Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: Consensus and Bylaws

[Muriel Kranowski (murielk]

Not only do our Bylaws contain detailed specifications for how we do
consensus, there is also a section that explains what we mean by consensus,
how it serves the community, and other background remarks. I was initially
not crazy about including that language but was persuaded by the argument
that if new people read nothing else, they will read the HOA Bylaws, so
that's a good place to educate them about this critical aspect of our
self-governance. We heavily revised our Bylaws last year and no-one
objected to including this language. Also our revised Bylaws were vetted by
our HOA attorneys and they didn't object either. (They might have rolled
their eyes....)

To answer your other question about changing our process, we did make a
change to our block-handling process about 10 years ago and that was
incorporated into the Bylaws at that time, and there was another change
related to our consensus process in the most recently updated Bylaws, so
yes, we consider a change in our consensus process to be a Bylaws-level
change.
   Muriel @ Shadowlake Village (in Virginia)