Hmm nice discussion here, but let me stir it up a notch 
I should probably elaborate a bit what Alberto mentioned about the points I made. I admit that the way it’s running right now in the House is “not broken”, but I am looking for a solution that would work (1) long-term and (2) generically in all kinds of OpenVillage Houses. Beyond the initial excitement of having such a House project, which admittedly makes it very simple to run a House, even to a nice standard.
And the current setup is not a valid candidate for that, for various reasons:
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There are never “no rules”. Informal organizing comes with its own rules, they are just not made explicit. People spend a lot of time trying to figure out what these rules are. (For example, I still don’t know if it’s acceptable to leave un-done dishes in the kitchen when you use one or two items in the evening and leave, as the last one.) All this beating around the bush is a waste of mental processing capacity and time, and the “failing on the safe side” approach to assume stricter rules if one is still unsure leads to doing work that could have been avoided. Which is contrary to simplicity, “the art of maximizing the amount of work not done”.
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Competing for household performance wastes valuable time. I am wondering why I am not getting any significant amount of work done here, and one reason is for sure the higher standard of household work. Now when the “informal organization” is set up in such a way that there is a built-in silent competition for better cleaning, better food etc. … everyone doing more work than they would need for themselves and more than they expect from others … how is this possibly a good thing? If this wastes only 2% of a person’s wake time that is still 19 minutes every day, 117 hours a year.
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Implicit rules breed divisions. This is not visible in the short term, but definitely in the longer term. Given that the (real or perceived) implicit rules deviate from personal standards, people tend to silently (re-)negotiate them by stretching them … without talking about them, because that is a well-accepted taboo in this “informal organization” style. The result is “unspoken conflict” by people with different ideas about what the rules should be.
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It leads to a lack of investment. Your standing in the group depends on your perceived share of the housework. If an informal mode of organization is in place, this “perceived share” means “when you see others at work”. Obviously, as there is simply no other (formal or explicit) way to observe who does what. This situation bends the choice of tasks more towards the visible ones, so especially towards cooking and cleaning, even to the degree of overdoing them. The alternative would be to use this “overdoing capacity” instead for less visible work that will pay off on the longer term, by reducing the very need for “daily chores”. In the case of (long-term) OpenVillage Houses this means things like:
- removing little hazards and annoyances, creating small comforts (furniture fixes and improvements, …)
- household automation (dishwasher, better washing machine, Internet connection failover etc.)
- household organization (storage organization, trash management, …)
- expense minimization (energy efficient devices, photovoltaics plant etc.)
- documenting collective knowledge
That’s all I have to say about this at the moment. All not set it in stone and up for discussion of course … the sole purpose of this post actually 