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[edit] Diggers & Dreamers Guide to Communal Living[1]

The who, why, what and how

Diggers & Dreamers [2] is a not-for-profit collective, which has published a guide to communal living in the UK (occasionally with information on some communities abroad, too), every other year since 1989. Over that time, members of the collective have changed, but all have had extensive experience of living communally.

A few years ago, we thought that a how-to book on communal living would be useful, since the only UK specific books available were The Collective Housing Handbook by Sarah Eno and Dave Treanor (1982), Buying Your Own Home With Other People by Dave Treanor (1987),both somewhat dated and hard to get hold of, and the Radical Routes[3] booklet How to Set Up a Housing Co-operative (updated fairly regularly). We imagined a book which looked at all aspects of communal living, from the dream to setting up and sustaining a collective life. We began writing in 2006, but got side-tracked by our last printed edition of Diggers & Dreamers, and as our idea began to gather dust, we thought of creating this wiki, to keep the process going, and to invite others to contribute their vast experience to it.

So here it is, a wiki which we hope will grow and become more comprehensive as time goes by, with links to as many useful resources as possible. We invite you to contribute especially if you have experience of living communally, or if you were part of a group who tried to set up a community, but for whatever reason never made it. Please bear in mind that our aim is for this to be a UK specific resource. So whilst information and reflection on the group dynamics/people 'software' side of community will potentially have 'universal' relevance - many technical, legal , land ownership issues etc will not be particulary relevant if they are not UK based.

We haven't given up on the idea of a book, and we want to keep open the possibility of using content from this wiki for a printed book, which would be published by Diggers & Dreamers, using a creative commons license (attribution (D&D), share-alike, non-commercial). As we are a not-for-profit, any money made on the project would be put back into ventures such as this. So if you contribute, we may use your contribution, attribute it to this wiki generally, and not pay you!

We've uploaded what we have written so far and hope you'll edit and add more content. Please try not to create any more categories (the main topics in the navigation box on the left of this page): we've tried to be fairly comprehensive. Have a look at the stubs we've created under these topics for areas which need covering first. There are a few editing pointers on the Help page, but we are really new to this ourselves! Perhaps playing in Wikipedia's sandbox is the way to understand how to edit. We strongly advise you to use the Show preview button before saving, since you can carry on making changes without saving each time, therefore avoiding millions of editing logs. Also, if you create a login, your contributions will be attributed to your username, and your IP address will not be made public. If you know how to do references, please teach us!

An important note about contributions

If you contribute, we may use your contribution for Diggers & Dreamers publications (we are a not-for-profit collective), attribute it to this wiki generally, and not pay you! (see above).

[edit] References