Some idealistic homeschooling friends of ours moved out of the urban/suburban ratrace zone several years ago. They rented a house in the hill country but dreamed of more: an ecological commune of small hut-like structures in the woods, set up so that the inhabitants could live in a more relaxed fashion, in greater harmony with Nature, sharing and collaborating with one another. They called their design an "Eco-Village" and tried for a while to raise money to construct one.

Alas, I fear that (like the famous jar in the Wallace Stevens poem about an artifact placed on a hilltop in Tennessee) such a cluster of homes would be likely to disrupt the surrounding wilderness, and result in rather less bucolic magic than my friends imagined. I hope I'm wrong.

The other day, however, I noticed that a slight modification of their concept-word generates a neat new term: E-Covillage. What does it mean? "E" implies "electronic", obviously, and "Co" means "with". An E-Covillage is thus a small online community that emphasizes working together.

Maybe that describes a successful Wiki!

(see also MetaForestry (28 Jun 1999), NuclearAccident (1 Aug 2003), ... )

TopicLanguage - TopicPersonalHistory - TopicZhurnal - 2003-10-14

(correlates: ModernPhrenology, BovineMind, BitsOfConsciousness, ...)