It worked
People are often intrigued to learn of how things are put together in a community structure. It often sounds complex, and some people would prefer just to fill their space in 'society'. But this is relegating your decision making powers to others who know little of you.
Being in a close community enables you to set up structures, plan ways of action, and interact with eachother in a way that can be beneficial to everyone. It is a great opportunity to be involved in such a community structure. We all learned a lot about working with eachother and group dynamics, and can take this knowledge with us for our futures.
Each community will have a different dynamic, as it settles down in its comfort zones. We have provided some information and tips that we would have found useful at the beginning. Hopefully it can help you.
How we worked it...
We tried to have a totally non-hierarchical society. We nominated different sub committees to share the different activities/ focus'. We had:
- map committee
- food committee
- action committee
- media committee
- schools committee.
These sub committees met whenever there was a need and enough energy. They reported back to the main group when we had our full group gatherings.
This process relied on necessity and energy, thus sometimes falling apart when we'd been cycling hard for too many days in a row. Necessity called the food and map committee more regularly together though! Possibly there would have been more continuity for gathering if we had more continuity of departure and arrival times. These structures quite often went through the typical group dynamic cycles:
- loss of energy
- one person making decisions out of necessity
- hierarchy
- discontent
- more group participation
- and back to the beginning
Decision Making
We tried consensus decision making with Naima's help. She taught us hand signals to clarify this process. The main signals were for - relevant point, direct response, irrelevant point, and tangent.
Once everyone's concerns were addressed we asked for dissent, and then we tried to address this dissent. If there was an overwhelming majority and the dissent wasn't prohibitive we asked the dissenters to stand aside whilst acknowledging their dissent.
This process sometimes took hours and was quite draining. Surprisingly, when there was a suggestion to change this system it was met with an overwhelming lack of support; quite interesting how small groups reflect the greater society at large!
We did eventually try a different system to try and shift the focus from the negative 'dissent' to a more positive perspective by asking for good things about the proposal. This system needed refining and we finished the ride before we'd totally perfected it.
In retrospect we needed either more energy, or a quicker, less consultative methodology.