Haight St. Archive
Haight St. Archive

Embassy Guest onboading and welcome email - 2022_23

Apr 01, 202517 min read

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This Embassy document may need to be reformatted, sanitized, or otherwise enhanced to meet HSA archival standards.

2025

We are excited to have you join us at the Embassy in January! This email has all the things you might need to get oriented, including ways to take care of the house, ways to show up in local projects, logistics & some house projects. It is a LONG email (sorry!), but it contains most of the onboarding that you will need.

Taking care of the house

High level ways to be celebrated - Don’t be a tourist, be an active citizen ;) 1000’s of people love the embassy for the experience of luxury communism**. But not everyone who comes through is a contributor to luxury communism. Our hope is that your time with us gives you the experience of being a contributor, not only because it helps us, but also because this is what leads to people feeling agency to build their own versions of this in their own lives.
** not quite fully automated yet..

Our non-human friends

We have a cat called Pico stewarded by Brooke, and a small dog named Matcha stewarded by Natalie. You can read more about them both here.

Logistics

  • Membership to our social club (Jurisdiction Syndicate) - You will have received a separate email requesting signature for a membership agreement. It is essential that this is signed before you arrive.
  • Your room is Wonderland, please do water the plants once a week!
  • Address > 399 Webster St, San Francisco, CA 94117
  • Door code > 0922 enter, please remember to lock the door behind you when entering and leaving, it doesn’t autolock :)
  • Wifi > network is embassy guest, pw netpositive
  • The metal gate at the bottom of the steps is held closed with a magnet, you just have to push hard.
  • Food is included in your stay - help yourself to anything you find in the fridge & pantry (unless it has a note on it to say otherwise). You can put your food requests in theesf_food channel :)
    other useful codes:
    > garage door: 1906
    > internal door between garage and house: no code
    > gate to the carriage house 0922
    > door between back alley & house 80085#

House Comms

We use slack for slow oscillation chats and signal for rapid comms:

Taking care of the city

We also encourage our guests to participate in one or two local grassroots activities during their stay here. In this way our global community remains anchored to local endeavours, and we have found this to be a really important part of maintaining a local and global community. You can see some of these projects and sign up here.

The Pay It Forward Experience

The embassy house is a pay-it-forward space. That means that our ask is that you should leave each space better than you found it. Always, everytime. Not just tidy and clean but actually, materially better than you found it. What that means is up to you, we have a number of maintenance tasks that if solved would make for very happy communards, but if you want to take something on yourself that is wonderful also. Think about what made it feel welcoming and cozy for you, what experience you want for the next person.

Our hope here is not only a self managed space, but also a self cared for space. A lot of effort and care goes into making this what it is. Things to remember are that someone vacuums, mops the floors, launders the towels and sheets, takes care of the plants, stocks the shelves. Someone has sourced all the furniture and set the space up. Someone moves the furniture back to a nice orientation and fluffs the pillows every day. The care that goes into a space like this is high. If any of us drop the ball on that, it falls to someone else to do. The point is to take responsibility for leaving it nice for the next person. This is a serious expectation <3

Common spaces & norms

  • The Lovelace and shared rooms are quiet spaces - for people living in these spaces they have nowhere else to retreat to for private or quiet time. Please do not disturb people in their beds!
  • Please do not leave personal items in common spaces - they will disappear to lost property and then to the donation pile! :) This is first the area under the mail in the craft room, then the closet in the carriage house, then the garage, then it gets purged.
  • Totally Social Antisocial Room / Please respect the norms of the Totally Social Antisocial Room. This is a place where you are welcome to join, but under no circumstances disturb the humans in this space. They have come to be in this space, in order to guarantee being undisturbed in a highly social living environment.
  • Kitchen / Please never leave a dish out, wash, dry, put away, everytime. Please never leave anything out on the surfaces, wipe them down after every use. Please do not leave pans on the hob.
  • Coffee & Tea Area / Please always refill the hot water heater. Make sure to leave the sink clear and all surfaces wiped down.

Easy ways to help out

Help out, participate! The embassy runs itself, which means helping out is a must do.

  • Never leave a single dish or fork in the sink - not ever. The kitchen should be immaculate when you leave it, even if it wasn’t your mess <3
  • Leave every space immaculate, and better than you found it. Refill the hot water heater after using, take the compost or trash out, sort the mail, collect mugs from around the house. The embassy is an extremely immaculate space and it is that way by collective action - leaving any mess will cause a lot of friction, just FYI.
  • Sort the mail!
  • Deliver parcels to the rooms that their humans use!
  • Empty the dishwasher
  • Put a load of laundry from the chute into the machine!
  • Water the plants!
  • Take the boxes and trash to the garage!

House Projects & Handbooks

There are so many but here are a few :)

Community Safety & Collective Care

Our Accountable Space Policy: Through our accountable culture, we strive for affirmative consent as a practice, as well as sex positivity. Seeking affirmative consent means that if you want to touch someone, you need to get an explicit “yes” from them. A ‘maybe’ or silence, or even a yes under persuasion does not count as consent and will be treated as a something to take seriously (and with love!) in our community. Consent can also be withdrawn at any time, so we encourage repeated conversations about boundaries and consent. Sex-Positivity is an attitude that regards all consensual sexual activities as fundamentally healthy and believes all forms of sexual practices (including being asexual) should be regarded with compassion and without shame.

Fentanyl in San Francisco: Fentanyl is rife in San Francisco, it is lethal. It is showing up in ketamine and cocaine supplies all over the city. We have had two incidents in the house this year that have required Narcan which is a treatment that reverses an opiate overdose. Please please be aware of how to source things safely & test them, as well as what to look out for and how to find Narcan (otherwise known as naloxone). We have tests and Narcan in the house, please just ask! And even if you are not someone who takes substances, it is worth knowing what to look out for in your friends and what to do. Read more here.

Please respond to this email with an 🌱 emoji, so that we know you got this far :)

best wishes & see you soon!
Zed & the rest of the embassy humans

Embassy SF
: commune with us :

2022/23

Thank you for bearing with us on our long and windy journey to welcoming you as a long term housemate :) We are thrilled to be formally starting this journey with you. This is a welcome and onboarding message, there is a fair bit of info here so feel free to go through it at your own pace :) Below are important links (for joining slack where we all communicate, and the house handbook etc <3

Embassy ’orgware” (governance & tools apparatus)

Currently we make decisions in house meetings which take place on Sundays at 12pm. Residents are expected to come - either in person in SF or online. If you can’t make it for some reason, we ask that you watch the recording of the meeting to catch up on things.

1. “Constitutional level ”actions: designing the governance system. This is the highest level, the level at which we design our governance system, for this we use consensus. We get to consensus using Loomio for discussion, in person meetings for the moment of getting to consensus and then formalize the outcome on Loomio once again (We learned that we are far better at reaching consensus in person than online).

2. “Collective choice” actions: implementing the governance system.

  • Exclusion: how we govern operational level “access” rights
  • Management: how we govern operational level “withdrawal” rights
  • Alienation how we govern the transfer of the above two collective choice rights)

3. “Operational level” actions: using the system: operational level rights fall into two categories:

  • Access: eg, attending an event, being a guest.
    • Withdrawal: extracting resources: food, emotional labour, money.

Embassy ‘hardware’ (the buildings and structures we inhabit)

We have strong norms around keeping the house tidy :) things left in common spaces will be removed. We keep the kitchen spotless at all times, that means no dishes in the sink, no pans on the hob. We ask that whenever we use a space, that we leave it better than we found it.

Embassy ‘software’ (modes of sharing/social structures)

Participation- super roles in the house that you might love to take on!
There is nothing that you have to do (e.g. we have no chore wheel), but everyone is encouraged to do what they can with the running of the house, and supporting / sharing the projects that you are working on. It’s worth thinking or reflecting on what the most energizing type of participation might be, what makes you feel excited to think about (as opposed to fatigued) in terms of participation and so on. Some of the things that we’ve been asking people to think on and articulate are:

  • What domestic tasks around the house would be enjoy doing?
  • What would you like your time in the community to look like?
  • What projects are you working on right now and how can the community support you in those?
  • What is one thing that the community can count on you for?
  • Any habits you want to have established during your time with us?
  • What is a way that you like to be supported in community?
  • What kind of social interactions are energizing for you and what is tiring?

Culture
We are all here to help you get acquainted with the house and the culture here, but it can be socially intense and it may take a little adjustment. We’ve all been through it and remember that other residents are here to support you in this transition! As people are often socially overloaded, we have spaces for different types of interaction. We have one room called the totally social antisocial room, where if you are sat in this room, it indicates you welcome others to join, but do not wish to be spoken to or disturbed. We’d love to hear any ideas for other culture & space based experiments :)

Onboarding
Previous residents have given us some feedback which I wanted to share here:
#1. “I wish that I had a record of the decisions that I was inheriting” Here is a decision log of the big decisions made!
#2 I wish that I had understood that smooth doocracy works better for those with existing relationships & trust and that sometimes jumping right in doesn’t work. See ‘precursors for a successful doocracy here**.**
#3 I wish that I had better understood some of the legal and financial challenges that the house has faced and is facing
> Other recent residents, please add your tips here so that we can all learn!

Logistics to do list
// Rent (this is done I believe!)
// House guidebook (this is a living doc, feel free to make comments and updates)
// Resident shared agreements
// book an onboarding face to face with someone (or me!)esf_current is a place to ask questions. I can go through our governance with you but there is an infographic introduction here.
// There is a list of things, gdrives, gcals, platforms to add you to, it will take a while <3
// covid protocols (updated regularly, best to ask at the time)

Much love
Zarinah & The Embassy village

… … … … .. ..
- the embassy network -
: commune with us :

____

2022

Dear XX, welcome to the embassy! We are excited to have you join us.This is to share some cultural things and a few logistics:

Logistics and bookings
A bed in our shared room (The Ada Lovelace)
$1550 a month, including our community dues and food
If you can make a profile here and let me know when it is all done, I can book you in <3

Participation
We have no chore wheel, but we encourage all guests to do what they can with the running of the house, and supporting / share the projects that you are working on. It’s worth thinking about what you participation level might be, how present you will be in the short term long term and how you might like to contribute. There are 6 roles here and 6 people on this list [Anika/Woj are being treated as 1 as you seem to be time sharing a space here :) ] - I’d love it if everyone could own one of these roles.

Super role #1 - Mail, post and parcels: these tend to get left by the front door.

  • All parcels get moved to the area at the bottom of the main stairs, but if you are feeling extra helpful you can deliver them to the room of the person.
  • Mail gets sorted and placed in the pigeon holes/mail room area in the room next to the kitchen.
  • All parcels addressed to the embassy need to be opened (box cutter lives on the mantle piece), put away, boxes flattered and taken to the garage.
  • Frequency: Every day, should take 10-20 minutes

Super role #2 - Trash

  • Trash bags from the kitchen bins need to go to the garage and bags replaced.
  • Compost bins in the kitchen need to to go to the garage and bags replaced.
  • Any boxes left in the corridor by the kitchen need to be flattened and taken down to the garage.
  • Frequency: Every day, should take 10-20 minutes

Super role #3 & 4 - Furniture and space resetting: chairs and furniture tend to be left higgledy piggledy and all askew

  • Do a walk through of the anti-social room, living room, dinning room, craft room and carriage house - replace chairs, collect mugs and trash.
  • Anything left out in common areas that does not look to be actively used (in the last 2 hours) goes to lost property (closet in the carriage house opposite the frog terrarium).
  • Frequency: Twice a day, should take 5-10 minutes each time

(Everything in this closet is donated at the end of the week by someone else)
Super role #5 & 6 - Kitchen and coffee area resetting: despite everyone’s best intentions the kitchen at times gathers a little clutter and could do with a reset.

  • make sure sinks are empty of dishes and wiped down
  • wipe down all surfaces in the kitchen, no crumbs etc
  • Make sure the coffee area sink is clear, machines are organised and the pour overs are empty for the next person
  • empty dishwashers if they are full
  • Frequency: Twice a day, should take 5-10 minutes each time

There are many other things that happen in the house to make things run - laundry, clearing the garage, sorting the donation piles, cleaning the fridges, ordering the food, ordering the supplies, budgeting and finances, insurance and taxes, maintenance and repair of the bathrooms and building, plumbing, bathroom cleaning recruitment, events and so on, that is all being done everyday in the background, but these four tasks are things that are easy for guests to do that make such a great difference to the feel of the house!

Your time here
Some of the things that we’ve been asking guests to think on and articulate are:

  • what would you like your time in the community to look like?
  • what projects are you working on right now and how can the community support you in those?
  • what is one thing that the community can count on you for?
  • Is there something that you are healing from right now that you would like to share?

The house is busy
Bare minimum, we have Thursday events, spontaneous dinners, support circles and music events. We have rooms for up to five guests at any one time so there are a lot of people and new faces coming through. We are here as residents to help people get acquainted with the house and the culture here, but it can be socially intense and it may take a little adjustment. We’ve all been through it and remember that other residents are here to support you in this transition!

As people are often socially overloaded, we have spaces for different types of interaction. We have one room called the totally social antisocial room, where if you are sat in this room, it indicates you welcome others to join, but do not wish to be spoken to or disturbed. We’d love to hear any ideas for other space based experiments :)

The culture
Please take a look at our cultural onboarding doc - this is a work in progress, feedback appreciated :) Our accountable space policy is here.

Let us know if you have any questions!

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