After a bit of research I realized there isn’t much you can do to avoid this other than to just not move anywhere with an HOA. The problem is that a lot of people don’t realize what they are getting into because they aren’t properly informed, and they don’t inquire when buying a home. Also, sometimes a good HOA can change leadership and makes someone’s life hell. Often some of the benefits of the HOA evaporate. The developers of the community trying to save money often slack on the maintenance funds and people have to pay for their own roof repairs and such. So they’ve essentially exchange their freedom for permission to use the community swimming pool and not much more. Supposedly rules prohobiting old cars in yards and such helps protect property values. I could however argue that this hasn’t been proven to actually increase property value at all, and that in fact might decrease property value because people don’t want to live where there are crazy rules. When HOAs rule everywhere land without an HOA will be more expensive. If HOAs taking away freedom makes living in one less desirable, and HOAs cover most of the houses, then decreasing demand and increasing supply will make non HOA homes more valuable.

The point is that once you are in, there’s no way out besides moving. Everything they have going is legal and by the book. So rather than try to fix the evil that is the HOA, I had a better idea. Let’s make a geek HOA. Build a community of houses with services like municipal internet (OCS!), swimming pools, digital movie theatres, file storage, segways, robot lawn mowers and vacuums. All the things that poor geeks can’t afford they can share municipally. Then we make all the rules of the HOA be extra awesome. Not maintaining your computers properly? No Internet for you! In fact, we can make the rules as cruel as we want. Running Windows? Foreclosed! Not that we should actually go quite that far, but the option is there, and it’s all perfectly legal.

The benefits of a geeky HOA would be obvious. Geeks would love living there. Property values would skyrocket since geeks would want to live there so badly, and there wouldn’t be enough houses to go around. Geeky people would be living near each other and thus could do all sorts of crazy geek things. You’d never be at a loss to find someone who can help you with some code, or for D+D players, etc. We could have our own private movie theatre that shows whatever we want. No more waiting in huge lines, there is a seat for geek already there. Pooling resources and cooperating results in more for everybody. This idea is at least equivalent in quality to the geek commune idea. It might even be easier to pull off since it is closer to the existing lifestyle of most geeks and more apparently beneficial.

Just remember. Whenever you recognize someone accruing power for stupid and evil, there is a way to use the same method for good. If only we could actually pull some of these things off we’d be in serious business. That initial financial investment is always the problem. If there are evil homeowner’s associations taking away peoples freedom, then why don’t we make a homeowners association with a different set of rules for us? I can dream, can’t I?

However, we all know that communistic style communities do work on a small scale. Ten farmers all working together and sharing profits equally is a very communist scenario. And it works. It works as long as the sale of the crops from that farm is sold competitively in a capitalist marketplace. If the sale of those crops was always guaranteed to bring in the same amount the farmers wouldn’t mind growing crummy crops, or fewer crops. They would make one rusty ear of corn, or no corn, and that would be that. But because the better they work the more they all get, they work harder. It is a prisoners dilemma for each and every farmer. One of them can try to go the other way and leech off the others, and that will work. The problem is that the other farmers will notice and kick your ass out. Since the group of people is so small, and they all agree to help each other “escape from prison” beforehand, they all benefit double through their help of each other.

This is how the kibbutz works. In Israel there are small communities just like this. They start a business, build homes, build schools and work together to help the community become bigger and better. Slackers are noticed and weeded out. Some of them grow oranges, but others run resort hotels or manufacture shoes. Its quite a happy existence of people working together to survive in a close knit community working together for the greater good of each other. And as long as the work they cooperate on is beneficial and profitable in the outside world, everything is great.

So I thought to myself, hey. I would love to live like that. Not have to worry about the boss or deadlines or any of that type of stuff. Just every day wake up and get to work doing something I love to do that is directly related to my continued survival and happiness. And I would be with a bunch of friends all working together making life very enjoyable. If you get right down to it, the only things missing in my life are two material goods. Those are a laptop computer and a nice car. I consider the Treo 650 to already be in my possession because I have set aside money for it. Other than that, all I really want is to live near and around other intelligent and like minded people. People I can play video games, D+D and German board games with. People who I can discuss Slashdot with on a daily basis. I want to sit at the dinner table, talk about what I did during the day, and for the other people to be interested and understanding instead of just “that’s nice”. Despite all the flaws, those are the things that make college the greatest place, and I see no reason to give up those things in order to continue with life.

So obviously I propose a geek commune. Like minded geeky people like myself should pick up and move to somewhere where land is cheap. We can spend half of our time developing high quality non-free software for any customer who needs it. We can use this money to feed ourselves, purchse technology, pay the bills and acquire luxuries and other fun things. In our spare time we can all work together on free/open source software that interests us and makes the world a better place. And because we will have a geographically central location we will be much more efficient and higher quality at developing said FOSS software than those who communicate solely through the internet. We can apply techniques like extreme programming and other in order to make some really awesome stuff. Also, because the people there are indirectly “paid” for their work we can maybe get some artists and musicians into the fold to make some FOSS games. It would be geek Mecca and college graduates would embark on pilgrimages to visit and join us if they are deemed (trust)worthy and useful/valuable.

We could also do awesome stuff like lock up all the buildings and caravan to conventions like Otakon and Comic-con with wireless mesh networks between our vehicles. There would be websites documenting our activities and antics for the world to share in. It would be truly a beautiful thing. There are only two obstacles in getting this thing to work. First we need stuff to start with. Difficult to come by a large block of land, a good internet connection, living space and an officy type building without starting funds. Second we have to start a profitable software business that can at least feed all of the founding members.

Barring those two difficulties I think this is the most realistic dream come true I can hope for. Anyone interested can just drop me a line and we’ll talk about it. I especially want to hear from you if you can help out with either of the two problems. I can tell you right now that if I had enough initial investment and a customer/customer base, and my college degree was complete I would be out buying land in the desert as we speak.

Today there are a number of issues for geeks like us. We’ve got copyrights and patents on one side, the patriot act on the other and open source under our feet. That’s not even all of it, there is still spectrum policy and censorship to name two more.

I think it would be really cool if we had a Geekstock. The logistics of having such an event aren’t easy. But if somehow we could manage to make it happen, it would rock the house. Think of all the free publicity created by thousands of geeks collecting in the same location. We could get the message out on all of the geek issues of today. Look at it from another angle. Think about what we could get done their. Geeks bearing Gentoo or Debian flags would flock together and they could team up to fix bugs in their software. Developers and users could communicate at a thousand times the speed of a newsgroup or mailing list. It would be a long uninterrupted time where all the geeks could hack away without worry about anything else.

The greatest thing about a Geekstock is that once you get forces in motion the inertia is unstoppable. Everyone will show up, and everything that needs to happen will happen naturally. If someone sets it up properly the geeks will come. And after they come they will setup a huge wireless network to blanket the entire place. And by nature, like-minded geeks will come together and start doing their thing without being prompted to. It will be a beautiful thing.

The problem is of course, how to make it happen. A huge internet advertising campaign on every geek site? Promises to appear from prominent geeks like Linux & Co.? What will it take to make something like this happen? I think there is nothing more I would like to see in my lifetime than for this to be real. Anybody with me on this one?