In the interest of communal harmony, the language and imagery of the original article have been altered. The stricken text remains, so that the original sin of the author is laid bare to the reader. If any Packers’ fans are offended by the replacement image for this article, please feel free to express your sentiments in the comments section. – ed

Imagine that you are standing at the front door of the Common House at 6am, with an urgent need to enter the building and the keypad lock isn’t responding. Do you know where the Common House key can be found? A light isn’t working in the south side parking lot. Whom should you inform and how? You’re not on the current meal rotation. Is it OK to take leftovers from the Common House fridge? The answers to these and a multitude of other questions are part of the tribal Cascadia Commons acquired (hereafter CCA) knowledge accumulated here over the past twenty years.

A small fraction of that tribal CCA knowledge is contained in the members manual, most of it resides in someone’s noggin, the rest can be found on a paper calendar, or document, by searching the mailing list message archive, or Google Drive.

Because we don’t know what we don’t know, it’s often difficult to formulate the questions we should ask. It would be helpful to have a proper owner’s manual for Cascadia Commons.

I’ve spent a week and a half, putting some of our tribal CCA knowledge into a Groups.io wiki. It’s really cool. And, the exercise of organizing and understanding the fraction of our collective wisdom available in print and on Google Drive has been personally illuminating. Particularly, I’ve become aware of the gaps where we have not formalized unwritten codes of conduct and tradition. We are very dependent on the knowledge that is often locked away in the brains of our fellow residents. Thank heavens for the mailing list. Otherwise we’d be constantly knocking on doors which, in this particular era, is probably something we should try to minimize.

While my first post on this topic focused on the nifty messaging features of Groups.io, I’m equally impressed with the Wiki and easy access to Google Drive files. Having a single site, where all of our digitized knowledge can be managed and accessed, is much less stressful than navigating between several different platforms to find what you are looking for.