Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: RE- the politics of co-h

[Laura Bagnall (Laura_Bagnall]

        Reply to:   RE>RE: the politics of co-housing
Rob Sandelin said (in response to a query by Wm Leler)

[...] Consensus is a decision making tool.  It is not required,
but it is one 
of the better tools around for cooperative agreements.  It is a
bad 
tool for making micro decisions such as what color the
commonhouse 
bathroom tile should be.  Most groups use a variety of decision
making 
tools as they progress through the  development process.

I'd be interested in different decision-making tools employed by
different groups, if people would care to share their
experiences.  Our group (NWIS) has been in existence since last
July, and in general consensus has served us very well.  We have
been making excellent progress, and we may have identified a
site.  The one decision that has been totally unresponsive to
this process is deciding on a new name for our group!  The
original name (Northwest Inner Suburban) was picked by the two
people who started the group and the intention was to come up
with a better name long before now.  We have had a number of
discussions about names, and we always end up coming up with a
long list of name, and no consensus on what name we should
choose.  Actually, it reminds me a lot of when I was in college
and the fraternity that I belonged to (Pi Kappa Alpha, nicknamed
Pika for short) decided to drop out of the national organization
(for one thing, we were a co-ed house, and they didn't think
that that was cool at all).  We spent a week on an elaborate
elimination voting scheme, and at the end came up with a name
that nobody liked, and finally just ended up changing the
capitalization, and going by the name "pika".  I'm a little
afraid that the same thing is going to happen here, and we'll
end up stuck with the name "NWIS", which is terrible!  Anybody
have any clever ideas for alternate decision-making strategies?

Laura Bagnall
NWIS Cohousing
Arlington, MA