[The L.A.B.]

Living Area Blueprint

The Praetor Labs' Developer House Initiative

What is [The L.A.B.] ?

A group name and banner for the Praetor Labs' Developer House and associated projects and initiatives.

A ‘network node’ that connects to other nodes in real space and globally. All nodes, as they grow and are added to by other nodes, form a growing decentralized community.

At Praetor Labs, you sleep in the LAB. You eat in the LAB. You play in the LAB. The LAB is your home.

As a Living Area.

We want to live with cool people. But just being around cool people is not enough.

We want to create a culture of creativity and projects. A place that encourages serendipitous idea sharing, and an environment that facilitates getting shit done. To do this we need people of many disciplines and backgrounds: Art, Science, Computers, Electronics, Design, Writing, Film, etc.  

That is, we need thoseingenuitive hackers and makerswho just love to create. Get enough of these people together, and be generally awesome. A community of awesome.

Mix in a great big dose of FILDI because we are all a little bit crazy.

As a Culture Hack.

Our core values should be to create, educate, and entertain.  We want to develop a culture that inspires the creative and industrious part of people, and helps others do the same.

Long term goals include the development of a social media outlet and platform to share our ideas and attract other followers to projects for fundraising, ideas, and general assistance. And the creation of resources that help others do the the same.  

But this doesn’t mean we spam ourselves all over the internet. The idea is that the stuff we create will sell itself, and those interested in us will find their way finding out more of what we do.

As a Blueprint.

The Lab is intended to be an "Open Source Culture Platform".  To create what the global village construction set is doing for agriculture, only for creative community building.  To develop systems that augment and evolve the already awesome maker-spaces, and create developer flats and maker-houses. A blueprint for hotbeds of creativity.

The house is a potential bootstrapping framework for the creation of an open source democracy. The idea will be to develop an adaptive and grass-root style fluid hierarchy.  The hope is to inspire autonomous teams of people all working toward shared goals that improve our communities and environments. Hinging on ideas behind distributed command and control structuresand the passion inspiring aspects of pull, we hope to allow for individual creativity but with a nod toward community driven goals.

Basically, create tools and processes that help groups of small and agile development teams meet real world demands and turn on a dime as opportunities occur. Being a living area, the focus will be on local communities and neighborhoods. On the larger front, Hierarchies will form and deform as different groups latch on to various goals. You vote by what you work on.

Apply agile software development ideas and ideals to real world projects.  [The L.A.B.] is our test bed to find out what works, doesn’t work, and what we need to make it work.

As a Bootstrapped ‘Business’.

Taking ideas from The Lean Startup we want to turn our hobbies and our passions into things that support themselves. We don’t want to worry about how they affect our day jobs, nor do we want them to take up all our time.

What good is a community that is not self-sustaining?  If the community cannot exist without outside funding, it is neither robust, nor resilient.  This does not mean we all need to be millionaires, but it would be nice to create something that is profitable.  This means we’ve done something we like doing, and will be getting paid to keep doing it.  A side goal will be to minimize the startup footprint and costs so that others can create their own community of awesome.

Ideally our house will eventually become a Vermont Low-Profit LLC organization (L3C) so that we can market products and make money as a ‘business’ to further our cause(s). It should be a low-profit in the sense that our goal should not be "return on investment", but rather a focus on "return on community".

Any excessive resources we gain should be funneled back to the house’s projects and initiatives, with an ever widening goal of improving other people’s lives and improving our own efficiency at doing so. We want to give back to the community, and become part of it.

Our vision is to become one of the few companies that are: Bootstrapped, Profitable, & Proud.  

Will we make stuff that helps people be frugal?  Will we help them live well? Will we make something to learn better? Create something to mow their lawn?  Don’t know. That is part the the fun.

TL;DR. (Too Long; Didn’t Read)

If nothing else, [The L.A.B.] will be a great self-governed dormitory style house where we can make cool shit and do cool stuff with cool people.

TLDR; throw a whole bunch of smart, creative, and ambitious people together, mix in the right set of ideas, tools, and space to work, and see what happens.