Cohousing-L Mailing List: RE: Consensus and Voting

[Rob Sandelin (Floriferous]

Dan wrote:
Oh, and you may have noticed that consensus makes for longer meetings! Get
used to delegating problems to committees -- the full group will still have
to approve the committee recommendation, but in my experience this takes a lot 
less time.

I would suggest that the facilitator should carefully examine the agenda of 
the meeting, prior to its begining, to look for items that are small group, 
not large group. Thus far in my observations of groups, a very large amount of 
time is wasted in large group meetings by agenda items that really should be 
small group work.  At the very least, divide the group up into subgroups to 
work through this at the meeting, and then bring the subgroups all together, 
report and clarify their input in brainstorm fashion.  This can make even a 
heavy agenda item move pretty quickly, especially if the group is bigger than 
20.

Rob Sandelin
Sharingwood