I recently wrote a blog post on easy digital layers that can be interesting for communities, summarising my recent paper on the topic.
Starting this topic in case someone has any comments/questions on it, or would like to discuss the theme in general.
Heads up that I will jump in after Feb 5th and answer comments 
This post is now listed and the related FIC newsletter comes out today 
Do please check out the blog post above, here is the short video introduction that comes with it:
Minor edit to the subtitles in the text:
I live in a Houseboat community …my Swedish accent just messed it up for the transcriber 
Hello - I loved your blog post, thought it was very well written and presented some very stimulating ideas. My husband and I recently moved into a 25-year old cohousing community in California. It’s a beautiful place, lovely group of people, with all the drama and challenges of community (as well as the fun and fantastic shared meals). We use email and a website with resident-exclusive area for our record-keeping. We haven’t decided on using Google calendar, and some teams have recently started using Google docs. We do not use SLACK or similar. The records/drawings of the land & buildings are on paper, kept in musty increasingly fragile rolls in the Common House office. A small workgroup of us got together to explore developing a GIS-based map of the community’s physical assets, boundaries, etc. with the possibility of adding many useful map layers such as for our subsurface utilities, stormwater drainage system, irrigation system, trees & orchard, etc. The idea (which came just before you blog post) was to migrate knowledge from paper to digital, and from people’s memories & experience to map layers so that it’s not lost should a key person move away. We also need better tools for managing our maintenance needs. A database linked to maps seems like it would help. However, moving our residents from paper/memory/experience to a digital tool like GIS maps would seem to pose all the same challenges you mention in your blog. Wondering if you encountered GIS mapping in your discussions with intentional communities out there and how they dealt with that. Nova
Hi @Nova_Clite!
Many thanks for reading the blog post, I’m glad you liked it!
So far, yours is the only community I’ve encountered that are directly working on GIS layers of the type you mention. However, I am involved with a large Digital Twin project here in Sweden and as part of this looking into how open source code for digital twins can be shared in order to easier set up hyperlocal digital twins such as the one you seem to be in the process of creating.
I’d be very interested in following up more on this, and will contact you if the hyperlocal digital twin project evolves towards something practical.