Keeping in Touch

A place run by people spread across several countries, most of whom are not here most of the time, lives or dies by its communication. This page describes the channels, the rhythm, and the practices we have arrived at — including the ones we got wrong first.

The rhythm

The week has a shape, and most confusion comes from not knowing it.

• House assembly, weekly: space use, events, cleaning, kitchen, volunteer work, whatever the week needs.
• Mental cleaning, weekly, one hour: relationship work, facilitated by the steward/s on site.
• Digital assembly, every second week: the steward circle and anyone off site.
• Collective dinners, aimed at twice a week. Not a meeting, and arguably the most important item on the list.
• General assembly, roughly annually and whenever needed, announced to all members two weeks ahead.

Channels, and what each is for

Telegram carries day-to-day coordination, organised into topics — land care, buildings, governance, projects, communications and so on. Keeping a conversation in the right topic is a real courtesy: people follow the threads relevant to them, and a message in the wrong place is a message nobody responsible will see.

Email — foundry@bravosfoundry.com — is the front door for everyone outside. It is a shared inbox rather than one person's job, which means an enquiry may be answered by different people at different times. We say so in replies, because the alternative is a stranger wondering why they are suddenly talking to someone new.

A shared workspace holds the durable material: project pages, meeting agendas, the calendar of who is coming and what is booked. Chat is for coordination; anything that needs to be found again in six months belongs here.

The blog and mailing list carry decisions outward to the full membership. See Getting the Word Out section.

A phone at the house is the number on posters and public listings, and stays on site rather than travelling in someone's pocket.

Practices worth keeping

Write proposals down. Anything that needs a decision from more than the people in the room should exist as a written proposal before the meeting, so people can read it beforehand and the meeting is for discussion.

Publish the minutes. General assembly notes go on the blog, and proposals go to members in full text with their outcome. This is the single most effective guard against decisions being made in the corridor.

Say who is answering. In a rotating inbox, a name and a line of context prevents the impression of an anonymous institution.

Ask before assuming silence means consent. Consent decision-making needs people to have actually seen the proposal. Two weeks' notice exists for that reason.

Languages

Conversations here happen in English, Spanish and Galician. English is the working language of the international group; Spanish is spoken by essentially everyone locally; Galician is spoken by many neighbours and, for some, is a matter of pride.

The practice we have settled on: publish public-facing material in Spanish or Galician alongside English wherever there is capacity, use Galician when addressing the parish and the region, and never let a language barrier decide who gets to speak in a meeting. General assemblies are translated live by a member, and assembly summaries go out bilingually.

We tried making the reading circle formally bilingual and found that simultaneous translation of a live discussion is much harder than it sounds. The circle now follows the language of the text, with individual translation where needed. That is the general lesson: translate the artefact, support the person, don't pretend a two-language meeting is free.

Handling members' information

The association holds a membership list with personal details of more than a hundred people. It is shared narrowly, on a need-to-use basis, and it is not posted into group chats.

Two small habits, learned the hard way. When someone signs up on a shared phone or computer, check which account the browser is logged into first — otherwise the association's own address ends up registered as the new member's email. And when a form or document is circulated, check what it exposes before sending it to everyone rather than after.

The credentials problem

For a long time, the passwords for the website, hosting, email, social accounts and the electricity supplier lived in a group chat. That was the pragmatic solution to a real problem — access has to survive individuals leaving — but a chat log is a bad vault. Anyone added to the group inherits everything retroactively, exported archives carry it onto laptops, and nobody can tell who still holds what.

The direction we are moving in: accounts registered to the association's own address rather than a member's personal one, a shared password manager instead of chat messages, and credentials rotated when someone with access steps back. The underlying principle is the same one that governs the buildings — the association should own what the association depends on.

Remembering

A working group on memory was formed at the general assembly of July 2026, for a reason anyone who has lived here will recognise: work gets lost. Somebody builds something, learns how a system behaves, establishes a relationship with a neighbour — and then moves on, and the next person starts from nothing.

The Foundry is always larger than whoever happens to be living in it. The group's remit is to make what came before visible again — collecting documents and photographs, reactivating the blog so that everyone who starts a project here writes about it, restoring old posts lost when the site moved, and possibly making a room in the church into a small museum of the place.

This wiki is part of the same effort. So is the habit of writing down how the heating works.

When someone hands things over

Transitions are where this all gets tested. The pattern that has worked:

1. List what exists — accounts, domains, subscriptions, the bank, the phone, the physical keys.
2. Move each one to an association-owned address, one at a time, checking that mail still arrives afterwards.
3. Write down where things live and who to ask. Not in a chat message.
4. Expect it to take months rather than an afternoon, and expect small things — a forwarding rule, a renewal on someone's card — to surface long after the handover was declared complete.