Setting community norms democratically within dictatorial bounds
This post is about something I've done before and plan to do again that I haven't seen discussed elsewhere. For that thing to make sense, I first want to describe some other things adjacent to it...
There are a few common modes of governance in groups of people. The most common category involves decisions being made some number of the people involved. When that number is everyone you have a democracy or consensus based or similar organization. When that number is less than most but still many people then you have a representational governance model. When that number is small you have something like a board or council. When that number is one then you might have a dictatorship or a sole elected leader. There are, of course, more complex systems involving committees, quorums, etc.
It is also relatively common to use different scales and methods of governance for different types of decisions. One or a few people might own the property and make decisions about new buildings, selling it, taxes, etc. A committee or subgroup might handle event planning, recruiting, onboarding, etc. Everyone might get a vote in meal times and quiet hours.
What I have done, and want to do again, and want to discuss here, is using those different scales and methods to make different parts of the same decision. The system I have in mind involves one or a few people setting hard boundaries for a rule or decision, and then more to all of the people involved drawing lines within those boundaries. In the examples below, I am the dictator in question, and I'm speaking from the perspective of me founding and organizing a community in which I would want to live with many other people. However, the same ideas apply if I am one of five co-buyers of a property and we are setting the boundaries that apply to decisions made by the more numerous non-owner members of our community.
The first motivation here is personal, to build an environment in which I want to live. A second motivation, similarly important, regards how decision making conflicts can affect the success or failure to get a project off the ground. A recent post on the Supernuclear blog (https://supernuclear.substack.com/p/how-to-kill-a-community-before-it) dove into the disastrous consequences of including too many strong preferences in choosing a property, and I believe that same concept applies to all sorts of early direction-setting decisions. My favorite quote is “The community that they now love and live in only exists because they didn’t get a vote at the founding.”
So, in that context, here are some of the boundaries that I would establish around a forming community, with the expectation that many people would self select out, and some other people, including myself, would be able to reach some common agreement within:
I don't want to live in a community where certain drugs are welcome. If the people around me are doing meth or heroin, I'm going to have a bad time. At the other end of the scale, I don't want to live in a completely sober community. Even though I am a sober person, I enjoy my friends and family being able to partake reasonably in things like alcohol and marijuana. So those are the boundaries I would set in advance; anyone who wants to join the next community I organize needs to be comfortable living somewhere in that range. If you need to have meth in your house, my house isn't for you. If you need everyone around you to be sober, ditto. But everything between those limits is up for discussion and decision among all the members of the community. Maybe we decide as a group that mushrooms and acid are ok, but cocaine and ketamine are not. That's my personal preference, but it's not nearly as strong of a preference as the ones I used to set the limits.
I don't want to live in a community that is only 25-50 year old able bodied professionals. I also don't want to live in a community that focuses the majority of its resources and efforts toward supporting young, old, disabled, etc members. My ideal would be about halfway between a representative sample of the population and a house filled entirely with my demographic neighbors, but I can see a comfortable future in a wide range of environments surrounding that ideal. I would set those initial boundaries and then let the community settle organically somewhere within them.
In terms of communal groceries and dinners, I don't want a diet with no animal products. I understand at least a few of the arguments and motivations behind vegan lifestyles, but that's not the right environment for me. I also don't want a diet where animal products are the only source of protein, or a necessary part of a healthy caloric intake. That's expensive and unnecessarily exclusive and potentially boring. In between? I don't have strong feelings, and everyone involved in the community can be part of the decisions about how we plan the food we share.
I need everyone to participate in community meetings with some frequency, at least often enough to vote for leadership and hear about large scale plans and upcoming changes. That might two to four times per year. I can't keep up with a community that has mandatory meetings more than twice a week. In between? We can all figure that out together.
I could give a dozen other examples, and probably will in a post more specifically about my next project when the time comes to pull that particular trigger. For the purpose of this post, I hope I've sufficiently illustrated the concept in question. I'd love to hear feedback on this approach, suggestions for how to tweak it, concerns about failure modes, variations you've seen in practice, etc. Feel free to comment here or reach out to me privately.