Joanne has been back to teach us sociocracy, along with two other teachers, Tena Meadows (pronounced like Tina) the General Manager of Ecovillage Community Association, and John Buck, who has been writing about it and training others to use it since the eighties.

SOCIOCRACY

—n. A theoretical system of government in which the interests of all members of society are served equally.

Sociocracy was originally envisioned as a way to adapt Quaker egalitarian principles to secular organizations. With sociocracy, the basis of decision-making is consent, which uses the criterion of "no objection." It's not that every decision requires consent, but consent must exist concerning an agreement to make decisions through another method. Thus, many decisions are not made by consent. Rather, with consent, persons or groups are given the authority to make independent decisions. The structures used in decision-making give everyone a voice and keep the process on track.

Sociocracy does a good job of reserving equivalent power for all participants. It integrates the managers with the doers so that there isn't a separate managerial class. It avoids the serious rifts that may develop in groups that make decisions through majority vote. The election process is unique and fun. Sociocracy can make a positive contribution to the whole group even when used just by one small group. It does not require the immediate complete overthrow of the whole self-governance system we have.

WHAT WE'RE DOING

We have started the Sociocratic Resource Circle (SRC) to examine whether or not Twin Oaks could benefit from a different sort of decision-making. We've used the "planner-manager" system for a long time, but the planners are overworked and underpaid. It's hard to convince people to take it on and decisions are sometimes overridden. It is, after all, taken from a work of fiction and only developed in the real world at Twin Oaks. We're not intent on changing this system, but we do want to investigate whether a different process might serve our needs better. Even if the planner-manager system doesn't change, small groups can still benefit from sociocratic processes.

We've organized workshops in June, September, and November, at which Twin Oakers have gotten experience teaching so that we won't be dependent on outside trainers. Fred and Ted have trained Oakers since then.

Any sociocratic organization evaluates just what the heck it's supposed to exist for. Each circle within the organization does the same thing. One goal we've had in the SRC is to come up with a Vision/Mission/Aim statement for the circle. A very important part of sociocracy is to state the goal and always evaluate what you're doing in terms of that goal.

Here is our current working draft:

VISION

•To have an egalitarian, participatory, and effective system for governance and decision-making at Twin Oaks.

MISSION

•To learn, understand, teach, and choose the best possible models of governance for Twin Oaks.

•To integrate and evaluate these models with the community.

•To help the community articulate a statement of Vision, Mission, and Aims.

AIMS

•To organize workshops for members to thoroughly understand the Sociocratic model.

•To brainstorm and try out ways of integrating the models.

•To mother one or more sociocratic circles in work areas at Twin Oaks.

•To continue learning and developing effective communication skills.

•To use the sociocratic circle meeting format for our meetings.

Another important part of sociocratic structure is its connection to the wider world. If Twin Oaks was a totally sociocratic group, this might include meeting with people from other communities for actual decision-making affecting Twin Oaks and to help keep us on track with environmentalism, non-violence, and egalitarianism.

The Sociocratic Resource Circle wants to help other groups at Twin Oaks try sociocracy and consent decision-making. We are working with the Community Visitor Program +to help them operate sociocratically and evaluate how well the experiment works. We volunteer to provide a sociocratic facilitator for small groups, managerial areas, SLG's, and committees wanting to try using the sociocratic method. In addition we would like to role-play proposals in our SRC meetings, to practice the skills and to help provide possible solutions for community problems.

Even though we believe in this idea and have commitment to exploring it's practical usage, finding the time to come to meetings and to do other work can be very draining. We are putting in an OTRA for hours to be used for facilitating, notetaking, and other various tasks.