When to Review Policies

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Q: How can a developing cohousing community protect itself from a member who joins and immediately wants to review all the policies? A:This is can be very difficult for forming groups, but it doesn’t’ stop once you are moved in. Almost every new member will immediately want to start redesigning the community as soon as they have their boxes unpacked. Often they have good ideas and bring new energy, but more often they are re-walking… Read More . . . “When to Review Policies”

Kees Boeke, Cosmic View

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Kees Boeke is perhaps best known outside of The Netherlands for his book, Cosmic View: The Universe in 40 Jumps (1957), which served as the basis for the film by Charles and Ray Eames The Power of Ten (1968) which is now the basis of an extensive interactive web site at www.powersof10.com and inspired the IMAX film the Cosmic Voyage (1996). The book presents a series of forty pictures composed to help children develop a… Read More . . . “Kees Boeke, Cosmic View”

Frustration with Sociocracy at the DMOZ

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The DMOZ is not the Division of Motor Vehicles nor the Demilitarized Zone but it was certainly a land mine for the better part of my afternoon. The DMOZ is the Open Directory Project (ODP) founded in 1998 to build a directory of the World Wide Web—all the websites in the world. Update: As of 17 March 2017, DMOZ is no longer active. That means this post is now history but the question is still… Read More . . . “Frustration with Sociocracy at the DMOZ”

My Pivotal Consensus Experience

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In 1972 with a group of parents forming a cooperative school, predominantly young Yale faculty members who had moved to town to join a new college. We were committed to diversity and having a hard time recruiting people of color and from a different socio-economic class. We were having an equally hard time finding appropriate space that we could afford. This was long before charter schools so we were funding the whole thing ourselves. We… Read More . . . “My Pivotal Consensus Experience”

Consent & Responsibility

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In dynamic governance there is no option to stand aside — the only options are consent or object. If you don’t have tangible objections, ones that can be teased out and addressed, then you consent. It maybe a passive consent, “I don’t see any reason not to do this”, or an active consent, “I really think this is a good idea.” Both are consent. We have members who insist on having a stand aside option,… Read More . . . “Consent & Responsibility”