Category: CONTENTS
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Third Time’s a Charm: What it took to launch a cohousing community (Cate de Vreede)
After two failed attempts, the de Vreede’s knew it was going to take a different approach to beat the odds and form the cohousing community of their dreams. In this presentation, Cate will share the piece of advice that made the difference in setting up their 3rd launch for success. She’ll also share why she…
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Merging the Board and the General Circle (Denis Côté)
Cohabitat Québec bought land in 2010 and moved in in 2013. Since the beginning, we have been using the Sociocratic Circle-organization Method (SCM) with 6 functional circles, a general circle and a mission circle (legal board). With years of experience and a lengthy reflection, we decided to bring the board into the general circle. We…
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Power and Transparency in Intentional Community (John Schinnerer)
Transparency is a foundational value of the Sociocratic Circle-organization Method (SCM). Power is an unavoidable element of human relatings. Intentional community is consistently a crucible for issues of transparency and power. We will explore concepts and aspects of power in human interactions and how they relate with our experiences in community and elsewhere. We will…
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Collaboration Shapes Education and Young Leaders
by Lisa Praeg Strengthen youth leadership – Open election of class representatives as initiative Do you remember the last time you participated in a democratic election? What did you feel […]
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What is a Help Desk?
After using sociocracy “by the book” for years and very successfully, we have started to introduce a new concept: a Help Desk circle. It introduces a small but extremely powerful nuance in what circles are and how we can decentralize decisions and operations while empowering everyone in the organization in moving things forward that they…
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5 Strategies for Combining Equity with Sociocracy
The key promise of sociocracy is that all voices matter. In reality our current sociocracy practices are not enough to overcome the way society systemically oppresses the voices of people from poor, non-white, transgender, disabled, et cetera, backgrounds. In this article I define equity, make an argument for why combining equity and sociocracy is so…
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Robert’s Rules and Sociocracy: A Comparison
The word democracy comes from the Greek “demos”, and is the shared rule of the people. The original meaning of democracy is a very large umbrella, of which majority rules is only one subset. Sociocracy, on the other hand, derives from “socios,” and means “the rule of the associates.” Sociocracy is one form of democracy…
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Self-Organization – a leap into the unknown
There are organizations, and in them people, who will never see the value in involving employees in shared governance. There are those who, although they feel the growing discomfort of working ‘in the old way’, remain full of fears and doubts about the incomprehensible concept of self-organization.
