[CH] Chili Community on Demand

R. Solarion (galaxy37@1starnet.com)
Mon, 19 Oct 1998 16:47:19 -0600 

Syndicated in The Dallas Morning News on Tuesday, 13 October 1998

*

As you've undoubtedly noticed, the Internet remains very much a work in
progress.  Every week seems to bring a new round of legal, technical,
regulatory and social challenges.  Given this unsettled and daunting state
of affairs, it's easy to overlook the bright little milestones that remind
us we're headed in the right direction.

For just a moment, let's turn away from the spam wars, censorship battles
and domain-name disputes to look at a successful case of online
community-building, a model we've not seen before.

This isn't a story about big-time Good-with-a-capital-G.  It isn't a
melodramatic, life-or-death online crusade.  It's about the kind of
unglamorous, routine and unself-conscious good that makes a lot of everyday
lives a little richer.  This is a story about a man, a plan and a whole
mess of peppers.

First, a little background : I am a chili aficionado of first rank.  My
devotion to chili is somewhere on the spectrum between extreme and insane.
I grow peppers.  I collect hot sauces.  I have logged thousands of travel
miles in my never-ending quest for fire.  Along the way, I have often
wished I could have my entire digestive tract coated with Teflon.

The habanero pepper (Capsicum chinense) is widely acknowledged to be the
most piquant chili on the planet.  Most varieties are rated at 200,000 to
300,000 Scoville units, the standard scale used to grade heat.  (For
reference, a jalapeņo is about 2,500 to 7,000 Scoville units.)

The ultimate of habaneros - rated at a nerve fraying, earwax-melting
500,000 Scoville - is the Red Savina, a proprietary varietal developed and
grown by GNS Spices in the Southern California town of Walnut.  Fresh Red
Savinas are rarely seen in grocery stores.  Through other channels such as
mail order and the Web, they've been known to command between $16 and $26
per pound.

In recent years, Rob and Joni Rayment, the owners of a hot-food emporium in
Milpitas, California, made a yearly harvest-time run down to GNS for fresh
Red Savinas.  Unfortunately, harest time this year found the Rayments out
of the hot-food business.

That did not sit well with Art Pierce, a 61-year-old Watsonville, Calif.,
retiree.  On September 16, he posted a message to Bay Area Chileheads, an
Internet e-mail discussion group.  His proposition : Because Mr. Pierce had
a truck and a lot of time on his hands, he would do the harvest run - 621
miles round trip.  Best of all, Mr. Pierce figured the bounty could be
bought cooperatively at about $2.25 a pound.  GNS Spices, which does not
sell retail, agreed to cut its usual minimum wholesale order of 500 pounds
in half.

That is, by any measure, still an extreme amoung of pepper.  A single
golfball-size Red Savina is potent enough to make four to six strong adults
weep.  Over the next few days, the e-mail network kicked in orders for 191
pounds.  A second, wider e-mail notice on Sept. 25 brought the order up to
280 pounds.  Mr. Pierce had never met half of the people in on the deal.

When we speak of the digital community, the term usually calls to mind huge
structures, complex nets of relationships woven over long spans of time.

This is a wholly different model - a guerrilla structure that popped up to
meet a specific common need.  And after the deal goes down, the ad hoc
network just dissolves back into the ether until the next time it's needed.

In a sense, this is community distilled to its most elemental form - no Web
site, no chat or bulletin board structure, no marketing plan or development
team.  Some of the key players in the co-op probably will never meet
face-to-face.  This idea - task-focused community-on-demand - would seem to
be a very big deal, indeed.

                                     Rob

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