Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: Committees and General Meetings

[Becky Schaller (bschaller]

Sharon,thank you for your response.  When writing a condensed version of
this long and complicated process, it was sometimes difficult for me to know
what exactly to include and what not to.

The reason this is taking such a long time at the general meeting is because
the language sounded very straight foreward. But as people gradually
discovered, there was meaning beneath the various words and phrases which
were known and important to many of the committee members.   Many people
said that we should start naming the white elephant or elephants in the
room.  Either outside or  during the meeting, I did hear these various
elephants being named.  However, I didn't hear two people name the same
particular elephant.  What people did agree to is that there are issues
beneath the surface.   It's taken a while for these issues to get named for
the whole community and I'm not sure how clear it is yet.

Part of the purpose of agreeing to a roadmap is to decide in what order
information will be presented and how we handle multiple goals.   Because of
the experiences of people on the committee in terms of either wanting a
certain  outcome or in terms of being burned in particular ways, different
people feel strongly about the roadmap taking a particular twist or turn.

I hope that doesn't muddy the issue too much.

> From: Sharon Villines <sharon [at] sharonvillines.com>
> Reply-To: cohousing-l [at] cohousing.org
> Date: Mon, 15 Jul 2002 10:42:19 -0400
> To: Cohousing-L <cohousing-l [at] cohousing.org>
> Subject: Re: [C-L]_Committees and General Meetings
> 
> on 7/15/2002 9:14 AM, Becky Schaller at bschaller [at] theriver.com wrote:
> 
>> At the last Facilitation Team Meeting, we began to look at Tree Bresson's
>> website.  Particularly, we looked at the page on setting agenda items.  We
>> noted that Tree had written that if an item is proposed for the agenda which
>> is the result of an unresolved conflict between two people, then those
>> people need to  work on the conflict and the general meeting is probably not
>> a good place for this issue to be resolved.
> 
> But it may be a good place to collect more information. Sometimes failure to
> reach a common decision is based on having different sets of information or
> different goals. These may need work rather than focusing on the
> disagreements of the parties involved.
> 
>> However, spending over three hours on the process of making a decision in a
>> general meeting about how to go about making a decision is enough to make me
>> not want to come to  general meetings.
> 
> This sounds like it may be a decision that is not ready to be made. Do you
> have all the information? Is it a  money issue? Is it different views of the
> site? Drop it for a few months and come back to it. The world won't go away.
> 
> (Says she in her own frustration over the insertion of birthday celebrations
> complete with cake into business meetings without full discussion by the
> community.)
> 
> Sharon
> -- 
> Sharon Villines
> Takoma Village Cohousing, Washington DC
> http://www.takomavillage.org
> 
> 
> 
> _______________________________________________
> Cohousing-L mailing list
> Cohousing-L [at] cohousing.org  Unsubscribe  and other info:
> http://www.communityforum.net/mailman/listinfo/cohousing-l
> 

_______________________________________________
Cohousing-L mailing list
Cohousing-L [at] cohousing.org  Unsubscribe  and other info:
http://www.communityforum.net/mailman/listinfo/cohousing-l