Some answers

A few examples of communal systems I have been a part of:


My Housing Development Board (HDB) block of flats.
For my family's section of the block of flats, we have 12 floors with 4 homes on each floor. That means that there are 4 households sharing a corridor, 48 households sharing one staircase and lift (plus lift lobby) and void deck (the empty space on the ground floor of the block). So we all have to do our part to keep the common areas clean and nice to live in - no dumping of rubbish or unwanted furniture if possible, no spitting or peeing in the lifts, so on. And we hang our clothes out to dry, so for the sanity of those living on the lower floors, we try not to let the clothes be dripping wet. It can be fun though, when it rains, our neighbours will shout at us to KEEP THE CLOTHES!

An online forum restricted only to those who sign up.
People who want to join the forum or yahoogroup usually need to get past the administrator first. Generally there are rules, explicit and implicit, to abide by. But occasionally there're people who are a bit nuts and go spastic and flame people, or make offensive comments. Most of the time, they are kept in line by other users who scold them; occasionally they are removed from the online space by the admin.


Key determinants of whether communal systems were successful:

I suppose the people in the system have to self-regulate themselves so that the system can run smoothly. Self-regulation will happen perhaps because those people were civic-minded and considerate, but for those who are not naturally considerate, they will only self-regulate if they feel that they are being watched (refer to Foucault's Panopticon) - so I think there must be some sort of surveillance by other people in the community (or some higher authority) for the communal system to be successful.




By the way, does anyone mind if the background colour of our blog is changed to white? I'm finding it quite hard to read against a black background, and highlighting the text doesn't help much :/ Am I the only one?