At the time of writing, The Reef has five main digital assets.
- The second-level domain name and related email address
- A website
- A forum
- A workspace
- A chat
1. The domain name and email address
We have registered the second-level domain thereef.brussels. We use it:
- For our website (see below) available at
https://thereef.brussels. - For our workspace (see below), available at
https://workspace.thereef.brussels. - For our shared email addresses, such as the main one,
cohousing@thereef.brussels.
The main email address should always be put in cc whenever corresponding with third parties on Reef business. Other email addresses and third-level domains can be created at will.
2. The website
The Reef’s website is live at https://thereef.brussels. We mean it as a no-frills, read-only introduction to The Reef.
To learn more about how to maintain and make changes to the website, read this post:
3. The forum
The forum is kindly hosted by Edgeryders. It is a space for online discussion, the place where we share and discuss our personal reflections about our project and cohousing in general. We mean it as a form of openness in The Reef: everything that could have a value for others – for example, in helping them to build their own cohousing – should be here. Examples of this are the results of our research on the topic of cohousing: reports on our visits of other cohousing projects, step-by-step guides in dealing with aspects of Belgian officialdom, general discussions about living together. Everybody interested in cohousing is welcome to participate, though participation requires an account on Edgeryders (free, and no surveillance). The functioning of the forum, including the creation of your account, is fully documented here.
Reeflings are required to keep an eye on the forum. The best way to do it is to set its notifications to “tracking”, so as not to lose important updates. Go to https://forum.thereef.brussels or https://edgeryders.eu/c/the-reef/420 (the former redirects to the latter), click on the bell icon to the top right, and select Tracking.
The forum supports a group of users called @reeflings of which we all are part, and several others for teams, full/associate members and so on. By @ mentioning a group you make the forum send a notification to everyboy in that group. The full list of groups is available from the hamburger menu of this forum (three horizontal lines next to the avatar), just select Groups.
4. The workspace
The workspace is for storing documents. Some of them are official – for example, minutes of the general assemblies of The Reef ASBL. Others are working documents, like spreadsheets detailing costing scenarios for The Reef. All reeflings need access to workspace in order to participate in the project.
The workspace is powered by Nextcloud, an open source suite of software tools for collaboration. It lives at https://workspace.thereef.brussels (here is a discussion on how we chose to use Nextcloud, as opposed to, say, Google). The workspace is private by default, though we can decide to make individual files or folders accessible to everyone. In order to access it, you need an account. All members of The Reef ASBL receive one upon joining.
See this page for tips on how to use the workspace:
5. The chat
We also have several` groups on Signal. TAll Reeflings should be on the “Emergency” group; there are others for rapid, short-lived communication across single teams. However, we should refrain for using it for anything substantive, because it is known to be difficult to retrieve things in a chat. The chat should be used only for instant and non-long-term relevant communication, like “Stuck in traffic! I’m late for the meeting”. To request to join the Emergency group, click here; however, we will only accept people who are members of The Reef ASBL, or will soon be.