Currently, many digital nomads are concentrated in a handful of popular locations such as Bali, Mexico City, Chiang Mai, Lisbon, etc. While these places offer many advantages such as low cost of living, great weather and a vibrant community of like-minded people, they also face challenges such as overcrowding, gentrification, high housing costs, loss of authenticity and strain on local resources and infrastructure.

I believe in the premise that most digital nomads do not want to contribute to the rise of these challenges, do good and create a more positive impact, but I also believe that they lack the information on how to do so.

One of the information gaps I would like to tackle is information about what places and communities to visit besides the well-known tourist and digital nomad hotspots. Everyone should have clear access to information on how to create more positive and less negative impacts.

For this reason, I started working on a tiny product during my creator residency at Cabin - a directory of rural and peripheral coliving communities. You can find it here.

🎯 The goal of this directory is to disperse digital nomads away from the current hotspots and to promote a more balanced distribution of people and economic activity across different regions and communities.

Why colivings?

Since digital nomads primarily travel between communities, I have started to present only community or coliving projects and not cities as we see them on Nomadlist. 

Colivings are also important because they provide a sense of community, foster social connections, and promote a more sustainable way of living.

To borrow words from my friend Jackson, ‘’In a world where loneliness is a growing epidemic, coliving offers a solution by connecting people in spaces designed for community and personal growth.’’ Loneliness is indeed one of the main reasons why nomads stop their travels and return back home.

Why rural?

By encouraging digital nomads to explore and settle in less popular or less developed locations, the hope is to:

• Promote economic development in underutilized or underserved areas by bringing in new businesses and investments, creating job opportunities, and supporting local entrepreneurship

• Encourage sustainable tourism and development by diverting traffic away from overburdened tourist destinations and promoting responsible travel and lifestyle choices

• Foster greater cultural exchange and understanding by exposing digital nomads to different cultures, languages, and ways of life, and facilitating greater interaction and collaboration with local communities

• Provide greater visibility for these communities and the people who live and work in them

• Help attract more people and resources to these areas, which could in turn help these communities thrive

• Support the growth of peripheral digital nomad communities located outside of the current hotspots

In this directory, I included communities:

• NOT located in cities suffering from overcrowding, gentrification, high housing costs, loss of authenticity and strain on local resources and infrastructure

• Suffering from brain drain

• Located in rural areas

• Not being intensively promoted

• Building on intentionality and inclusiveness

Will this directory solve the problems cities and communities are facing today? Probably not. It is a complex social problem and complex problems cannot be solved with one product, one start-up, or one person. They require a global network of people and organizations.

Therefore, my main goal would be to initiate a discourse and create an open and decentralized community consisting of different people with one goal: creating a more positive impact while traveling and building regenerative communities.

This community could potentially work on these things:

• Add more listings (preferably also outside of Europe)

• Design a functional website with a system to filter listings

• Enable others to add listings themselves

• Develop a unified booking system for regenerative accommodation options

• Develop a blockchain-based reward system (impact certificates) for doing good 

• Start providing educational resources on how to design regenerative communities and create a more positive impact while traveling 

• Your idea?

These are just some of my ideas of what the next steps might be. I would be happy if others who are interested in this topic would join me and contribute to this open project.

For this reason, I am setting up a private Telegram group where people can join in and discuss pragmatically how we might address some of these issues.

If you feel motivated to solve some of these issues with me, join the TG group here.  

If you know a coliving community that would fit in, you can enter it here.