Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: Cohousing-L Digest, Vol 135, Issue 7 - governance methods in cohousing

[Diana Leafe Christian (diana]

Hello,

        This is a response for Virginia Sandman at Virginia Hill Cohousing who 
asked about the variety of governance systems used by cohousing communities and 
Liz Ryan Cole of Pinnacle Project who is also interested in this, and Rick 
Keller of Pioneer Valley Cohousing, who recommends focusing more on management 
for cohousing and less on governance.

        For the last several years I've been focusing on what seems like 
successful and unsuccessful governance and management methods in intentional 
communities in general, and specifically in cohousing and ecovillages. (Rick, I 
see governance structures and management methods as distinct but overlapping - 
please see below).

        My background is as an informal researcher, workshop leader, and 
conference presenter on how people start successful new intentional communities 
and how existing communities can become more healthy and thriving. (I've 
written a book and articles in Communities magazine on these topics, which some 
Coho L browsers may be familiar with.) I now believe that how well a 
community's governance system functions (governance including not limited to 
its decision-making method)  has _everything_ to do with a community's healthy 
and well-being. And, that a community's governance structure (which includes 
its decision-making method) is the process by which they conduct the management 
of their community.

        I now see governance as the organizational structure of whole-group 
(plenary) meetings and smaller committees or teams to carry out the community's 
management functions, which focus on the "what" (not the "how") of decisions - 
topics about activities that build community life and community spirit; 
allocating resources of time, money, and community members' labor for the 
community; building, maintaining, and repairing the community's physical 
infrastructure, and so on. And their specific decision-making method in these 
meetings as the "how" (not the "what") they make decisions about these topics. 

        I've also been a consensus trainer for the last 9 years, although 
nowadays I only recommend what I call the "N St. Consensus Method," which its 
creator, Kevin Wolf of N St. Cohousing in Davis, Calif., has described in this 
forum.  And I'm now a trainer of Sociocracy, also called Dynamic Governance. I 
wrote a series of articles for Communities magazine called "Busting the Myth 
that Consensus-with-Unanimity is Good for Communities," and right now I'm doing 
a step-by-step series of how Sociocracy / Dynamic Governance can be used in 
communities. 

        Sociocracy/Dynamic Governance and Holacracy (which I also like a lot) 
are whole-system governance structures that include a decision-making method, 
but they are both a whole lot more than decision-making.

        The various methods of consensus (including with those with a test for 
legitimate blocks, super-majority voting fallbacks, a super-majority voting 
decision rule but no approving or blocking, the N St. Consensus Method, the 
representational Village Council method, the Austrian Systemic Consensus 
method), majority-rule voting, and multi-winner voting (the parliamentary 
method), are all decision-making methods but not also governance structures. 
That's because these focus solely on how decisions are made but not also on the 
topics to be decided and the organizational structure of whole-community 
meetings and smaller-group meetings to decide things.

        Virginia and Liz, I'd be happy to send you (and anyone else who's 
interested) my handouts on these topics, which are described in the next email 
(so this email isn't so long). Also, in that email I'll send links to online 
articles on the variety of governance and decision-making methods used in 
communities.  

        All good wishes, and please see my next email to Coho L,

        Diana Leafe Christian