bluerasberry

Ideology of Chinchilla Café as a house venue

By bluerasberry on 2023-05-09

On Tuesday 2 May 2023 Shagwüf played a concert at Chinchilla Café which was special because it was recorded. We are all big fans of Shagwüf and were keen to make it happen. Here I describe what it means from an administrative perspective to operate a house venue. I live in a house where we host concerts and showcase activism. Check the show:

There is an existing concept of a punk house and I have lived in those. While we still have a lot of punk ethos, nowadays I need something different and more. Another band, Work Wear, played at our house recently and commented that we were the only house venue they have ever visited which had clean bathrooms or bidets. I want to keep the community and values and spirit but we organizers and residents are all university researchers and need a higher level of stability even if our home is open for public events. There are concepts of the house concert and basement concert which apply to us, but historical journalism and cultural understanding of these things do not completely match Chinchilla Café because we rely on Internet outreach, online music and media archiving, interconnections with like-minded community groups, and a desire to assign meaning to the partying. We call ourselves a house venue. We host concerts and activist presentations. People come for the music but also they are protestors who address the target of their objections by yelling and jumping on a dance floor while people take pictures and post to social media or wherever else. People come to have fun and many of them may not be conscious of the activism, but there are protest signs everywhere and we give microphone time to activists between sets. To me all this is a variation of familiar experiences, but part of the reason why this can happen is that Charlottesville is relatively wealthy to support an arts and activism scene, and also because my housemates and friends all have years of community organization experience both for entertainment and political demonstrations. Calling us a punk house or similar is not inappropriate but the point is connecting people to entertainment to community demands for rights without regard to a more specific subculture.

As I wrote previously I saw Shagwüf for the first time last New Years Eve and was impressed with the music, performance, and stage presence of the band. At the time we thought Shagwüf was too big of an act for us to host, but on meeting them, they said they would perform. We booked them once but they had to cancel due to COVID. They came later and their show was amazing. We had recently gotten some media coverage both in the local newspaper and on local television, and that coverage brought a journalist to our show. This person said that they wanted to write a story about Chinchilla Café, and that also they wanted to profile Shagwüf as the kind of music group that can both do house shows and also manage any larger amount of popularity. I will say more about the journalism experience in another post, but for now I will say that as conversation turned to media attention, we all decided that it would be a good time for Shagwüf to put out a new video for existing and future fans. That led us to planning to have a recorded house concert at Chinchilla Café.

There was extra coordination for this one and I will describe that. In Chinchilla Café we reviewed our organization. Shagwüf planned their concert set. They had an audio equipment operator named Jesse Fiske who managed the sound recording. They had two videographers, Rich Tarbell as director and Edmond Marchetti as additional cameraperson. The journalist interviewed the Chinchilla Café crew intensely.

Gaby, Robin, and I are the main café hosts. The routine preparation that we do includes preparing the concert space, café, chill space, and bathrooms. The concert space is our living room. At this point our indoor couch has become permanently an outdoor couch which has a tarp on it when not in use, and our furniture is an inflatable chair, a beanbag, and pillows. We had other chairs but we permanently exiled them from the living room in the past few weeks to make concert setup easier. Our concert space has drums, speakers, and a PA system which are always ready to go. Fabian designed the walls to be cool as background for people taking photos in any direction.

The café is the room where the chinchillas live and also where bands set up their merch. The most common merch is t-shirts and stickers. Bands sometimes sell cds, cassettes, and vinyl while also referring people to the same music available for free through digital streaming, with the business concept being that music in physical form is cheap to produce and that people like buying physical objects even if they cannot play them and only use digital services. Bars and nightclubs are expensive and communities would be better to have spaces to run nightlife events on a nonprofit model. Since for this recorded event we only had the one band, they did not take donations. For our typical shows we have three bands and a nonprofit group. We collect donations from anyone who wants to give, and always get less than the small requested donation amount per person because we know a lot of people do not have money and they are comfortable giving what they can. A lot of people with money give 2-3x our requested amount. All the money we collect goes to performers and the nonprofit activists. People can bring their own alcohol to share. When there is a marginalized community like the LGBT+ community, they do not have money in addition to all the other problems going out. We are hosts and we spend our own money to make every event happen. I tidy the chinchilla area near the merch table so that they look their best because everyone who comes to a show passes them and checks them out.

The gardens are the chill space. We have video playing, plus the couch is there, and people have snacks, drink, and vape. Most socializing happens here. Gaby likes to host in the back for most of the shows and spends less time in the actual concert. Robin does front door greeting usually until there are enough guests so that they can all chat with each other, then Robin does mostly time in the concerts but also checks in with guests in the gardens. Before the shows I set up photography lights and the backdrop to photo the bands and whoever arrives before the first band plays. I stay in the concert space for all the music and like jumping and moving to it.

Besides the physical space we have administrative procedure. Over time we have discussed and developed our code of conduct policy. While we have not had trouble yet, our guests preemptively ask us what we do if we have problems with misconduct and how they can report misconduct. Ten years ago code of conduct policies were less common, but now most community meetings and organizations which I attend have them routinely and without prior experience of problem in that group. We have often talked about someone coming to shoot and kill us all, which is something that event organizers in America have to discuss, and which is even more common as a conversation because of Charlottesville’s recent history of hatemongering in the 2017 riot and because it has what for the country seems like a normal amount of shootings and stabbings. We have a process for misconduct reports and a process for addressing them. We have talked with other community organizers and concert spaces about misconduct to exchange lists of banned attendees and to be mutually aware in case we need to discuss any patterns of misconduct which may affect the music and event scene locally.

We are getting more assertive about our nonprofit partnerships. First I will name them, then explain the complications with them. Charlottesville Harm Reduction is a harm reduction community organization which provides education about safer lifestyle and recreational drug use, and which provides fentanyl test strips, naloxone for opioid overdose, and referrals to other resources such as other drug testing and needle exchange services. F12 Infoshop is an infoshop based in Visible Records but they distribute zines and pamphlets here with contemporary relevant themes like community self-reliance, dealing with police, trans and other queer rights, and presenting minority activist perspectives. Stop Cop City, also known as Defend the Atlanta Forest, project protesting the conversion of public forest land in Atlanta to a police station, with part of context being that police murdered one of the protestors for demonstrating on that land and using violence to disperse other protestors. We do not normally take up issues outside of our community as this one is in another part of the country, but this regional issue was of national concern and we had local people who championed the cause and organized trips to the area to join the protest. Arm Trans Women is an organization which provides firearm training to trans people and anyone who wants gun training targeted to trans people. CUFF or Charlottesville Underground Fetish Fellowship is the local sex positive / BDSM organization. Every attendee of Chinchilla Café is a queer activist, which we know because we put gay flags and gay messaging on everything we do, and most of our attendees are queer. We try to send our guests to CUFF because most people feel like they need an invitation to join kink events and will not show up unless they get invitations and discussions at non-kink events like concert. CUFF has capacity and community support for new members and benefits from organizations like ours doing outreach for them. CUFF does a class, two social events, and a play party every month, so they always have something for us to advertise.

We at Chinchilla Café sometimes publicly talk about organizations we like without those organizations having formal presentations here. Organizations which we have presented include Animal Justice Advocates, which is demanding reform in the University of Virginia’s treatment of research animals; FLAG or Fight Like a Girl, which is a women’s self-defense class; and community groups promoting access to psychedelic and entheogenic drugs. Many of us have relationships with labor unions and workers’ rights organizations. I am a member of United Campus Workers Virginia and even stood in the last election as candidate for secretary. We also like communism and socialism and take in representatives from organizations promoting those causes. I wish there was any Ordo Templo Orientalis organization or similar magic organization around, but we could not find one so we have an occultist scheduled to come over and initiate us into the Orphic Mysteries later this month. I said that we are not quite a punk house. There is no brief word like “punk” that describes what we are doing but I do think we are part of a subculture that would say that all of these organizations go together well and would understand why people would float around like butterflies among them all.

We have had representatives from most of these organizations speak at our events, and we present some activist cause at all of our events. Internally as a matter of administration we have had talks about how being public with activism can attract negative attention or stalking, and that safety comes first so we should be discreet. I can be persuaded by safety concerns but favor transparency, documentation, and seeking media attention. I just said and will say again that we worry about people shooting us, as in killing us with guns for hosting community events. I am saying this just in general as an American citizen who has to think about gun violence at public events as a part of daily life in the context of mass shootings in the United States. All American event organizers have to consider safety protocols for someone coming to kill event attendees, typically for having political views and ideologies of the sort we have here. Our guests and attendees are do not have the ideological background to threaten violence, whereas the people who oppose events like ours are more likely to do violence as they come from hate-based cultures. For more context, our community recognizes a concept of “hate” or “intolerance”. There are lots of definitions of this, but as an example of how hate plays out, there are some hate demographics where if they are aware that an LGBT+ person is nearby minding their own business not disturbing anything, then the hate-based demographic will feel an obligation to cancel their daily routine in order to invest their time and attention in disrupting the LGBT+ person. We get Internet harassment from strangers who will not mind their own business. In contrast, the people at our events do not seek out others to harass; we just want to be free and left alone.

Currently in the English speaking world there is an inflammation of anti-trans hate. The hate-based narrative is that trans people, in the course of their everyday lives, are somehow corrupting youth, corrupting society, and harmfully doing activities of daily living. To me this kind of talk is comparable to hate against Native Americans from early US history, opposition to women’s suffrage through modern women’s rights, discrimination against Jews, opposition to the Civil Rights Movement for black people, opposition at universities to admitting women or non-white people or Jews or by religion, or the anti-gay movement, and now we have arrived at trans rights being the focus of hate. It is all the same to me and I feel like the hate will eventually pass as the hatemongers eventually come to accept trans people just like every other demonized group, even though they will eventually hate someone else. There is no need for intolerance except against any demographic except the intolerant. To run a venue like ours though we make ourselves targets for violence and hate. We have stalkers. I have stalkers. I hope no one shoots me.

At our events we have had several people first come as one gender then see that we are a safe space, and come back to a later event with a different gender presentation. We also have had people come with furry or puppy or kitty gear for pet play and other kink activity, and I like that people feel comfortable to do that because life can be so hard without opportunity for self expression. Some people attend an event alone or with friends, then come to a later event with a same-sex date. Any politics that is for the people is good for us. I subscribe to the ideology that most of the wealth in the world is captured by non-productive heredity lines, and that life would be better if most resources were in the control of workers. I want to encourage freedom. It makes me very happy to see people step out of their usual environment, come into our place and get the feeling that they are free to express themselves while they are here, then do and say whatever they had been wanting to do but were unable to do outside of the community center we created.

Shagwüf came the day before the concert to set up their instruments, do sound tests, rehearse some parts of songs, and confirm their playlist. Jesse set up an audio both and all the microphones. The setup took about 5 hours, and was not typical of usual concerts which have 20 minutes of preparation for a performance with no recording. On the day of the concert the band still came early as did the two videographers who planned where they would stand for what kinds of shots.

Shagwüf is a queer band and they play the role of rock stars. All of the bands we host are cool but Shagwüf is really good at manifesting celebrity superhero energy and when they get on stage, perform, and talk about LGBT+ things then it combines the entertainment which is the draw that people think they need, with the encouragement and acceptance that people needed but did not know that they needed. No one comes to a concert because for the purpose of getting told that it is okay to be yourself, but when a hero team looks cool on stage, and they rock everyone out, and then they say this stuff, then people get a lot of confidence and have a great experience. Having this recorded and posted online as a cool video with cool music also builds the cultural foundation that LGBT+ people can have a space with each other where no one needs to hide. This video is recorded proof that Chinchilla Café existed as a DIY event venue and that in a town without an LGBT+ community center for our guests to come, they came to ours, and other people can set up their own concert venues in their own city to do music and activism and community also.

We did the concert. It was awesome. Sally the singer in the video said at the end, “Thank you Chinchilla Café! We fucking love you all so so so much! Thanks for having a queer safe friendly space for us to play. It means so much.” I feel really grateful to be able to host events like this. All my life I wanted to be a guest at opportunities like this and I am fortunate that at this time in my life I am in a position to be a host for so many people who come here to find what they are seeking.

Posted in art, Charlottesville, gay stuff, non-profit | Tagged concert, party | Leave a response

Wikimedia Movement funds should sponsor Wikimedia community conversation

By bluerasberry on 2023-04-13

The Wikimedia Foundation sometimes calls for global community conversations. Every time it has done this in the past, I feel like the outcome has been invalid and misleading because the Wikimedia Foundation spends a lot of money to influence the conversation and also they document the outcome in a biased way without sufficient community input. The consequences of the bias have not been too problematic to date, but it is an abuse of Wikipedia’s democratic ideals, and every time this happens the foundation is advancing a precedent which harms the integrity of the Wikimedia Foundation demoralizes the Wikimedia community, and demonstrates poor governance to the world. There is an inexpensive solution to this problem: funds from the Wikimedia Movement should sponsor basic communication infrastructure to support the Wikimedia community in speaking for and representing itself. For as long as paid Wikimedia Foundation staff speak for the community, there will always be conflict of interest, and there will always be problems. Below I say more about this.

The particular problem happening right now is that the Wikimedia Foundation is asking for community comment in designing the ratification process for the Wikimedia Movement Charter. Here is the background on this: some years ago the Wikimedia Foundation organized a global community conversation to develop a Wikimedia Movement Strategy through the year 2030. The Movement Strategy identified a set of goals. The plan for manifesting those goals is to allocate Wikimedia Movement resources, money and otherwise, to agents who can achieve them. Allocating movement resources is a big deal, because the Wikimedia Movement brings in a huge sum of money; a five-year budget is a billion United States dollars, and lots of people want that money. There are two main camps asking for money – paid staff of the Wikimedia Foundation, and Wikimedia community members who have built Wikipedia into a project which can attract donations measured in billions of dollars. The process proposed for deciding who gets the money is to write a constitution, now called the Wikimedia Movement Charter, which defines roles and responsibilities for different players. Presumably the Charter would also allocate power, which means allocating money to enable the performance of the roles it defines. A number of conflicts arise between Wikimedia Foundation staff and the Wikimedia community; I could describe those, but in narrowly thinking only about global community conversations like this one, the problem is that the Wikimedia Foundation tends to make proposals which grant itself more power and more money, and then designs global conversation processes to validate the proposals it puts forth. Historically for such global conversations, the Wikimedia Foundation invests millions of dollars from Wikimedia Movement funds to develop and communicate its positions, whereas there is no particular budget for the Wikimedia community to host its own conversations, and communicate its own points. The Wikimedia Foundation’s theory of government is that the Wikimedia community is a functionally limitless volunteer labor pool, and that anytime the foundation calls for a conversation, then whatever crowdsourced volunteer response rises is the will of the Wikimedia volunteer community of stakeholders. This is an error; for many reasons, it was never reasonable to believe that Wikipedia community members are capable of running global governance without paid staff community administrative support, like conversation facilitators. In practice, conversation methods like the one for ratification are heavily weighted in favor of the side that spends money. If the Wikimedia Foundation spends a million dollars on its own staff and consultants to communicate a position, when the evidence of grant funding for global community conversation is something like US$100,000, then I feel that the power imbalance is so great that the results are unreliable. At best, reported results may present points on which both sides agree, but when the foundation has one position and the community takes another, then with power imbalance like this the communication at the end of the process inappropriately favors the foundation. The solution to correct this problem is a re-allocation of the communication budget to cut money from the foundation and grant it to community members. I am not sure how much money is in play here, but just to compare, in 2020 the Wikimedia Foundation spent about US$2 million dollars on a branding conversation in which the Wikimedia community felt that the Wikimedia Foundation and their consulting firm Snohetta spent most to advance the foundation’s position in opposition to the community’s position. Organizations like Snohetta sell communication services which produce documentary evidence of consensus; in that case my read of the community review was that the consultancy’s publications were fantasy propaganda telling of community support when in fact only opposition existed. The largest Wikimedia community protest to date was about this rebranding, and is centered in the petition called COLOR or Community Open Letter On Renaming. I am giving that example as a case when the Wikimedia Foundation spent money in an effort to publicize Wikimedia community support on a point which completely lacked that community support. This ratification process is different in that the community is not in opposition, but still, if the community did oppose all the resources are in place for the foundation to do as it pleases until and unless volunteers invest their personal labor into a massive protest.

Part of the routine injustice in this and similar community consultations is that the Wikimedia Foundation fails to express awareness that calling for community conversation is an immense labor burden beyond the capacity of Wikimedia community volunteers to organize. This WMF call for the community to ratify the charter requires a spontaneously organized, crowdsourced, global, multilingual, representative consensus-making process which appears by WMF request and without sponsorship. Somehow in the Wikimedia platform the WMF fantasizes or wishes that such organization could happen for free, but it does not, and it never has. Community conversation is possible if and only if the Wikimedia Foundation sponsors it with money to communities, especially to lower and middle income countries and underrepresented demographics. I propose that a transparent accounting of money awarded by the Wikimedia Foundation to Wikimedia community organizations be a metric for measuring the extent of validity and the legitimacy of the Movement Charter Ratification Process, and similar global conversations. Here is what counts: grants to community groups where there is public on-wiki evidence of community participation in discussions. Here is what does not count for this metric: money spent on Wikimedia Foundation paid staff doing anything for community groups, such as speaking for them, representing them, organizing them, training them, or directing them to use technology.

This ratification methodology lacks community confirmation that volunteer crowdsourcing of the requested conversation is feasible. The Wikimedia Foundation regularly organizes rituals with the appearance of democracy without doing the necessary checks to ensure that the communication infrastructure is in place to actually host a conversation of this sort. Community participation is greatest when Wikimedia Foundation staff set the agenda for discussion, and that is problematic too, especially for participation from Lower and Middle Income countries were there are problematic connections between community support for Wikimedia Foundation staff proposals and improved chances to access other Wikimedia Foundation resources such as grants. Too many times I have seen paid staff of the Wikimedia Foundation assume that the labor pool of volunteers is so large that they need not measure it, and that they can safely assume that whatever response comes from a call for comments is representative. This is not the case! The Wikimedia Foundation should account for its consumption of volunteer labor and hours, which it does not! Neither is the Wikimedia Foundation aware of how much volunteer time it consumes, nor does it attempt to estimate how many volunteer hours a conversation like this requires, nor is there any estimate of how many volunteer hours the global crowdsourced community has to give! There will be a reaction to this call for comments, but with our current community infrastructure and the Wikimedia Foundation proposed methodology, good democracy for a community-based ratification is not a possible outcome.

Yes, correct, community conversation is the way, and yes, correct, collaboration with chapters and thematic organizations is also an effective strategy for organizing conversation among stakeholder communities, but it is not possible to organize so many people so quickly for such complicated discussions without some sponsorship of local staff, non-WMF, community paid organizers. I wish that the WMF could sponsor communication infrastructure to be permanently in place for these discussions because we need them several times a year, perpetually. There is great overestimation among WMF staff about the limits of community infrastructure. Have mercy for the volunteers, please. Assign a budget to community conversation and be public and transparent about this resource investment. Also, Wikimedia Foundation staff should publish an estimate of how many volunteer labor hours they expect this process to consume, and ask community groups to report back on the labor burden.

Here is another small practice which we could implement, which would be helpful: The correct methodology includes each community organization tracks the number of labor hours its decision makers spent in deliberating the choice. As an example, a typical time investment for such decisions in the United States is that 5 community volunteers will plan a community discussion for 10 hours each, then in a mix of live and on-wiki discussion, about 50 other people discuss and consider for an average of an hour. The total labor investment to that point is 100 hours. Beyond that, there is still need for staff administrators to archive, organize, and summarize the conversation, and that could take another 20 hours to sort plus, plus another 10 hours to review by small committee, then get another 20 hours to circulate for final community approval. Depending on the wiki community group, the staff investment in all of this could be from 20-100 hours, depending on whether the staff is professional and part of an existing community versus first-time and in need of training, and trying to communicate this to a group of stakeholders who are not organized as a community. I think this amount of discussion and labor would be typical for most wiki community organizations which had a good democratic decision making process. Unfortunately also, most wiki community organizations are unprepared and unsupported to do this.

Posted in rights, Wikipedia | Tagged Wikimedia chapter, Wikimedia community, Wikimedia Foundation | Leave a response

Chinchilla Café 2023 status report

By bluerasberry on 2023-02-10

Typical Chinchilla Café concert poster of the sort archived in Wikimedia Commons

Chinchilla Café is a concert venue, community center, and animal coffeehouse in Charlottesville, Virginia. Robin Brown, Gabriela Toledo, Eli Draizen, Fabian Garcia, and I Lane Rasberry established it last year in 2022. I want to describe what it is, the shows we have presented, and what we are trying to accomplish by hosting it. See media links for images and other details.

The Chinchilla Café has hosted about 20 concerts of 3 or 4 bands each. Concerts have had up to 100 attendees but 75 is typical. The show format is that the first band is usually local and less experienced, but should have some energy to get everyone hyped up. We check out the bands before booking, either by listening to whatever they posted online, or by getting a trusted referral from someone whom we know and who has been to their performance. The second band is usually visiting from outside town, often Richmond the capital city of Virginia which is an hour’s drive away, but we have had bands on tour from various places including DC, Philly, NYC, and Jersey City. If a band is on tour, then that means they have practiced a lot, are really good, and usually they have recorded some songs or even an album which they are promoting through their social media accounts. The problem with touring bands is that even if they are good, local people will not recognize their names, so unless they are into indie music and actively try to see touring bands, they often are not a draw because they cannot ask their local friends and network to come to the show. When people do see the touring bands, they tend to like them a lot because going on tour gives the performers a lot of energy to play with new enthusiasm. We try to cap at 3 bands to keep shows under 2 hours, but if for some reason there is a 4^th band which needs to play, then they get the third slot, which can be for a second touring band, or a band which needs to promote new music immediately, or who for some reason needs to play immediately and requests a slot at an existing show which we did not design for them. Where there are 4 bands then we cut one song’s time from the other bands, meaning 5 minutes, so we still have a long overall concert but we make room for everyone. The last band is the experienced local draw. This is the band that is best known locally, who has their own fanbase, who can call people out to come see them in their own way, and whose fans will come to the concert for all the other music and then get super excited at the end when the band they know plays. This band supports all the other ones not just for bringing an audience, but also for incidental other support, like sharing music equipment in case of failure or need, or helping with sound checks, and for knowing polite behavior like naming and thanking all the earlier bands who played so that the audience remembers their names and looks them up online.

Typical concert goers are indie music fans who want to experience and support the local music scene. We do not charge anything to attend, but we ask for donations with all money going to the bands and none kept for the house. We suggest $10 per attendee but usually collect half that, which is fine because we want people to come even if money is short. Collecting $100-120 per band is typical, which for bands with multiple members who have to travel, maintain their instruments, practice, perform, and everything else is not much money to split among the musicians. I wish we could raise more but this is where we are right now.

There are three areas in the venue: the concert space where the bands perform, an outdoor chill space where we play recorded music and screen the weirdest videos we find in YouTube or elsewhere, and the actual Chinchilla Café area itself where the chinchillas live and where in the morning, there is coffee and chinchilla interaction before they go to sleep for the day after being active all night. We do not serve alcohol because of the complexity that brings. The audience tends to be aged mid-20s and up, with a mix of graduate students living here while studying and who want whatever culture Charlottesville has, and also local permanent residents of any background who like Charlottesville’s music because they live here, it is theirs, and because Cville has a great music scene. I mention ages because this is a university town, and we are not hosting undergraduate parties. The focus at Chinchilla Café is experiencing the music and venue with other people who are doing the same.

The schedule for concerts is doors at 7, with the show advertised to begin at 8 but actually starting 8:15. Sets are 25 minutes with 15 minutes between bands. As described above, typical concerts feature 3 bands, so (25+15)*3 is 120 minutes or two hours. We get people out before 10:30 so they can go out to later events or do whatever they like. Some people chill around a bit longer while the bands pack up, although often the earlier bands can finish packing up after their sets.

The resident chinchillas are an attraction of the venue. The audience comes a bit early. While the bands are setting up in the performance space, guests can hang out either in the Chinchilla Café or the outdoor chill space. If they walk outdoors they pass by the chinchillas and see them. We the human hosts do not usually introduce ourselves as hosts except to ask for donations for the bands, so not all the guests have met us or even know who hosted them. We do turn everyone’s attention to the chinchillas though. We must have had 1000 guests with many of those repeat visitors. However many people have come, all of them have seen the chinchillas and probably half of them have interacted with them either by allowing the chinchillas to sniff their hand, or by giving them pellets or treats, or by making eye contact which the chinchillas like.

Chinchillas have irregular schedules and wake up at different times, but typically, they sleep all day to wake up around 7:30pm. If they are asleep then they cannot socialize, but when they are awake, they have a large chinchilla pen with their private hidden area in the back but an interaction area in the front. Their pattern is to approach the interaction area to try to meet humans. We often ponder what chinchillas think and why they behave as they do, but for whatever reason, chinchillas like to meet new people by sniffing their hands. They want to sniff everyone’s hand every day, but then lose interest in that scent after sniffing it to meet the person. When there are a lot of people attending the chinchillas like to sniff a lot of hands, presumably to gather information about who is there but I do not know why they want to know this. They need naps often even during their waking time, and may retire to fall sideways in slumber after as little as 30 minutes of socializing.

For those familiar with dogs as pets, it is common knowledge that dogs are reactive to opportunities to get treats. Dogs want treats and repeat patterns of behavior to get them. Chinchillas like treats too, but they are a lot more moody, and if offered a treat they will come if they feel like and decline if they do not. Continuing the comparison, dogs rarely refuse treats when offered. It is likewise with food. I feed the chinchillas on a consistent schedule. They have hay to eat always, but get pelleted food in the morning and evening. They really like hay and pellets both. After watching them for years they still seem inconsistent to me for eating extra hay somedays and being less interested in pellets when I serve them. Most people are unfamiliar with chinchillas so I will share something that all chinchilla caretakers know: they are extraordinarily picky and their food selection process is inscrutable. This is most apparent when they are eating hay. To eat, they approach the manger of hay, individually select each blade or strand of the hay, and thoroughly examine it. They grab by clamping with their mouth, then transfer to hold the hay in their hands, then they examine it visually and by smell. We have all as humans examined the hay ourselves, and some is broad, some is thin, it can be more crisp or flexible, there are different parts of the hay plant in the mix, and it can have other variation in appearance. None of us know the chinchilla evaluation process, but whatever the case, half of the hay they throw on the ground in rejection and to trample on it. Discarded hay is unwanted by all chinchillas, and they cannot be fooled into accepting hay which failed another chinchilla’s inspection. This epic judgment repeats daily. The three chinchillas consume about 50 pounds of hay a year, so are actually just eating the tastiest half of that. Concert goers can watch this dining spectacle, imagining gourmands at a fancy restaurant who somehow discern that only some bites of the food they are served meet their standards, and who shovel other portions of their meal onto the floor with intent to stomp on it.

The most common question which concert goers ask about the chinchillas is “OMG are those chinchillas? I did not think the Chinchilla Café would have actual chinchillas”. Yes, they are chinchillas, and they live here. Answers to the other common questions are as follows: Pip is the dark one and he has the colors of a wild chinchilla, and he was born in November 2010 so he is 12 years old. Napoleon the white and gray one is a mosaic chinchilla, and Starr Baby is beige. Napoleon and Starr Baby were both born in 2016 but they are not related. They are all boys and they are best friends who play with each other every day. We got them all from a chinchilla rescue. Chinchillas typically live for 15 years but can live for 25, and it is necessary to have multiple chinchillas because they need to sleep together, groom each other, chirp and get chirps in response, eat together, react to each other running around, and hump each other. A lone chinchilla will miss that and it is not ideal. We do not know how they behave in the wild as few videos exist, few scientific papers are published, and we know of no tourism to visit them in Peru. Visiting them in the wild would not be easy as they are nocturnal and shy, so someone would have to find them in remote areas at night when they are actively trying to hide. Chinchillas are rodents. Sometimes I tell people that chinchillas are a hybrid animal like a mule, and that they are the offspring of a rabbit and a squirrel. The chinchillas have never visibly reacted to the music of the concerts. We watched them closely in the beginning. The music seems far enough away from them to not disturb them. None of the chinchillas have ever bitten anyone, but all of them could if they wanted to do so and we all agree that their bites would be very dangerous.

So the concert guests see the chinchillas before the first concert, then again after the intermission following the first concert. By this time everyone knows there are chinchillas in the venue, and everyone has learned what a chinchilla is. We also hype up that the chinchillas do a show in the intermission before the last band plays. People get curious about this, and we call them in during that intermission. I have a large container prepared with dust. I recruit a volunteer, typically someone who has been curious about the chinchillas, to give the container to the chinchillas in their pen. People who have not seen before do not suspect what will happen, but what happens is a big chinchilla bath. They are predictable for their enthusiasm to take a dust bath, and they always deliver. When the bath is there they stop whatever they are doing and hop to the bath. They jump in and roll around wildly, all three at once. People take videos and pictures, and everyone likes this. I have been watching chinchillas for years and I still watch every bath I give them. It never gets old. Chinchilla baths are interesting every time. After the bath the last band plays.

It took five of us to establish the Chinchilla Café. Briefly, Eli and Robin are active concert goers. Eli is a drummer who has been in a couple of local bands, and went to local shows as a child in Oakland then onto whatever was available as he lived in various cities in adulthood. Eli has good taste in band selection, and he set up the social media accounts which recruit bands and promote shows. Calling Eli the promoter is probably best, but he also has kept the venue mostly rock, original music, and has made calls about who has quality music and is cool enough to play here. Eli also set up the performance space by collecting speakers, the mixer, and sharing his drum kit with the bands. Robin did undergraduate studies in Cville and now is nearing the end of graduate school, and has been going to local bands throughout this so knows them. With Eli, Robin also does band selection and has kept the quality of music high, but primarily, Robin makes Chinchilla Café a community center by recruiting nonprofit activist organizations to present their causes. People come for the shows, but when they come the activists also get their attention. Some organizations which we have featured include F12, the local anarchist bookstore; Cville Area Harm Reduction, which provides public health education on using drugs more safely and who distributes Narcan to counter opiate overdose; Arm Trans Women, which hosts gun classes for general education or to get concealed carry permits and which especially trains the LGBT+ community. Robin also announces other community events at other venues, and makes sure that Chinchilla Café has enough Rainbow flags to communicate that we are the queerest venue in Cville. Gabby is not particularly interested in concerts, but she does like to party, and is the person in a friend group who organizes the fun and turns it up to push people to have more fun. Fabian has a background as a club promoter in New York City but is not playing that role here. Instead he is the designer who makes the concert posters, and in turn those concert posters have set the aesthetic for the venue as they are the art, they set the colors and style of venue lighting, and also cause the photos people take to have a certain appearance. My role is chinchilla caretaker but my aspiration is venue archivist. I am the writer here so I will speak for myself.

The reason why a community concert venue like ours needs an archivist is that local artists and the entire community benefits from digital media presence, but even super savvy amateur social media users need professional support to manage basics. My view is that all the local bands have deficient online presence. I think that any communication worker could follow a process which takes a few minutes per band but which would greatly promote each band individually, and also better interconnect the network of the music scene, and improve the reputation of the city. Technology changes rapidly, and what I am doing matters now, but also what I do could be irrelevant with advances in AI anytime in the next 3-15 years. My vision is that every city should have a funded arts coordinator, perhaps through a grant to a community center, and that the arts coordinator should arrange the kind of archiving I am doing. Here is what I do: I create Wikidata items for the bands. The Wikidata items designate the band’s city of origin, whether Cville or touring, and also list all the bands social media accounts that I can find. I also make individual Wikidata items for each concert we host. That Wikidata item includes Fabian’s concert posters because he makes art with free and open copyright, and the item links to the bands who played there. That means that the bands who play get a permanent record of playing at least at this show, and they also can find the poster we used to advertise them. The current norm is that most venues treat concert listings as ephemeral, so we have permanent records of the bands playing at our place and those bands can use the record to promote themselves if they advance or just reminisce at any time in the future. I am trying to get more and better photography of each band, because too often these poor bands do not have any good photographs of themselves online. By putting those photos in Wikidata there comes to be a free and open photograph of them for anyone to use, like for promotion at any future booking, and they do not have to clear copyright with a photographer because the photo is there licensed for reuse for any purpose. Since all big tech companies and AI companies of any size continuously slurp everything wiki, and since all of this is Linked Open Data, it means that in Google and everywhere else all the bands’ social media accounts are interconnected and optimized for all other platforms to find and present to users. Also, because of that location data, the technology can answer questions like “show me artists in Charlottesville” then present a list of the artists. Without structured data, tech platforms cannot easily promote local artists.

I lack experience, and I have little evidence, but I think Charlottesville has a better music scene than many comparable cities. I am just guessing, and neither have I visited other similar cities nor do I have any data, but the music here is good and I have thought about why. Charlottesville is small enough for bands to all know each other and for audiences to be aware of all the venues, so we have interconnectedness and competition for excellence here which is not possible in bigger cities. Also Charlottesville is relatively wealthy because it has the University of Virginia and the regional medical center from the medical school, and also for various reasons there are some large tech companies in Cville. The extra money puts extra amenities in circulation – not enough which is why we established the café, but some perks – and those make for a better arts scene. What I regret about all this is the lack of data. We are compiling the first structured data list of the bands in Cville, and we have 60. I would guess that in a year about 200 local bands play at least 3 shows. Although the government is supposed to support the arts, not long ago the technology did not exist to count how many artists there are, nor was their any way to track their popularity. What we are doing for bands could be repeated for any kind of art, including visual arts, performing arts, or whatever else, to track what happens in the city and also to showcase that Cville has a great arts scene. This should happen for every city. I am on hiring committees at the School of Data Science, and when people ask about the Nazi riots we hosted a few years ago, I wish I could counter by showing evidence that the community response to that unfortunate event was the promotion of local art and artists as a way of protecting ourselves from fascism. Those who move here to accept jobs, such as at the School of Data Science, should think of the city for its contemporary arts scene which I can demonstrate with this data.

Fabian has his own style for concert posters. He would need to explain it himself, but in the 90s and 2000s in NYC he was a club promoter, and designed ridiculous weekly advertisement cards then with the help of a professional artist. In that time computer design was different and there were analog aspects. Fabian developed a style of his own then though, and in the age of mobile devices, he makes several digital artworks a week. We both like photographing the chinchillas and have 10,000+ pictures of them hopping around. He selects the best of those, recolors them wildly and puts the chinchillas into abstract landscapes, then positions promotional text around this.

Eli primarily manages the social media accounts. He responds to booking requests from bands. It makes sense to us that local bands find out about us as a venue and they proactively seek cool places to play, so they write to us. We always wonder how far-away touring bands have heard about us, but do not always have time to ask. Robin posts to social media also, including Fabian’s posters if Fabian has not, and also reacts to messages. Gabby in the midst of this invites cool people to attend, sets up games around the café including a bucket of art prompts on paper and a dry erase board with pens where people have to draw what prompts them. The night starts with an empty board and ends full of art.

About our personal histories – Fabian and I are boyfriends. We were living in New York City when I took a position in the School of Data Science at the University of Virginia in 2018. Fabian does hair for movies and television, and as there is no movie industry in Cville, he stayed in NYC while I moved here. We have a long distance relationship and take the train to see each other monthly. He comes for certain concerts.

I met Gabriel in 2018 when I moved to CHUVA, which was a Charlottesville cooperative housing complex for 20 people in operation from 2007 – 2021. It closed during the COVID pandemic, so in addition to the loss of community housing, our town lost CHUVA as a community center. I was secretary at CHUVA from 2018-2021 when it closed, while Gabby had the role of fun officer. As fun officer she organized the parties. CHUVA was great for the space it had and its community, but by requiring the consensus of so many people, there were some limits to what kinds of events we could do. We could not get organized to have concerts for example, and even regular outdoor movies were sometimes challenging to coordinate without disrupting other activities and people’s daily lives.

Eli and Robin were housemates elsewhere in another large home with multiple people. The situation there changed also, so they wanted to establish another venue with options to host guests. Eli and I had both been in the School of Data Science since 2018. Robin I met as Eli’s friend and also through the labor union which would eventually become the Communication Workers of America – United Campus Workers – Virginia chapter – University of Virginia unit. I became housemates with Eli and Robin. Gabby started visiting us. Collectively, we started talking about CHUVA, labor activism, the loss of community centers in the pandemic, the local music scene, and whether we could establish a venue to bring people together for fun and greater purpose.

The convergence that we had was that we all wanted to host parties; we all are extreme activists for civility, human rights, and community empowerment; we all were at a point in our lives where we have both the skill to manage parties and the capacity to do so; and we can contribute financially to this as hosting parties has a labor and financial cost. Again, we take donations, and we give all the collected money to the bands. We pay for the venue, provide the light and audio equipment, arrange printing, we clean and maintain the venue including restrooms, buy decorations, replace things like chairs and tables which get damaged with 100s of uses, supply water and some light snacks, and of course present the chinchillas at their best which we would do anyway, but we have tried to make their pen more photogenic for the humans who all want pics of them.

Chinchilla Café like any community center is vulnerable. We have no permanent space and due to market pressures may have to leave at any time. We are all volunteers and if too many of us go, we may not be able to recruit other volunteers in the same mindspace with compatibility and capacity to join the organizing team. We get no funding, not that we want it exactly, but if there were sponsorship then we wish we could have commitment to host events in a more permanent community center, and have more administrative support to make for easier booking and quicker communication with the bands, and also to better integrate our community center with other local community centers, the city event calendars, and other nonprofit organizations and campaigns which we could showcase. We also have a significant community of partygoers and guests, and having a network is valuable. For many people they start by wanting an evening of entertainment, but to have a community center means they meet friends with whom they might not otherwise connect, they learn of activist causes they might not find otherwise, they hear music which has local flavor which could not come from any other city, and they make the memories that make living in this city pleasurable in ways that are different from experiences in any other. Chinchilla Café will not last forever. Eli just got his PhD and will get a job outside of Charlottesville. Robin gets her PhD this summer and will move on. Gabby already has her PhD and plans to move in the next year. I have longer term plans here, and there are other people who volunteer to present these shows, but neither I nor Fabian want to be leads in administration. Eli has served that role, and while we can continue without him, when enough of us are gone it is not going to be the same.

We identified a demand for a community center in Cville which hosts concerts. Many of the bands who played with us would likely have played one fewer show had we not provided the space, and for a lot of volunteer bands like these, one fewer show can be an existential crisis that can dissolve the band. As a community center we are not a bar, and not a commercial venue, so when we host a band it is not transactional and there is no stress on them to be part of an investor owner’s business cycle. We are not a neutral space; we are a queer space which does community activism, so when anyone plays at our place, they are also protesting and taking a stand for community rights. A typical commercial venue has no values, as the norm in business is bland neutrality and facelessness. It feels better to play at our place. At bar venues it is sometimes the case that the audience is out to socialize and drink, and incidentally, there is a band playing. For our venue, almost everyone in the audience there to see the bands and so are excited, jumping around, and cheering them on. The people who are not there to see the bands are there to see the chinchillas, but that crowd is also very supportive of the bands and make for good audience members.

Concerts are the main events at Chinchilla Café but other events are significant. We all drink coffee, and guests are welcome in our animal café weekend mornings when the weather is nice are good times for guests joining outside. Chinchillas can be aroused to interact and be petted till about 10am when they are soundly asleep for the day. On warm non-rainy Friday or Saturday evenings last year we hosted a summer outdoor movie series from late spring to early autumn. We plan to do it again this summer. We have a projector and a movie screen in the back yard. We have some picnic blankets and chairs, or people can bring their own sheets to lay out and watch movies. We typically do horror of the sort which thrills but which is not disturbingly violent, so we do not want to see people getting hurt but we do like to see them getting eaten or having monster encounters. We have hosted some classes, including a gun class by the previously mentioned Arm Trans Women. Sometimes we clear the concert space and digitally DJ dance parties. We cook our own pizzas by making sauce, rolling out dough, and baking them out. Pizzas happen most weeks with us making 10 of them. The default Chinchilla Café pizza is vegan, oddly shaped crust because it is DIY with whomever shows up, with mushroomy sauce containing lots of rosemary minutes before the end and lots of garlic raw going in right at the end. We do bell peppers, kalamata olives, chili peppers, pineapple, tofu that we season and pan fry, and some basil and arugula leaves. The most common variation is with vegan cheese. Anyone who wants meat can have it but they have to bring their own carcass because we do not supply that.

That’s my perspective of the café! The others would describe it in a different way.

Posted in art, Charlottesville, festival | Tagged chinchilla, coffee, music, party | Leave a response

Shagwüf and Falsies New Year’s Eve 2022

By bluerasberry on 2023-01-03

Angela, Taylor, Eli, Lane, and Fabian seeing Shagwüf and the Falsies in Charlottesville New Years Eve 2022

For New Year’s Eve we went to the Southern concert venue in Charlottesville for Shagwüf and the Falsies. When I first moved to Charlottesville Fabian and I went there on 16 March 2018 to see Southern Culture on the Skids. Fabian had not been back since but I had gone there for concerts sometimes. Robin was visiting Laura who had been living in Chinchilla Café until she moved to Florida for a professorship. Gabriela was in Baltimore visiting family and friends there. That left me, Fabian, and Eli to go to the concert, and we met Taylor and Angela there.

Phoebe and Alaska met us before we went out. They had been traveling and Phoebe is not much for concerts, so they just wanted to visit us at the cafe to chat a bit. Conversations these days are congratulations to Eli on getting your doctorate and questions about what comes next. Eli says he just wants to take a break with no obligations for a bit, and he is planning to escort his father on a trip that he always wanted to take. Other than that, Eli is trying to relax and sort of checking options for next steps. I had mushrooms, some others did also.

We walked from home to the venue. People come up to me now and tell me that they had fun at Chinchilla Café shows. Hosting a venue has been a fun and weird experience because with our budget of $0 so many things could go wrong, but everything has been fine. We do these small private parties by invitation. If all of us living here and our friends were not contributing to this, then it could not happen. Evidently we are aligned with the cultural wave of Charlottesville because bands and cool people like the shows we have been able to host, and people recognize us in public because we host. The chinchillas are very popular and people know their names.

Shagwüf was amazing. I talked to Sally the singer after her set and asked her if she would play at the Chinchilla Café, expecting that I would have to explain to her that I had an events venue, but she had already heard of it because she had friends who had gone to our shows. She said that she wanted to play! We have had a lot of shows so far but during her set, I recognized her as a rock star, and we have not had anyone with that attitude yet. Her music is great, she plays the audience just as well as her music, she had technical problems with broken equipment but played it off by changing her plans and nothing was the worse for it, and she dresses the rock star part. We have had some great musicians play, and when they come everyone wants to look and act their best. Many of the performers have clothes they wear only for performing which are not typical street wear, but Sally really is a star plays the part.

Just a few weeks ago in mid December we had an experienced touring band over, blankstate. They were interacting with the chinchillas while talking with another band who had no live performance experience, and who was asking them for advice. The advice they wanted was how to feel about their fear of performing, and of not being good enough. The new band had just formed a couple of months ago, so the members were new friends just getting to know each other. They wrote some music, but had hardly had music education or experience. They practiced together, but they all were working and going to school, so they had limited time. Overall, they had in common their shared interests in other bands, and that they somehow had some childhood education in playing instruments even if that was limited. They all liked live music, and they thought to form a band together, but this was the first time for all of them that they had done their own thing away from school or other education, and if they performed anywhere it would be just them as friends and bandmates on their own. There are lots of people in the world with more practice, more education, more time, more money for better gear, and better support networks to help them get out at bands. They complained of social media – is it really worth the effort to make a profile of yourself to get booked, when you do not even know if it is going to work anyway? And what about doing cover songs – if they just play other people’s music, then maybe audiences would recognize that and like it either more or not know the difference, and it would be so much easier to use music that already existed and was proven to be good than take chances with writing their own music.

Blankstate replied – and this is my recollection, the band speaks for itself – that the newer band had to perform live as soon as possible with their own music. They did not need to spend a lot of time on media profiles, but they had to do the minimum to present themselves for a booking, even if the band might not last forever. They said that they could not do covers, or hardly ever and only with good reason, and they always have to perform their own music with their own lyrics. The reason why they have to do all these things is because it feels really good. Everyone in blankstate said that they got intense emotion both from playing live on stage and also from just living life knowing that they performed music on stage. They said regardless of whether attempt brings artistic or financial or any other kind of success, that on this earth and in our short lives we seek out things worth doing. The experience of performing in front of an audience with one’s own music, while doing one’s best to relate and make a connection, is one of the great experiences that life has to offer. Blankstate encouraged the new band to put themselves out there as soon as possible without being overly anxious about perfection, and to see how it feels and where the path goes. That they were asking these questions based on the preparation they had already made meant that they were ready.

I was thoroughly impressed with blankstate’s performance, which I thought was one of the best we had ever had. They were good with their music, but they also interacted really well with the audience, getting reactions, talking through what they were going to do next, and getting people to move and jump while they were playing. When they first walked in they said they did not know what kind of venue we would be, but when they saw the LGBT+ flag they knew we were cool, and when they saw the second rainbow flag in the same room they knew we were really cool. I had thought the extra flag was excessive but I guess we needed the second one to make the point we are trying to make.

That was weeks ago, and back to Shagwüf – I expect they will play with us some day. I started thinking about Charlottesville’s music scene, and how a performer can be world-class awesome here, but there are some opportunities that only come from bigger cities. Live audiences can be great anywhere, although being a good audience member is not something that people naturally know. The proper behavior is something that people must learn, and it can be taught. Good audiences react to everything the performers do, move to the music, make noise at the right times which are frequently occur, they dress the part, and they feel the music. Shagwüf can play an audience like that. I hope that Charlottesville’s good audience and music scene gets them to whatever additional opportunities they might want outside Charlottesville.

Next was the Falsies, whom everyone told me was awesome, but of whom I had not heard. Well they were amazing. They do great music. Their songs are kind of sing-along with repeating parts and lyrics are easy to understand, and most of their songs have scripted parts for audience participation. The band members improvise parts throughout the show also to get the audience engaged. The band is large plus they have backup singers, and they do costume changes throughout. I am not sure what these kinds of bands are called – “performance bands” maybe? In NYC I had been going to Pinc Louds shows, where every song has some weird performance ongoing while Claudi is singing.

I know of other bands who do music plus performance, but I could not find a Wikipedia article for the concept. Anyway, I was into Falsies music, then over-stimulated with whatever else they were doing running around the crowd, throwing things everywhere, doing skits on stage, demanding that people in the audience behave bizarrely and with bold familiarity to everyone else, asking for help doing things that disorient everyone and both tease the song while drawing attention to the space. Falsies are on another level for performing beyond music, and although their music is good, they have an in-person experience. All their songs were good and I could barely scream any more by the end of the show. Then when the end of the show came they were as loud as possible and the song they were playing would not end, it only got louder, and they all started screaming and made everyone else in the room scream while jumping around. There were like 20 Falsies on the stage and a few of them lied on the ground rolling around, then they got tangled into each other and could not move anymore. Other Falsies lied on top of them making a pile, and making the ones on bottom scream more because they were squished. Eventually they were all in a pile. I was at the front of the stage kneeling and jumping while I was screaming in their faces.

The Falsies do not have a wiki article. As a large ensemble which has been around for years they have had some turnover. Some of their songs could transcend particular performers if they wanted them to do so. I know how much money we are able to raise for bands to play at our venue, and that kind of money makes performing a labor of love only. For a band like the Falsies to go on the road they would definitely need money because there are so many of them, the leads play multiple instruments, they have several costume changes, they have backdrops and scenery, props are necessary for every song, and their performance is exhausting. Lots of bands get their high and low from performing but Falsies shows expend all energy. I do not think they have toured, which is unfortunate because I think they have something special that does not exist in many places. I would recommend that anyone who has the opportunity and who has energy to participate go to a Falsies show. It was not relaxing, and some of it was a lot of work as an audience member, but I enjoyed it a lot.

There was a DJ playing after the Falsies and I thought I was dead but we kept dancing, which is a trip going from anxious and wondering what the Falsies were going to make us do then transitioning to dancing with the music. No one stayed for the DJ except the people with me, so we had the dance floor all to our selves. It was wrecked with Falsies explosive material. Poor Falsies background singers packed up part of the stage, the leads grabbed their instruments, and a lot they left to collect whenever another time. I felt wrecked from everything else including going into the restroom throughout the night to freaking out over my reflection, which I still do as an indulgence sometimes. Eventually we walked home. That was new years.

Reflecting back over all this, I have been thinking about what kinds of experiences are possible to have in Charlottesville, what needs to come together for anyone to have these experiences, who gets to have them, how much it all costs, and what it would mean to engineer society so that if there are good experiences to have in this world, then how could someone with power issue the resources to ensure that more people get to have them. What makes certain experiences seem personal rather than manufactured at scale? When we went to this concert I had a great experience. The concert venue itself was under capacity. Many more people could have gone, but did not. In New York City for comparison, the venues tend to be over-filled, and although all the most in-demand performers all do shows for holidays like New Years, there are lots of NYC venues which are unable to book great acts. If this show I saw in Charlottesville had been performed in NYC, then it would have commanded the maximum ticket price, and everyone in attendance would have said that it was a best and perfect show. Because the show happened in Charlottesville, not as much money is here, and even not enough people are here to fill the venue.

I am glad that I got to experience this with my friends. I asked Fabian what he thought, and among other things, he mentioned that he was the only person in the audience who was not white. Shows like this are designed for people like me. The world is designed for me, or the world made me to experience activities like this as well as everything else that I do. I know there are people in Charlottesville who would want to go to shows like this. Tickets are not expensive exactly, and we saw this downtown which is as centrally accessible as anyplace can be in Charlottesville. These were queer performances but the audience was not necessarily queer. I screamed and jumped the hardest of anyone there which is typical for me at most shows, whether here or NYC or Seattle or anywhere else. Fabian rocked out second hardest even though he can be more intense than me, he usually tries to support me in getting more intense experiences because of his background as a club promoter in NYC and someone who has already done most of the things a city performance venue can offer.

Sometimes I wonder if I get more out of this than the performers, like, they are the stars and they are the celebrities. I am an audience member which is sort of mundane, but from another perspective, because I have a venue I get to go talk to Shagwüf which feels like talking to a star and transgressing a social norm that audiences do not have routine conversations with transcendent celebrity personas. Since operating the Chinchilla Café I have been having new thoughts about what it means for a city to have an arts scene, what it is like to be an artist, what it means to be an audience member, who has power over all these experiences, and how anyone can deconstruct all this to replicate it in other places and maximize the positive effects for everyone involved.

Posted in art, Charlottesville, festival, gay stuff | Tagged holiday, music, party | Leave a response

Demographic profiling in Wikipedia Wikidata WikiCite & Scholia

By bluerasberry on 2021-11-15

I tried explaining something in video by webcam which is new for me, but I want to try more often. I sorted notes in my head, rehearsed out loud once, then recorded. I watched it and thought it was fine, so I published it.

I wanted to start a conversation on demographic profiling in the Wikipedia platform.

I explain that Wikipedia has biographical encyclopedic articles. Complementary to Wikipedia, in the Wikipedia platform, we have Wikidata, which is a database of information about the subjects of all Wikipedia articles and many other topics related to building a general reference resource. Wikidata imports lots of datasets, and the project in Wikidata which has been largest in terms of content and contributor community is WikiCite. WikiCite is an effort to collect scholarly source metadata, or the citations to academic and research literature. Beyond being a mere copy, we also enrich the data in the wiki platform. Now we get to Scholia which is my project and the place where demographic profiling can happen.

WikiCite imported citation data from lots of papers, and this data includes the names of lots of researchers. When we have researcher names we can associate them with their institutions, such as by reading their institutional affiliations in the author byline of their paper. When we know a name and some additional information, often we can connect to other data sources and get much more information, like a full publication history from other profiling services, or research history from any project database, or funding history from government or foundation databases, or event participation history from conference programs. By and by we have more complete data-based biographies of many people.

Eventually we may get demographic data. Maybe they have published papers in multiple languages, so that might be supporting evidence of being a member of a language community. Maybe they have a few decades of publication history with nothing before or after, so we can place them into a generational cohort. In writings about a person we can observe the use of gender pronouns and mark those. In other ways sometimes we find race, ethnicity, religion, or LGBT+ status. In the end, if we have a list of people for a university, institution, research project, community organization, conference, grant recipient cohort, or any other group of scientists, then potentially we could demographically profile the entire group and gain insights. The benefits include identifying and showcasing the accomplishments of underrepresented demographics, addressing bias with data-based evidence of its existence, improving the quality of research by enabling administrators to more easily recruit diverse collaborators, and better assessment of impact and benefit for user communities. The risks of demographic profiling are numerous and serious, and include increasing the visibility and vulnerability of demographics at risk for harassment, inappropriately violating the privacy of individuals, creating a scalable chaotic new global paradigm in human interaction without the infrastructure and planning to mitigate harm, compelling individuals and institutions to participate in labeling or otherwise be left out, applying temporal and cultural labels at scale where they are certain to be misinterpreted across time and culture, solidifying strong labels of personal identification when labeling also causes harm, and creating a massive new dataset which can be co-opted by corporate bad actors to enact perpetual shenanigans. I do not know where this can go or who if anyone has delineated the discourse on demographic labeling.

After publishing the video I thought about everything else I could have said and did not. I have to start somewhere. I felt relieved to talk.

Posted in data, Open access, Wikipedia | Tagged demographics, profile, Scholia, WikiCite | Leave a response

review of “Citation needed? Wikipedia and the COVID-19 pandemic”

By bluerasberry on 2021-06-03

Someone asked for my thoughts on this early draft of “Citation needed? Wikipedia and the COVID-19 pandemic” at the preprint repository bioRxiv. I look at lots of such papers and often have the same thoughts about them, so I thought I would share my views here to list how I think about medical research on Wikipedia nowadays.

This is an up-to-date May 2021 scholarly review of how Wikipedia presents information COVID-19. Such information matters because Wikipedia is an extremely popular source of medical information, and because throughout this pandemic Wikipedia has been the most requested, published, accessed, and consulted source of information on COVID-19 in particular, and because collectively we public health educators need to coordinate our response on how we are going to use Wikipedia to achieve communication goals. I like this paper and it is as good as it gets for these kinds of medical reviews from health authorities who are not insiders to the Wikipedia editorial community.

The Wikipedia community does not itself publish good status reports which give basic facts which researchers would need to put their evaluations into context. The lack of that factual context is in my view the biggest barrier to making sense of this COVID paper, and of course is no fault of the authors of the COVID paper because that data does not exist in publication. While for the entirety of Wikipedia it is possible to get reports of massive numbers that give facts like the entirety of Wikipedia having 6 million articles and 200,000 active editors, more commonly researchers would like to run a report for some subset of Wikipedia. In this case the researchers would have benefited from a medical status report explaining how medical articles Wikipedia has, how many citations they use, how many people are editing, and how much traffic those articles get. No such report exists. The authors do the best they can with available information. Some problematic statements in this preprint include that “Wikipedia has over 130,000 different articles relating to health and medicine”, which is accurate, but the breakdown would surprise most people because half that is non-English, much of it are local social topics like biographies or organizational profiles, and quite a lot of it is alternative names or definitions. For this study I expect the researchers would prefer to separate medical science from medicine in society. Another statement is that “medical professionals are active consumers of Wikipedia and make up roughly half of those involved in editing these articles”, which cites casual research from 2011 and 2013. While I believe this anecdotally and while I recognize the validity of past small surveys, I am uncomfortable with how frequently and seriously researchers and policymakers emphasize these reports, and want another more robust survey. In Figure S4 the authors present data visualizations about Wikipedia’s audience traffic and editorial change rates, which I know is very important, but Wikipedia does not publish baseline norms that establish what kind of traffic and editing patterns are normal in various situations. The effect of this lack of basic context is that understanding the researchers’ very good measurements and insights is difficult for anyone without experience looking at Wikipedia metrics.

This paper describes a plan to describe the quality of Wikipedia’s articles on COVID by considering how many citations to scientific sources they have. This is a workable idea, but I think the authors anticipated that Wikipedia’s perspective on COVID by assuming be medical, rather than social. The authors found 1500 articles which Wikipedia categorized as COVID related and remarked that only 149 of them cited scientific sources. The information that I am missing here to put this in context is some assessment of how many of the 1500 articles ought to be citing a science paper; perhaps this 10% is the appropriate amount. My expectation is that the majority of Wikipedia’s COVID content would be non-medical, non-scientific, and instead sociological. I recognize that there is a traditional societal expectation that disease is the field of health experts, but nowadays matters of citizenship like public health are more participatory. At the start of this pandemic I wrote an article in The Signpost describing that public health in COVID meant publishing information about cruise ships which were sites of outbreak. The cruise ship article I mentioned cites nautical reports, newspapers in Chinese, English, and Japanese language, vacation and leisure magazines, and heavy machinery trade journals related to the class of engine in the boat. This is a solid article which is fundamental to the COVID story, and it is an example of a Wikipedia article where the best available information sources to cite are not scientific.

I like the way the authors talk about certain Wikipedia articles being key to the development of other Wikipedia articles. This makes sense to me, but Wikipedia editors have no tools for surfacing this other than intuition from experienced editors. When the authors identified the articles for the pandemic, the disease, and the virus as being centers of development I expected those; but when they named COVID-19 drug repurposing research, COVID-19 drug development, and Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus I was surprised. The drug development articles are getting the least traffic of all of those, which I expect because they are not of general interest. I looked at this content a lot when I set up the article for one of the vaccines, and now I realize that I was like lots of other editors who were also setting up COVID drug sub-articles by starting with what we found there. I remember how difficult it was for me to make sense of that content. I originally named the article for the vaccine “BNT162b2” because at the time that was the name, and right now its name is “Pfizer–BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine”. Sorting through the kind of research that gets published before drugs and concepts even have names is so tedious. Since the research is showing the migration of citations from these articles to elsewhere on Wikipedia, then my interpretation is that lots of wiki editors also sorted this mess independently and came to our own private conclusions that we did not know how to make it more orderly. Wikipedia is a great place for collaboration when everyone is editing and proposing ideas; I am seeing again that Wikipedia does not have good collaboration support when lots of people are quietly baffled alone in the same spaces. If those drug development articles really were hubs, then other people must have looked at the talk pages and been speechless in confusion just as I was, even while I was publishing other content. And for the last hub – article about a sort of coronavirus which was not COVID-19 – I cannot immediately think of a reason why that article would be a source of other citations, unless it simply cited the same sources as SARS-CoV-2. Elsewhere the author talked about how new Wikipedia articles rely on the existence of older well-established articles which frequently are citing older well respected academic papers. I believe that also, but that kind of insight would need to come from analysis, because it is much too difficult for any human to recognize gradual reuse of content over hundreds of articles through several years.

The authors talk about the difficulty of organizing all the publications which Wikipedia articles on COVID were citing, saying “no better solution could be found” for issues like recognizing links between preprints and later publishing; mapping the citation graph among papers, categorizing sorts of publications, and making comparisons between academic literature and either respected traditional media or non-academic expert health sources like the World Health Organization. Wikipedia is trying to present the Wikicite project to address these issues, and projects like dear Scholia should be tools to help users navigate sources. There is a major research deficiency in access to open and machine readable source metadata. When humanity sorts that then the problem will be solved forever and a new generation of research can begin, but we are still in a state of transition from paper to digital publication were fundamental problems like this regularly consume hours of research labor from all researchers at a global scale.

The authors’ explanation of why Wikipedia editors lock articles is what people say, but in my view, it is a misunderstanding and not how Wikipedia editors themselves think about the issue. The description the authors give is the one that non-Wiki editors expect, which is that Wikipedia editors lock certain articles to protect quality. The reality – which non-Wikipedia editors never recognize – is that Wikipedia has much better systems for protecting article quality thank locking out editors, and that the locks are an attempt to prevent one of a few much more boring problems. Wikipedia editors themselves would give a few reasons for applying locks, such as new users edit warring, or a crowd of new users suddenly surging to edit a Wikipedia article, or sometimes a trickle of new users coming steadily over time to add content, but typically the unacceptable behavior that all these cases have in common is the users failing to cite a source. If I had my wish there would be much less article locking, and instead we could just have software development to apply to certain articles which rejects the addition of claims without citations. The lock is not supposed to discourage editing exactly, but instead is supposed to make people aware that Wikipedia has a quality control process and if they, for example, fail to cite sources, then they fundamentally are failing to recognize the nature of Wikipedia as a quality controlled publication. Bad sources are not the issue; because Wikipedia reviewers have good processes in place for checking sources and training editors to identify good sources. Wikipedia’s locking system has always been very easy to bypass. For most editing privileges in Wikipedia, the distinction is between new editors, and the trusted, experienced, mature editors who have accounts which are 3 days old and have spent about 1 hour making 10 edits. The point to recognize is that when seniority to bypass locks comes after 1 hour of experience, the locks are not there to improve the quality of citations. Also, even for mass vandalism, we have other systems which eliminate those edits, so nowadays if there were no locks on Wikipedia we could probably configure other systems to provide comparable protection against totally misguided edits. I will mention that we do have some rare higher degrees of locks which many editors never encounter. These are in place on Wikipedia articles known to cause insanity, like those related to Israel, girls+video games, classifications of certain Hindu castes, and certain unpopular rap music albums with inexplicably devoted followings.

This paper has my imprimatur and position that nihil obstat.

Posted in health, Wikipedia | Tagged sickness | Leave a response

Identity verification on Wikipedia

By bluerasberry on 2019-12-23

Wikipedia has many active features which are broken. Conventional product development practices the idea of the minimum viable product in which there is a schedule of feature rollout to give most users a narrow but working experience. With Wikipedia, anyone can integrate a new product into the user experience and if there is any oversight it is by volunteers. Some places in Wikipedia have more oversight and some places less, but there are critical high profile usage patterns where the process lacks any evidence of coordinated design. I will share one, which is Wikipedia’s identity verification process. Earlier this year I drafted Wikipedia:Identity verification as guidance on this.

“Identity verification” is when a website confirms the identity of the person or organization operating a user account in order to confirm some privilege to that account. This comes up often in two contexts in Wikipedia: one is confirming that we are securing compatible copyright licenses from rightsholders when accepting files into Wikimedia Commons, and the other is when a person or organization claims a right to edit an article about themselves or something close to them. One challenge with all of this is that performing reasonable identity verification of the sort most people would imagine is complicated and expensive. If Wikipedia had a hard definition for its standard of verification then either the standard would need to be low to meet, or costly to achieve, or we could usually achieve it but with frequent flagged exceptions. In practice right now we strive for a high standard but have many exceptions, and the entire process is more labor intensive than I would like. Another challenge is that upon confirming an identity, we lack consensus about what rights this should confer. The challenge of implementing an identity verification process is something I would talk about with Wikipedians, but the issue of user rights is a matter of broader public interest since it affects how everyone’s community relates to Wikipedia. I will say more about that second challenge here.

Commons has a default practice of encouraging high-profile copyright holders to hide their identity when making media uploads to Commons. I think that this has always been a long-standing procedural error. Like for example, if famous photographer or an organization wishes to apply a free and open license to media, then the usual case would be they have no need to hide their identity, because obviously the copyright of the media could only come from that well-known organization or person when it is common knowledge that they should be the copyright holder.

I would like to change the Wikipedia default practice from “hide the identity of the copyright holder of media” to “only by request, hide the identity of the copyright holder of media”. My expectation is that in 90%+ of cases, most people and organizations would not request to have their identity hidden for media uploads. I see no reason to believe that users are even aware that we have a practice to obscure their identity. We go to a lot of trouble to hide identity, and hiding identity means that people who reuse media can have doubts for 95 years (until public domain) that the media actually came from the copyright holder.

This confusion starts because there is a longstanding practice of our Wikimedia Commons community performing a number of functions to assist with media uploads by email. The Volunteer Response Team is a global collective serving every language and wiki project for anything necessary to discuss by email. Many wiki administrator type people call this service Commons:OTRS which is a name I try to avoid because those letters are a brand name of some software we use for part of the process. There are documentation pages about various language and subgroups of this team at the Wikidata item.

A particular problem is the use of template PermissionOTRS. The designed use of this template is to mark that privately, trusted Wikipedia administrators have performed identity verification with the copyright holder of media uploaded in Wikipedia. The identity verification validates a copyright license which the uploader has chosen, and all of this indicates that a file has a free and open copyright license. I advocate for this process to happen in public rather than in an email backchannel.

Suppose that the office of a public figure, like a corporate executive, the head of a nonprofit organization or NGO, faculty at universities, a government officer, or anyone similar writes into our email service to share their publicity photo. In the Volunteer Response Team queue, there is a process for identity verification of the rights holder, then if the file passes verification, it gets that template above marking it to communicate that in private email the file has come to Wikimedia Commons with a Wikimedia compatible copyright license from the copyright holder. This typically happens for organizations which publish photos with conventional copyright on their website, but then want some of those photos mirrored in Wikipedia with a compatible copyright license.

The change that I think I want is that by default, when anyone with a public identity applies a copyright license to content with Wikimedia Commons mediating as witness to their application of the license, then we do all this in public, seeking to publish the identify the copyright holder. Again, our norm right now is privacy, and I would still allow that privacy for special cases by request, but I believe that in many cases this privacy is an unwanted burden to the rightsholder, our readers, and a labor burden in our administration.

If I were to go further, I wish that we could make all this OTRS permission process public by default, so that anyone could review the license. The norm for Commons is associating uploads with Wikimedia accounts, which is already pseudonymous and which anyone can have. For people who write in by email, the new process I want is that by default we share some aspect of their identity (maybe their name, maybe their domain name if it is a company or org or personal domain), or we offer them some other pseudonymous process including perhaps the one we have in place if they request it.

I know that this is a discussion which needs to include various agents in the Volunteer Response Team. It is still so challenging to organize meetings in the Wikipedia space. I meet monthly for online chats with about 10 Wikipedia groups already. I have capacity to meet more, and volunteers enjoy joining these meetups, but no one enjoys administering the meetup rooms to poll for an acceptable time and perform the hosting functions of the online meeting space. There are many such challenges which have in their solution a few meetings with voice and video.

I was thinking about this issue because on 20 December 2019 Slate published an article about some public relations representative trying to share a publicity photo of a United States presidential candidate. The article is able to generate a lot of journalism over what ought to be straightforward, which is the act of uploading a photo. I recognize that there are multiple issues in the article, but one that has my attention is how we scale up the ability of every public figure and organization in the world to be able to upload publicity photos in the Wikipedia network without requiring so much of our human attention and to operate at scale.

Posted in election, rights, Wikipedia | Tagged copyright | Leave a response

Carter Mountain Apple Orchard 2019

By bluerasberry on 2019-10-23

Fabian and I went to the Charlottesville Saturday 19 October 2019 morning farmer’s market. We met Andy there, a CHUVA former resident and regular, and bought some of his dried peppers. He had grown 50 different types and was still producing peppers, and he had given some to us for Thursday night pizza. Dried ones are more difficult to produce and I buy these anyway, so was happy to get some from him. He told his about the process for making them, and that since he used his own oven the utility bill went up and overall he thought making more dried peppers by this method was not profitable.

There was a booth for Carter Mountain Apple Orchard. We were less interested in the apples and more in the applewood, which is a favorite for our chinchillas. They said that they had no wood available, nor would they ever, nor could they ship any by request. That was fine, and we did not expect them to be ready for a rodent market when they have other priorities. We took their brochure and went for coffee.

We had our day then toward evening time we decided to visit Carter Mountain. We knew apples were in season and I knew the place to be a visitor attraction, but I had never visited. I did not realize that it was so accessible and set up for guests. The people at the farmer’s market said there was no applewood but it we expected a different story if we went there, and the chinchillas would appreciate anything. We thought to check it out ourselves. When we arrived we asked about applewood and the staff directed us to wander through the orchard and collect sticks, and that we could have them. It was apple season and there were apples everywhere. There were tens of thousands on the ground intact, fallen from the tree or discarded for minor blemishes. Probably hundreds of thousands of apples end up this way. It seems like a huge waste, and I thought surely it would be better to collect them and do anything with them than leave them to rot. The financial model of Carter Mountain is to sell by the weight, and a picked apple costs the same as an apple from the ground, so visitors almost exclusively will pick and let any loose apples fall without noticing.

Amid truckloads of edible, tasty apples which had been on the ground for a few days at most and left to rot, there were signs claiming that this was a family-run orchard and that families could eat one apple to taste while picking in the orchard, but the second apple they ate would be theft. Obviously there were more apples on the ground consigned to mud than there could be families visiting. I also questioned what it means to have a family business. Surely whomever operated this orchard was among the wealthier residents of the town. The workers were not family, but people from the community, and although I appreciate locally owned businesses there is no custom of transparency of business practices to grow faith in what is local versus other models. Seeing the signs made me wish that the orchard were run as a park in a public trust with some community ownership model. I felt accused by a sign which said to not eat any apples in a Grapes of Wrath context where all the food is going to waste to prevent it from entering the marketplace and disrupting other sales. I wish that it were not so politicized to remark when capitalism creates systems when the path to financial gain is to destroy valuable goods only to manipulate the market. I took more than one of the discarded apples from the ground and ate to my satisfaction.

We had our sticks and we went to check out with a few apples. We asked if we should pay for sticks and the checkout boy told us to have them for free. We had about 10 sticks all in a backpack, poking out. I purchased the apples and began to exit, then one of the employees confronted us as if for theft and told use we had to pay for the sticks. I explained that two people told us we could have them, and he said they sold firewood. I actually wanted a log, not sticks, and asked him to buy firewood. He pointed us to a place and we found a log which we thought would sit stable in various orientations and be comfortable for the chinchillas to hop onto. We brought the log back, and the guy who confronted us wanted us to check out in his line. He had us weigh the log and asked for $7.50. This was fine for us and a chinchilla, but upon checking the receipt, the expense line noted that he charged the price for half a bushel which is a pile of firewood.

Fabian and I have purchased sticks online at much greater cost plus shipping at high cost. These are for the entertainment of the chinchillas so money is not a great concern. I did feel like the farm was a bit disrespectful in general – why should a family assert generations of ownership over a natural environment which should be a shared community resource? If they are the stewards, then why present the place requests for peer to peer respect among poor equals, and assume that visitors are thieves, and leave the waste, and charge us the price of several logs for a single one? I do not fault the owners exactly, but something about the entire business model seems like a part of American culture which I wish to reduce. Every aspect of a community should exist to encourage positivity in a community, and the nature of this orchard seemed positioned in conflict. A local apple orchard is no problem compared to national or international corporate monsters, and those monsters definitely do all these bad things to the greater detriment of society, but I still wish that we could develop society and technology to a point where people and culture and places and institutions aligned better with each other.

Posted in Charlottesville, service industry | Tagged crime, ecotourism | Leave a response

Charlottesville data portal, gangs, coffee 2019

By bluerasberry on 2019-10-22

Fabian came to visit me in Charlottesville for the first time in a while on Thursday 17 October. He came to me at school then we joined Eli and Daniel at the Newcomb cafeteria for lunch.

On Friday Fabian and I did a couples photo shoot with Gabriela. We talked about her photography hobby, and what life was like when she was at CHUVA, and how she liked Charlottesville now. We tried various poses in the Confederate Cemetery, at the Dell, and near the Rotunda. She went to the medical center for work after and Fabian and I met up with Felipe and Daniel for lunch at the O Hill cafeteria.

Felipe was excited about new interest in the concept of the data trust. I had heard this concept for the first time in April 2018 when I was at the Sage Bionetworks Conference. Felipe was saying that crowd interest and momentum for defining and protecting data trusts in the public commons is growing. Corporations already have closed trusts among themselves for monopolistic exploitation, but of course the kind of data sharing for public / private partnerships or for public benefit is lacking. We talked about the Charlottesville Open Data Portal. The portal is great for existing and many people put lots of work into establishing it. Now that it is established it can be a model for others to emulate and also a workshop for producing the infrastructure we need to resolve problems. For example, there are 2 local transportation apps to attempt to tell people when buses will be at bus stops, plus Google Maps has bus schedules. All three of these often tell different times for each bus, so the organizations presenting each of these have their own data sets and expectations. Right now, neither Google nor the official service are usually correct, and instead a third-party app is. In our School of Data Science we would like to facilitate local community amenities having access to public data but many social and bureaucratic barriers challenge the resolution of such issues.

Felipe recently had a birthday but could not schedule a celebration so instead we proposed to go on the weekend to an arcade. He said that in the town near where he grew up in Brazil there was an arcade, but to travel there, one had to pass through gang-controlled territory. He described that he would be excited to go to the arcade, but to get there, he had to take a long bus from his home in the suburban area, then walk through the gang territory, then enjoy the arcade, then go back through gang territory to catch a bus again. The gang was boys around his age and they would mug non-gang boys for whatever they had, typically money and shoes. If they stole money on the way in then there would be no option for the arcade or getting home, whereas if they stole money on the way out then there would be a problem paying the bus to get home. Felipe came from a social class which was closer to the middle than the class of the boys who needed to be in gangs on the street, so what he had was the typical experience for some boys who had a bit of money to visit arcades.

I asked Daniel what sort of street gangs he experienced when he was 15 and in East Germany. He said there was no gang interactions because he was not old enough, but I pressed him because age 15 was the right age for anyone to join or interact with gangs. He then said that he and some other boys would collect paper and glass bottles to sort and sell and recycling. I asked him if he did prowling, and he asked what that was. I explained that it was the crime of trespassing, and he said that since the state owned everything there was no concept of trespassing or having restrictions on where people could be and go, especially with regard to accessing waste to sort for recycling. Having a specialized word like “prowl” was even further removed, because if there is no trespass then there certainly are no specialized forms of trespass.

The University of Virginia has a surplus furniture warehouse which is open every other week on Friday for a few hours. They sell university supplies like desks, office chairs, big tables, and laboratory equipment. I asked Fabian to visit and try to get an office chair for me and a table for CHUVA. He did, and we got them home. I was thinking of remodeling the dining room and living room of my home to be a coffeehouse. The idea is that on Sunday mornings when I like to write and have coffee, then I could have it at home, and invite others in CHUVA to visit. It would be coffee club.

Posted in Charlottesville, data | Tagged coffee, crime | Leave a response

Eviction at CHUVA October 2019

By bluerasberry on 2019-10-17

I live in CHUVA, a cooperative housing organization for 20 people in Charlottesville, Virginia. I enjoy group housing. In the case of our organization, we share meals, have tea together, divide some costs, celebrate holidays, and do social outings. Each of us has a bedroom, then we share the several kitchens, bathrooms, and the other common areas.

On Tuesday 15 October 2019 some CHUVA people including me went to the courthouse to seek an order of eviction for one of the residents. I was present with the others but I contributed nothing to the planning and did not speak at court. I volunteered to go if asked, and others asked me to join. The judge granted the request and ordered eviction after 10 days when the sheriff is available, and the sheriff scheduled availability on Monday 28 October at 10am.

This evicted person’s situation is unfortunate, as I think they enjoy CHUVA and CHUVA is good for them, but they are not socialized to live in a community. In my view, this person is well spoken, presents nicely, intelligent in conversation, and has some background accomplishments like education and military service. What does not work about them is they do not participate in CHUVA social activities as typical people do, and they communicate strangely and with great shyness, they get into conflict, and they have financial trouble to pay the rent. CHUVA rent is already low as compared to anything on the market, plus it the place is exceptionally large with many amenities, so I cannot imagine anything leaving CHUVA to find a better place except if they need to be alone.

We in CHUVA talked about what to do to detect when applicants to join our home are incompatible. One thing that we did which I think will be helpful is raised the rent considerably so that we would never be quick to move in new housemates for need of rent money, which is why this particular person got an expedited invitation to join. I reflected on this as another way that having more capital also reduces costs. Having a budget surplus permits more thoughtful choices in lots of ways, so just by having more money in the bank, other activities will naturally prevent costs. In other words an organization which tries to charge less money will actually have greater expenses for lack of preparation against challenges.

I want everyone to live their best life. I like group housing but I can also see how operating these situations requires culture, training, and experience. This all fits in with my wiki-oriented participatory lifestyle. I tolerate the anxiety of having an unfit resident, but overall many other people in CHUVA find their moods spoiled.

Posted in Charlottesville | Tagged homeless | Leave a response