Awfully Personal Question for August 21, 2004


christinaWelcome to That’s Awfully Personal, an opportunity for blog writers and readers to reveal a little more about themselves than might normally happen during the daily blogging process, and hence get to know each other a bit better. It’s a little like the late, great Friday Five, but more challenging. Each week our Awfully Personal Panel will post one or more new questions for you to answer on your blog, or in the comment space below if you don’t have a blog.

 For more on how That’s Awfully Personal works, please see the How to Play section below. Here is this week’s Awfully Personal Question:

You and your immediate family have been invited by a rich futurist foundation to participate in a grand experiment in community-building. Eight hundred people, a mix of singles, couples and small families, will be brought together for one week, all expenses paid, and invited to self-organize into twenty groups of 35-45 people each. Each group will be given a very comfortable, 20,000 square-foot communal home with all modern conveniences and communications on a 160 acre piece of wilderness land with its own solar/wind energy generator and its own greenhouse. The conditions are: (a) you can only bring one suitcase of possessions with you, (b) if you stay with the group for one year, and if the group meets its mandate, each member of your group will receive $100,000, (c) the group’s mandate is to meet (virtually or in person) with the other 19 groups (they’re on adjacent acreage) and develop a local economy by the end of the year that could produce all the essential needs of the 800 people, (d) you can’t physically leave the 800-person community during the one year, but you can buy and sell things over the Internet and you can have all the visitors you want provided the others in your group are OK with it, (e) you receive a tax-free weekly living allowance of $1000, less your share of your group’s Internet profits for the week, and (f) at the end of the year, and continuing for as long as at least 25 of the original group members remain, your group can continue to use the home as your own.

Questions: Would you at least show up to meet the 800 people and hear the plan? How likely would you be to find others and form a group by the end of the week? What would you be looking for in group-mates? Do you think you’d stick it out for the whole year to earn your $100,000 prize? Would you stay after that?

How to Play “That’s Awfully Personal”:

  1. Subscribe to (i.e. join) this Yahoo group to get the weekly question(s) sent to you automatically by e-mail each Friday.
  2. On Saturday, or whenever you get around to it, post one of the questions and your answer to it on your weblog or web site.
  3. Then come back here (you may want to bookmark this site) and click the ‘comment’ button under the question(s) of the week. If it’s your first time, you’ll be asked to enter your e-mail and the URL of your blog or website. Then just note that your answer is up. Other readers will then be able to read it on your site by simply clicking on your name in the comments thread. You can check out other people’s answers at the same time. Or, if you don’t have a blog or website, you can post your answer right in the comment box.
  4. If you have questions or observations about “That’s Awfully Personal”, or would like to become part of our Awfully Personal Panel that selects the weekly questions, e-mail us.
  5. If you have a suggestion for Question of the Week, e-mail us and our Panel will review it and, if selected, they will acknowledge you as the author with a link to your blog. Questions should ideally be challenging, so that the answers will be revealing (when answered honestly). But this isn’t Truth or Dare — we want people to want to answer honestly and to have to think a bit before they do.
  6. “That’s Awfully Personal” was developed when The Friday Five closed down. The questions are more thought-provoking and, well, more personal than most Friday Five questions. If they’re too serious for you, here’s a group that is resurrecting The Friday Five, which you might enjoy instead.
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