing about in this forum is access to the > Thermax panels which are often hard to get. The Coop could organize > "thermax bulk purchases" and deliver quantities of them to locations chosen > strategically for access to the people who pre-order them. E.g., if there > are lots of people in the SF Bay Area, Seattle, portland, interested, the > Coop might be able to arrange deliveries to those areas on a > pay-in-advance-you-come-pick-them-up basis. > > Same same with any other supply issues involving the hexayurts. > > So let me if anyone is interested in this. > > Bob Waldrop > Oklahoma City > > On 9/23/2014 4:46 PM, Jay Batson wrote: > > I very much like the idea of a centralized yurt-storage service. A couple > of thoughts: > > - There's a guy who did this last year for me ("Black Rock > Hexayurts"). He charged a very modest price last year ($75), but raised it > to $300 this year. Sadly, his service quality was poor; yurts were not > on-playa on the date promised, the yurts were buried under lots of his > other camp "stuff", and he was rarely around when you went to find him. A > solo person, unorganized, with poor standards is NOT the solution. (I found > a different solution this year, but would still like a quality service.) > - Charging for this in advance of the burn is reasonable. The service > must incur a fairly substantial investment to make this happen; having a > predictable number of people / yurts is crucial to viability. > - It's also reasonable to require that Yurts be packaged to specific > requirements. Because people are not likely to always comply with them, the > service should have some spare supplies - tarps, ply, etc. - to "fix" those > that are not delivered properly (at either end). By the way: 1/4" ply adds > a huge amount of weight to a wrapped bundle; I used 1/8" satisfactorily. > - I LOVE the trolly solution pictured in this thread. These could > actually be made of ply & some wheels with carriage that could be broken > down for storage year-to-year. We could actually have / make a half-a-dozen > of these to help people get yurts to their camp quickly (and back). Some > form of generalized clamp-to-bike-seatpost needs thought up, so people can > use their own bikes. > > > -- http://www.ipermie.net How to permaculture your urban lifestyle and adapt > to the realities of peak oil, economic irrationality, political criminality, > and peak oil. > > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "hexayurt" group. > To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an > email to [email protected]. > To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. > Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/hexayurt. > For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "hexayurt" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/hexayurt. 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