I have some thoughts I want to express in the hopes that these thoughts might evolve a bit.
I think that in a few weeks our group will divide in the winter group at basecamp and the winter group at the lab. We need people who will LIVE in wofati 0.7. And those people will cook at least one meal per day there. through the winter. In the next few weeks we will find out who will spend the winter where - and I wonder if we will have a bunk here available or maybe several bunks available at wofati 0.7.
I think we
should split the current
gapper program into three different programs: gapper, tours and pebbles. Gapper is for people that want to be here very long term and work on stuff. Tours are for people that want to have a look for a few hours. Pebbles are people that want to be here for a few days or a week and expeience lots of different projects.
gapper
I think we need to upgrade the application. And maybe have an application fee of something like $40. So the $100 per gapper thing is replace by a lot more $40 things and only a handful of people are accepted.
I think that rather than doing workshops, things will be done to improve the skills and knowledge of the gappers. We can still have workshops - but the workshops will be attended by a lot of gappers and maybe a few paid
workshop attendees.
tours
I think we will set up an email address for tours and that can be a side business for a gapper. That gapper charges some amount and deals with the schedules and crazy. The email address can be forwarded to different gappers as needed.
pebbles
Permaculture experience binge. I think there are people that have a week of vacation and would like to come here and experience stuff. Maybe harvesting food, maybe canning .... maybe building something, or preserving meat, or green woodworking, milking a cow, gathering eggs, eating with our community, driving the excavator, building a
pond, building a
hugelkultur, drilling a well .... what projects we are working on during that week could be strongly influenced by a pebble.
I think that the pebble program will be a huge thing in three or four years. So for 2015 it will be something a bit rough. And in 2025, people might do the pebble thing because they are bringing somebody that is sick and it is possible that our environment and our food could be helpful.
I think that a pebble person would be assigned a gapper during their stay. Their gapper would be by their side as much as they wanted - even 24 hours. And the gapper would get a cut of the action. The gapper would help to make sure that the pebble person would get all the experiences that they sought. If the pebble person doesn't feel up to community meals, the gapper would bring the pebble person the meal. If the pebble person wants to
milk a cow, the gapper would arrange for it.
A pebble person could choose to stay in a tipi or wofati or the love shack or whatever else we come up with. We could have two or three pebble people here at a time (assuming that there are
enough spots to stay and enough gappers willing to do this). It is possible to faciliatate a pebble couple or a pebble family or a larger pebble group.
The gappers could come up with a list of possible experiences for different weeks.
I think that when we formalize the pebble program, we will start off announcing what weeks we would do it and which gappers are up for it. So it is plausible that a person could pick their time and gapper. I think we would start off with a week, although later we could have stuff for as short as three days or as long as several weeks.
I am thinking that four years into the future this would be something that a couple would do for about $3000 for a week. But for 2015, and our very first experiments with this, it would be ... maybe .... $1000 for a couple and half of that would go to the gapper. Maybe $700 for an individual. Maybe $1600 for a family.
In time, maybe different spots to stay in would be different rates. And some gappers might be in higher demand than others.
....
So, as I said. This is just some ideas that I wanted to put out there in the hopes that other people would help these ideas grow and be something richer and more solid.
