Cohousing-L Mailing List: When to spend time on abstractions and when not

[Rob Sandelin (floriferous]

The people that are part of a first formation group, and those who actually
move in, are usually two very different sets of people. In between many
people will come and go. Some will stay. Many will come to 2-3 meetings and
then leave. Spending lots of time on a pet policy too early, means redoing
the same work over again with the "new" set of people later.

In my opinion, before you have a site controlled, you should not be talking
details of anything like a policy. Share information about yourselves and
your dreams and general goals, but don't try to set time and structure for
community dinner at this point.

Once you control a site you will weeding people out by requiring lots of
personal money to be placed at risk. These people that do this, and those
that stick around, these are probably 75% going to be there at move in. It
is with this group you want to start getting clear on the parameters of your
life together.

But there is a danger here. As you start doing design and development work
you will be making some very hard to change later, concrete types of
decisions. This creates a certain mindset about decisions. Also the group
might be growing and consensus which might have been easier with only 10
people now becomes problematic with 20. When its hard to come to decisions,
people are reluctant not to try to get everything they want in the process,
continual difficulty with decisions, etc.

Once you move in, you find out that every thing you decide about how to live
together is totally changable. You can easily change what time dinner is,
and in my opinion should look at EVERY decision as being temporary. As you
learn about things, you want to make adjustments. This mindset makes it easy
to say yes, even to things you disagree with because its going to be changed
later anyway.

So making policy decisions in this last stage becomes easier and not a big
deal. Making them earlier means redoing them again with a new set of people.
So deciding a rental policy before you even have a site, is in my opinion,
not a good use of your time.

Rob Sandelin
Sharingwood resident for 11 years

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