Co-living to me is a superset of family life. Except that it seems much more potentially durable, resilient, sustainable, growth-oriented. Potentially, of course, it is also liable to destructive patterns, so creating a healthy co-living environment is important.

Some of the relevance of ReGenMatch for co-living is similar to family life. That is, if we bring together people who answer each other's questions in acceptable ways, we are more likely to get a group of people who can live together harmoniously. But to me there is quite a lot more that ReGenMatch can help with.

People differ in their degree of development of social and co-living skills, and this can be for several reasons. As a result, just as different people suit each other in family relationship, so also different people will get on well together in different co-living situations. To address this, one of the things we are planning to do in ReGenMatch is to craft some sets of questions that a co-living community could ask of an individual, and others that an individual could ask of a co-living community. A really good starting point for questions of a community is given by the advanced search of the Foundation for Intentional Community. Here are a couple of other questions which do not appear there.

• What is the age and generation balance?
• What kind of work in the world do people collaborate on?
• What kinds of conflict-resolution practices are in use?

And, as well as the kinds of question that we might expect to see for family life, we could ask individuals this kind of thing.

• How much experience of what kind of co-living do you have?
• Where are you with pro-activity?
• What is your preferred community role?

As well as these general community-related questions, some communities will want individuals with specific professional skills or experience. It could be building work; web site work; medical expertise; farming; or whatever. Note that preferences for community characteristics do not appear in an individual's answers. They may easily change as the individual explores. So, the aim is to have as much as possible of the information provided by both sides to be relatively stable.

The point of questions like these is to get a sense, on both sides, of who would thrive best in what kind of co-living situation. And, I would say, there are no wrong answers here. While you might say, using the Pathways to Liberation scales, simply, the more developed you are the better, rather, I would say, everyone has their own levels of development of community skills, and for those have not (for whatever reason, and there are many) developed enough skills to serve their particular role, a community with an explicit focus on developing those skills might be an excellent fit. But there is no need at all to develop beyond what is needed. The exact questions to be asked will develop over time, with ReGenMatch adding extra possible questions as the need or desire arises.

The point of all the ReGenMatch process is to enable people to find the best place for them to thrive, and for communities to find the people they need to help them to thrive as communities. Exactly which questions give the best start to this will, naturally, develop over time. But as better and better questions are found, asked and answered, people of all kinds will be able to find for themselves, not only places where they can grow and develop, but where they can trust others, and where they can share many more things that are normally owned by single households, and thus reduce the use of resources and contribute to returning to within the planetary boundaries. I wrote more about this on 2023-08-03.

Also, in my experience and no doubt the experience of many others, in a community in which one is able to collaborate with others towards goals of real value and satisfaction, the temptation to indulge in wasteful or destructive habits and addictions is bound to reduce. It's not only the good life we can have and the good work we can do better together, but also the promise of reducing the bad things in life.