on the street · a house of knowledge · knock and go in · no Discord, no account
A house on the street, green throughout
Cavendish Coworking
every door shut, and not one of them locked
Stimpunks is run in the open. Our team meetings are open to the world, because we default to open, and until now the only way into them was our Discord — which a great many people will not use, and that is their call to make rather than a thing to be talked out of. Open is not the same as an open-plan office. Nobody has to work in full view with every door propped, and nobody has to walk into a room to find out what is going on in it. So here the meetings are behind doors, the way a house has rooms: every one of them shut, every one saying on a note what is behind it and when, and none of them locked. The room our events meet in has a door here too, and up the stairs are rooms for just hanging out. You do not need the Discord, an account, or anybody’s say-so to knock and go in.
Every note says when its room is in use before you open the door. The times are Central, as our events page gives them; where your browser will say, the note works out the same hour on your own clock underneath. Clocks do not all change for summer on the same day, so the week they change, trust the Central.
Events
The steady pulse beneath everything we do.
Our recurring events are the heartbeat of Stimpunks: weekly, consistent, and always here.
Solidarity SeshThe radical act of showing up for each other.Saturdays, 10AM Central
InfodumplingsBring Your Muchness Down the Rabbit HoleThursdays, 7PM Central
Campfire Learn TogetherExpert lecturers. Community wisdom. Zero hierarchy.Sundays, 10 AM Central
Watering Hole HangsDrop in. Space out. Belong here.Weekdays, 9AM Central — and spontaneously whenever someone feels like gathering
Off site: Proton Meet’s guest page for the room named Events. Nothing reaches Proton until you open it.
Operations
Where we run the thing.
The Operations meeting is where the work of keeping Stimpunks running gets done. Each week we hold a task scrub — triage, prioritize, and move work forward together. If you want to understand how the organization operates or get involved in the doing, this is the meeting for you.
The Operations meetingEvery Tuesday · 10:00–11:00 AM CT
Off site: Proton Meet’s guest page for the room named Operations. Nothing reaches Proton until you open it.
Editorial
Words, design, and everything we put into the world.
The Editorial meeting is where we work on the Stimpunks website and print materials — writing, editing, and designing for publication. Whether you’re a writer, editor, designer, or someone who just cares deeply about how we communicate, join us.
The Editorial meetingEvery Thursday · 10:00–11:00 AM CT
Off site: Proton Meet’s guest page for the room named Editorial. Nothing reaches Proton until you open it.
Hang Suites
Wanna just hang out or work on something together? We have rooms for that.
Up the stairs are the rooms for hanging out. They are named for the three kinds of Cavendish Space, which are David Thornburg’s caves, campfires and watering holes, and Cavendish, as our glossary tells it, needed all three. Each door says what its room is for and how things go in there, before you knock. There are no times on these doors: they are drop-in rooms, and whether anybody is in one when you knock is part of dropping in.
Cave
The Cave / Quiet Room is for quiet co-presence, ambient togetherness, and low-demand connection.
Off site: Proton Meet’s guest page for the room named Campfire. Nothing reaches Proton until you open it.
Watering Hole
The Watering Hole is for open, come-and-go, group Watercooler chat where random and off-topic are on-topic. This is a casual, drop-in space where people come together without any particular agenda.
Watering Hole Norms
Video optional.
Mute when you’re not actively talking.
Quietly lurking with camera and mic off is perfectly fine and accepted.
Come-and-go as you please. If you need to drop out suddenly, no need to worry with goodbyes. We understand.
Off site: Proton Meet’s guest page for the room named Watering Hole. Nothing reaches Proton until you open it.
A Note on Communication Access
We support multiple modes of participation including text chat, audio, and video — whatever works for your communication needs on a given day. You do not need to speak to belong here.
The house in Bedford Square
Two of Henry Cavendish’s houses were kept for opposite things. At Clapham Common, then outside London, he worked: a red-brick house whose drawing room he made into a laboratory, with a forge in the room next to it, an observatory upstairs and an eighty-foot ship’s mast in the grounds for a telescope. Nobody needed to be let in to see that something was going on there: the mast alone told the neighbours that the new resident was different. In Bedford Square he kept his library, and he opened it for borrowing, at all seasons of the year, with a librarian to look after it.
Anybody shown round it, his biographers write, would have concluded it was a house of knowledge. It was green throughout — green moreen curtains, green fire screens, green chair covers — and its mahogany blinds were lined with green transparent canvas: they could be down, and you could still see through them. It had rules, and the rules were his too. He signed the register for every book he took out of it to Clapham, like anybody else, and when the librarian died he gave a day a week to checking books out himself.
That is the house this room is built after. A place can be open without being open-plan. What makes it open is that anybody can find out what is behind each door and when, that the rules on the door apply to the people who run the house, and that nothing is locked. Our meetings are where the Stimpunks team does its work, and the team goes in by the same doors you do.
Everything on this page about Cavendish’s houses is from Christa Jungnickel and Russell McCormmach’s Cavendish: The Experimental Life, chapter 11, “Places” (second revised edition, 2016), read on 2026-09-25. The line about the librarian is their report of Thomas Young’s.
Why Cavendish
Cavendish Space is our name for psychologically and sensory safe space: caves for quiet reflection, campfires for learning together, watering holes for peer connection. We named it after Henry Cavendish, the eighteenth-century natural philosopher who discovered hydrogen, as Steve Silberman tells his life in NeuroTribes. Cavendish needed his cave. He also needed, now and then, a small set of his peers — the Royal Society’s Monday Club was his campfire — and he came to it on his own terms.
It is not true, however, that he wanted to remove himself entirely from the company of his peers; he just wanted to stand off to the side, soaking everything in.
Steve Silberman, NeuroTribes, p. 25, as our Cavendish Space entry quotes it
A door is how you get to do that. Our page on Cavendish Space quotes Annie Murphy Paul on why a place to work needs doors:
Perhaps the most important form of control over one’s space is authority over who comes in and out
Annie Murphy Paul, The Extended Mind, as our Cavendish Space page quotes it
Here that authority is yours, on the doorstep. You decide whether to knock, and once you are in, Proton will let you keep your microphone and camera off and stand off to the side, which is what the man the house is named after would have done.
Next door in spirit: body doubling, which our Watering Hole Hangs welcome, and whose nature cams run up the street in the Jungle Room. The calendar with everything on it is on our events page.
On the other side of a door
Each door opens Proton Meet’s guest page for one room, in your browser. We opened every one of them on 2026-09-25 as far as that page and no further. Here is what was there:
No account, and nothing to install. It asks for a name, which can be whatever you would like to be called, and it names the room you are about to walk into, so you can check it is the right one. It offers a desktop app; you do not need it.
Your microphone and camera can stay off. If your browser has not been given them, it says so and offers to carry on without, and you can go in that way.
Proton’s own terms apply over there. Its page says that joining means agreeing to Proton’s terms and conditions and privacy policy. That is between you and Proton, and it is written here so that nobody finds it out after the knock.
The part of each link after the # is the room’s password, and it is there on purpose. These rooms are open, so it is not a secret; it is what takes you straight to the name box. A browser never sends that part of an address to any server, and this site tells Proton nothing on the way out but that you came from stimpunks.world.
The call is on the other side of the door and not in this page, and that was measured. Proton Meet will only let Proton’s own apps frame it, so a call inside this page would load as a blank box; and this street gives no page on it your camera or your microphone. Nothing on this page reaches Proton until you open a door.
What is not in here
No open plan. Nobody is on show, and nothing is propped open to prove it.
No lock and no list. Nothing to sign up for, and no Discord between you and the door.
No register of you. Cavendish kept one for his books; this page keeps nothing and sends nothing. The hour on your own clock is worked out in your browser, from its own clock and time zone, and goes nowhere.
No call inside the page. See above: it is behind the door, where calls go.
Whose these are
Every line on a door is our events page’s, word for word: each room’s own line, what it is for, and every day and time, read off stimpunks.org/events on 2026-09-25. tools/make-coworking.py reads that page again every time it builds the doors and refuses a line that has gone from it, a door without its room’s password, a door in a different order from the page, and the call framed inside this one. The hour on your own clock underneath is worked out in your browser and is ours.
Everything here about Cavendish’s houses is Christa Jungnickel and Russell McCormmach’s, from Cavendish: The Experimental Life, published open access by the Max Planck Research Library; it is retold in our words and the drawing of the house is ours, not a picture of his. Proton Meet is Proton AG’s service and its name is Proton’s trade mark. Proton has no connection with Stimpunks and does not endorse us; we use it because it lets anybody in with a link and a name. The name Cavendish Space is ours, after Henry Cavendish as Steve Silberman tells his life in NeuroTribes, and the line above is Silberman’s, read off our glossary entry rather than the book; the Annie Murphy Paul line was read off our Cavendish Space page.
The type is Libre Caslon Display, by Impallari Type, for the room’s name, the brass plate on each door and each room’s own line, and Libre Caslon Text, by Pablo Impallari, for everything you read: revivals of Caslon’s letter, which was the English letter of the century Cavendish worked in. Both under the SIL Open Font License and read off their own records. More in the liner notes.
Job marker — a folded note left on the hall floor, with a round seal on it
You have found a job marker. The Adventurer’s Guild is a shopfront on the street, and it posts jobs that send you round these rooms. Take the code below to its board and that job is done. Nothing here is scored, nothing expires, and one is a perfectly good number of jobs to do.
The job: Who signed for his own books?
Before the code: Every time Henry Cavendish took a book out of his own library, he signed something, like anybody else. What?
Hint 1
It is in the part of the room about the house in Bedford Square.
Hint 2
It is the book a library keeps of what has gone out.
Last hint
One word, and it is also what you do when you sign in somewhere.
Give me the answer
The answer is The register. The library in Bedford Square had rules, and the rules were his too: he signed its register for every book he took to his other house at Clapham. That is the room's idea of open: the rules on the door apply to the people who run the house.
Taking the answer is a real way through this, not a lesser one. Nothing is watching and nothing is written down.
The library in Bedford Square had rules, and the rules were his too: he signed its register for every book he took to his other house at Clapham. That is the room's idea of open: the rules on the door apply to the people who run the house.