Zaratan is a 📝Los Angeles, CA coliving company that converts older buildings into high-density shared housing and runs them with Chore Wheel, its own open-source suite of collaboration tools. It describes itself as "cultivating housing abundance" and states a vision of "a world of abundant housing and accessible community." Its listed houses are Sage House and Cactus Cottage.
Sage House is a nine-bedroom house in 📝Highland Park, CA that was bought in July 2020, renovated over two years, and founded in September 2022. A 2023 Supernuclear case study by founder 📝Daniel Kronovet presents it as the first of Zaratan's planned series of community houses. Instead of managers, the house runs mostly asynchronously on Slack through Zaratan's apps: Chores for labor accounting, Hearts for reputation and norm accountability, and Things for shared purchases. A short monthly meeting handles calibration. Kronovet has presented Chore Wheel at Metagov seminars, and the Chores and Hearts mechanisms are analyzed in 📝Cybernetic Governance in a Coliving House. Zaratan says Chore Wheel is the first software to be Calm Tech Certified. Its listed values include "Housing is not a luxury," "Community cannot be bought," and "Rules can be simple."
Daniel introduced me to Zaratan.