Sunseed Desert Technology, Andalusia, Spain
Sunseed Desert Technology is a center for practical education in off-grid living. It offers studies in sustainability, soil erosion in drylands, appropriate technology, eco-construction, and organic gardening. The center has been teaching in the off-grid village of Los Molinos del Río Aguas in Andalusia, Spain for 30 years.
Sunseed is in the process of adopting a more horizontal organizational structure inspired by Sociocracy. In 2019, the community worked with facilitators Xana Piteira and Maria Rute… Read More . . . “Sunseed Desert Technology, Andalusia, Spain”Consensus, Compromise, or Pay Off?
The board of a wildlife federation reaches consensus on a plan to save a threatened wild bird’s habitat. Then they delete the budget for legal action. A Senate committee unanimously recommends legislation after adding amendments for unrelated items. They gave each Senator something they wanted. A bike trail organization stops protesting a new parking lot when it was promised a wider bike path.
Is this the same kind of push and pull that is required… Read More . . . “Consensus, Compromise, or Pay Off?”Full-Circle Meetings
Sociocracy’s structure is based on delegating decision-making to a hierarchy of semi-autonomous subgroups called circles or teams. This structure gives sociocratic organizationsThe Delibrative Democracy Consortium (DDC)u is an alliance o... the ability to
(1) delegate decisions effectively and efficiently,
(2) extend policy decision-making throughout the organization to the shop floor, and
(3) reduce the number of meetings.
Cohousing and other community groups are attracted to the values of sociocracy and its ability to support consensus… Read More . . . “Full-Circle Meetings”Strong Towns and a Way Forward
…a good example of how sociocracy consultants and advocates can work within an organization to incorporate sociocratic principles and practices using the language and current objectives of the organization.
What prompted me to write today was the discovery of Strong Towns, a non-profit organization devoted to local civic development. In despair over the state of American governance, I was clicking through the far too many news sources I read every morning and saw a link… Read More . . . “Strong Towns and a Way Forward”Sociocracy’s Achilles Heel
Trump, Trumpism, and Trumpist
In the winter, I promised to write more about Donald Trump as a democratic leader (already a difficult leap) and how things would differ in a government based on the Sociocratic Circle Method (SCM) of organization. A series of compare-and-contrast analyses that would illustrate the ways in which a sociocratic democracy would prevent or disable a Trumpist government.
The 24/7 television news channels have been and still are a daily deluge… Read More . . . “Sociocracy’s Achilles Heel”