Cohousing-L Mailing List: committee volunteers and representation

[Lynn Nadeau (welcome]

>I would
>predict that a well-facilitated dialogue ... could also help assign tasks to 
people
>who should really be working together. For example, I'd hate a common room
>to be designed with only extroverts or only introverts in mind, just like
>I'd like the shared procedures to be mindful of both the need for closure
>and the need for flexibility.

Assign tasks? It wouldn't happen here. 
In our community, as we rely on volunteering, the closest one could come 
would be to invite someone to join a project because they would bring 
more balance to that committee or task force. Which does happen. 

Unless there is a built-in expectation of a hierarchy with powers to 
"assign", a community will typically work on volunteer energy. Even where 
a certain number of hours or work credits are expected, or where the 
quantity of volunteer work is high, the choice of tasks is still 
typically self assigned. The constraints this brings with it are an 
important reality and challenge. 

With volunteerism, it is normal that some committees will NOT be 
representative of the spectrum of perspectives. The folks who volunteer 
to drive mowing tractors are all different from the ones on the 
document-revision task force, the finance team is a different crowd from 
the common house cleaning team. It's a fact of our community life here. 

At first we had the expectation that the way to make things work better 
would be to delegate more power to committees, but because the volunteers 
weren't representative, when a committee would "just decide and do it", 
the choice often was jarring to others. 

The solution has been a back-and-forth dynamic between whole-group and 
committee/task force, with plenty of email and discussion circling and 
such to help define the team's task, to check on where they are going 
with it before they have done too much work on a particular process, and 
to give input as they go along, and prior to final approval. Well done, 
this can be very successful. It avoids the burnout you get when a team 
pours a lot of energy into something the group then scuttles or rejects 
or wants to seriously change. At the same time, it allows small groups to 
do the homework, research the options, and also to make specific 
decisions the whole group empowers them to do, whether by the charter of 
their committee, or on a case by case basis. 

But when you have 50 people in a group, it's unlikely, I'd say 
unrealistic, to expect that groups of 5, say, will be representative. 

In your example, you might have a common-house design team that WAS all 
extroverts without young children, or whatever. Their job would be to get 
input from the introverts and the people with young children, as well as 
the hard of hearing, the technology buffs, those with security concerns, 
etc etc and address those concerns as well as their own personal ones. 




Lynn Nadeau, RoseWind Cohousing
Port Townsend Washington (Victorian seaport, music, art, nature)
http://www.rosewind.org
http://www.ptguide.com
http://www.ptforpeace.info (very active peace movement here- see our 
photo)