How this is written
If you are reading this to decide where to live, you are entitled to know where the information came from. Three sources, and one of them is a machine.
What we know first-hand
EcoHubs is building a community, and its members visit others. Some of what is here comes from that directly: what a founding group actually argues about, what a membership process feels like from the inside, which agreements turn out to matter and which are never read again.
Where a claim rests on our own experience rather than a published source, the page says so. That is a different kind of evidence from a citation — not weaker, but different — and you should know which one you are reading.
What we learn from other communities and gatherings
We are in contact with communities across Europe and beyond, and we attend gatherings — online and in person — where the people who run these places talk candidly about what is not working. A good deal of the most useful material here comes from those conversations rather than from any book: the failure patterns, the questions worth asking on a visit, the things nobody writes down because they are embarrassing.
Two rules go with that.
- Nothing said in confidence is published. People speak freely at these gatherings precisely because it is not being written down for the internet.
- Nothing critical about a named community is published without that community seeing it first. If we cannot show them, we do not name them.
How AI is used
Plainly, because you are increasingly right to ask, and because the honest version is not embarrassing.
Help draft, structure and edit — turning notes, conversations and sources into readable prose, and keeping eleven lessons consistent with one another.
Decide what goes in, or invent experience. Anything describing what we or the communities we know have actually lived comes from people.
- A person reviews every page before it is published. Nothing here has gone up unread.
- Facts are checked against sources, not against the model. Every claim about a named community, a date, a figure or a study is traced to a citation you can follow.
- Where we could not verify something, we say so. The frequently-quoted claim that ninety per cent of intentional communities fail has no sound source we can find, and our pages say that rather than repeating it. The Findhorn footprint study is real, twenty years old, and carries a caveat everywhere we cite it.
Written by EcoHubs members, with AI assistance for drafting and editing, and reviewed by a person before publication. Facts are checked against the sources listed; anything we could not verify is marked.
When we get it wrong
We will. This is a field with very little reliable data, a lot of confident folklore, and communities that change faster than anything written about them.
If something here does not match what you have lived, that is the most valuable thing you could tell us — more valuable than a donation, and we would rather have it. Corrections are made in the open, and the page's updated date changes when they are.