Community Learnings, an Introduction

In my last post, Some 'Software' Tools, I wrote that I was focusing “on tools used at Twin Oaks, Acorn, Ganas, and Dancing Rabbit because these are all places  I've spent some time at and all of them have been running 20+ years and all  seem to be going strong.”  Having spent a bit of time at each of these places, I’ve been thinking of what I could learn from each of them.

Part of my thinking is that it’s easy to be critical and look at what’s wrong with places (and I could find fault with any one of these, or any place else for that matter) but I think it’s more important to look at what works.  Part of this is a follow up from my last series, again focusing on what works at successful communities as a source for people building communities to think about.  And one of my inspirations was something Paxus talked about long ago when he was considering starting a new community.  His idea was to use what he called Best Practices.  In a sense I started thinking about the Best Practices at each of these communities.

I started with the community I’m now at, Ganas.  I sat down one afternoon and without thinking hard I came up with a list of ten useful things I think any community could learn from Ganas.  Then I went on and listed ten things for Twin Oaks, and Acorn, and Dancing Rabbit.  

So my posts for the few weeks will be these lists.  Since they’re already written, I promise they will come quickly.  (Not my current weeks or months.)

Quote of the Day:  “The human condition is that we are individuals in relationship, and there are tensions between individuality and relatedness.”  - Jone Johnson Lewis

Some ‘Software’ Tools

In my last post, I talked about the need for communities to deal with the ‘software’ (people and relationships) as well as the hardware.  I still hear a lot of people who are planning community worrying about things like money and property more than how they will find and keep community members.  But I think that many communities never succeed because they don’t have the people power.  In my last post I also mentioned a community attempt that had all sorts of great stuff, but basically consisted of two people, a couple.  I personally know of at least two other situations just like this, where a ‘community’ with great ideas was basically a heterosexual couple and having difficulty growing beyond this.  My sense is that there are hundreds of situations like this, where there is either one person or a couple (and I know of at least one situation where it was a gay male couple).  Lots of them have great ideas and even the know-how to do the hardware.  But how do you go from ideas to community?

I’ve recently been reading a book on Twin Oaks, Living the Dream, by Ingrid Komar--one of three books on the community and the only one not written by Kat Kinkade (a founder).  While this isn’t my favorite book on the subject, I did notice that Ingrid Komar devoted a chapter to ‘The Many Support Systems of Twin Oaks’.  One reason that I think Twin Oaks (and other long term communities) do well is that they provide support for their members, ‘software tools’ so to speak.

Twin Oaks has lots of support systems, as does Acorn (especially their clearnesses but they also use transparency tools and parties and games) and Ganas (which focuses on ‘feedback learning’ but also has lots of birthday parties and the occasional NVC or transparency tools group) and Dancing Rabbit (where they talk about ‘inner sustainability’ and have women’s groups and men’s groups among other things).  I will focus on tools used at Twin Oaks, Acorn, Ganas, and Dancing Rabbit because these are all places I’ve spent some time at and all of them have been running 20+ years and all seem to be going strong.  And they all use some of these tools.

Here’s a list of some tools.  This list isn’t comprehensive but it should give folks who are interested in building communities some idea of what’s available to help with people and relationships. Take this as a beginning, and know that there’s lots more stuff available.  Remember: you can’t build community without people.  It sounds obvious, but I have seen so many places where folks were worried about everything else.  And then they wondered why no community was happening.  Maybe the most important thing is to support and encourage people and to have fun.  If you’re dour and intense and discouraging, I don’t think you’re going to succeed.

• Listening  I think this is the first and most important tool.  I believe even that if you only are able to listen well to each other, it will take you a long way.

• The Clearness Process  I’m referring to the Acorn version where people check in with each other to make sure that things are okay between them.  Simple but very useful.

• NonViolent Communication   It’s more than the four step process that many people learn first and it begins with the desire to really understand and connect with another.

• Re-evaluation Counseling This is a good basic tool for peer counseling, although the organization behind it is rather strict about how you do it.  There are also alternatives.

    

• Twelve Step Groups  Again, a peer approach, this one primarily useful with addiction and dependency issues, but really looking at the human condition.  (Like it or not we are all more powerless than we care to admit.)

    

• The Seven Habits  I’ve written in extensively in this blog about the Seven Habits, ending with the posts Synergize!, 9/15/11, and Sharpening the Saw,  2/21/12.

• Transparency Tools  This is a collection of techniques for getting to know people better.  It may simplistic, but often it’s more revealing than expected.

 

• ZEGG Forum This comes from the ZEGG community in Germany and is a process that has influenced many communities, including Ganas and the Network For a New Culture.

• Conflict Resolution Not a tool but a variety of processes to work through conflict, including mediation, NonViolent Communication, Restorative justice, and Restorative Circles

• Parties/Dances  Having fun is important.  Parties, dances, etc, let people relax and interact--often to great music.  Why would you join a community where no one has fun?

• Games  Another way to have fun.  Games played as a group--both competitive and cooperative--can help build community.  These can include team sports, board games, and role-playing games.  Ultimate frisbee is popular at Twin Oaks and Magic and Dungeons and Dragons are often played at Acorn.  I think the game Pandemic is a great community building game.

• Team Building  Games (as above) but also specific exercises and particularly the experience of working on a project together can be very community building.

• Women’s Groups/Men’s Groups  They have these at Dancing Rabbit and Twin Oaks and are helpful building safety as well as cohesion.

• Other Identity Groups  Particularly for social category that’s a minority within a community (queer folks, people of color, etc) having a group restricted to folks in that category can, again, build safety and cohesion.  You want to avoid an us vs them mentality but use the groups to build strength to work within the community.  Sometimes fishbowls are helpful to help others outside the group learn what it’s like for people within the group.

• Spiritual Practices These include prayer, meditation, chanting, Sufi dancing, Jewish and Pagan Rituals, Quaker and church meetings and services, and even humanist/agnostic gatherings.

• Discussions  Acorn has two meetings a week, the business meeting, and an evening discussion where they pick a single topic and discuss it but make no decisions.  Ganas has had some success with a Residents Dinner where folks ask questions and the group tries to answer it.  What’s important is that these aren’t business meetings.   People just get to hear each other talk about things they think are important.

• Intentional Community Organizations  There are a bunch of these including the FIC, FEC, the Cohousing Network, GEN, NASCO, and Point A.  I’ve also written about the phenomena of Communities of Communities, 6/9/12.  Because even communities need social networking.

• Group Works  A deck of cards with each card giving info on a different group process.  You can use them systematically to learn a whole lot of group techniques or randomly for inspiration.

As I said, this is far from all of the possibilities.  Perhaps it’s only a beginning.  But I’m hoping it’s a good place to start, particularly if you have a group focused on all the ‘hardware’ of community building and ignoring the ‘software’.  

Quote of the Day: “The biggest mistake is believing there is one right way to listen, to talk, to have a conversation -- or a relationship.” - Deborah Tannen

‘Hardware’ vs ‘Software’

One night at Ganas, we had a discussion about sustainability and someone started talking about the difference between what he called the 'hardware' and the 'software'. (Obviously he was a computer person, but we all started using the terminology.)  The hardware, in this case, is all those cool eco-things: solar panels and gardens and greywater systems and ... (the list is very long).  The software is the people and relationships (and community).

Twin Oaks doesn't focus much on sustainability. They have a few solar panels and (as I mentioned) one half of one house that's off the grid. But when someone did an energy audit on them, they found that TO produces almost 80% less carbon emissions than what the average American produces--and that's because they share so much. On the other hand, I recently went on a tour of a 'community' that had tons of amazing 'eco-groovy' stuff. I was pretty impressed with all of it and learned about a bunch of things I didn't know. But I noticed that, other than the folks on the tour, there was no one there. Someone asked about how many full time members there were and the tour guide admitted there were two, him and his wife. Obviously they weren't doing well with the 'software'.

So communities that succeed, are communities that get the software right.

One of my interests in communities is as laboratories for social change.  In a sense, you could look at the whole Soviet Union as a social change experiment that demonstrated that communism doesn't work--at least if it's done from the top down. On the other hand, communism seems to be working very well at Twin Oaks (and Acorn, etc). Someone wrote a comment in an article about Twin Oaks (that they didn't seem to have read very well) that Twin Oaks wasn't going to work. But this kind of communism been working at TO for nearly fifty years
and they're going strong. It works there and Twin Oaks works.

I think of intentional communities as small enough experiments so that if something doesn't work, the community simply comes apart, people move on, hopefully we learn something, and few people are hurt. (Contrast that with what happened with the USSR.)

This is why I see community building as my social change work. I want to be part of creating working alternatives--to see what works and what doesn't and to create those simple systems (communities) out of which we can grow a new society.   But one thing I do know, getting the ‘software’ (the people and relationships) working is as important (if not more important) than getting the hardware to work.  The best designed community won’t work if it doesn’t attract and take care of people.

Next: Some ‘software’ tools.

Quote of the Day:  “Relationships are all there is. Everything in the universe only exists because it is in relationship to everything else. Nothing exists in isolation. We have to stop pretending we are individuals that can go it alone.”  - Margaret Wheatley

Population Explosion

I’m currently temporarily staying at the Acorn Community, having just attended the Community Conference (my fourth in a row--see Update 1: The Twin Oaks Community Conference, 9/9/12, Circling Around to the Communities Conference,  9/5/13, and Where's Weirdo?, 9/22/14 for my previous adventures).  The big discussion here at Acorn is about children and families.  Acorn just got two new kids living here and there are a couple of other families applying.  Twin Oaks has had children and families for a while but there haven’t been a lot of children or families at Acorn up until now.  So this is a very alive issue at Acorn at the moment.

But the real population explosion that I want to blog about is about all the new communities starting up recently, many of which want to be income-sharing egalitarian communities.  There’s one in Vermont, one right on Staten Island (where I’m now living), one in Baltimore, one in DC, one in Richmond, one in Louisa (which would make Cambia the fifth egalitarian community in Louisa County--after Twin Oaks, Acorn, Living Energy Farm, and Sapling), and one folks are trying to start in southern Virginia near the Appalachian Trail (not even mentioned in the article Pax wrote).  Most of these communities had folks at the conference.

This is great news for the Federation of Egalitarian Communities (see Egalitarian Communities, 10/22/08), which according to their current website,  only has six member communities and three Communities-in-Dialogue.  (Two of them, Sapling and The Mothership, also had representatives at the conference.  Last year they were brand-new--now they’ve been upstaged by all these new forming communities.)

So this is an exciting time for the egalitarian communities movement  I’ll be interested to see where all of this new community building energy goes.  Even if only a little over half of the newly starting communities make it, that would still be four new communities for the FEC.  And I still want to work on growing another one in New York, and maybe some in other places (like the Boston area) as well.  Maybe I’ll be part of one of the new ones next year.

Quote of the Day:  “If a community is seeking FEC membership …  that community may apply for Community-in-Dialogue (CID) status. For a community to be accepted as a CID, the Assembly need only be convinced that the community is actively working toward meeting the membership criteria, and that there exists a mutual desire for cooperation between the community and the FEC.

“...by becoming a member of the FEC, your community joins a group of like minded yet diverse communities that work together to try to make a better world.” - from the FEC website

Quoth the Raven

I know.  I’ve been neglecting this blog.

I’ve been focusing on other things, some useful (doing work here at the Ganas community and work on the Point A project for example) and some sort of useful (reading even more about chemistry and biology) and some not so useful (reading webcomics like Girl Genius, Skin Horse, and the awesome Kimchi Cuddles).  I've also been keeping my other blog (Lagoon Commune) going but I’m about to put that on hiatus for a while (or perhaps indefinitely) both because of low readership and because I want to focus on other things--like writing for this blog.

Meanwhile, my name has been mutating.  While I’m still officially MoonRaven, I’ve been going more and more simply by Raven.  It sounds a little less outrageous--at least to my ears.  (A friend informed me today that Raven still sounds weird.)

All in all, life is good.  I’m happy (I think of that as a decision), I’m enjoying life here, and I’m doing the work I want to be doing.  What more could I ask for?

Quote of the Day: "To live is so startling it leaves little time for anything else." - Emily Dickinson

Statified, Nesting, and Hierarchy

Oops. I thought I’d done that review of Donella Meadow’s book Thinking in Systems that I promised long, long ago but I can’t find it looking through this blog.  Unfortunately, this won’t be that review.

Thinking in Systems is a pretty good book.  I reread it regularly and I still hope to review it, but one thing that bothered me about the book was Donella Meadow’s use of the word ‘hierarchy’ to describe what I think of as nested systems.  Here’s an example:

“The world, or at least the parts of it humans think they understand, is organized in subsystems aggregated into larger subsystems, aggregated into still larger subsystems.  … This arrangement of systems and subsystems is called a hierarchy.”

She goes on to say: “Corporate systems, military systems, ecological systems, economic systems, living organisms, are arranged in hierarchies.”

I have just been rereading parts of Fritjof Capra’s The Turning Point (which I reviewed almost seven years ago in a post called Capra 1:The Turning Point, 8/23/08).  I wasn’t that impressed with much of it (I think it was more of a turning point for Capra’s thinking and work than anything out in the world) but I really liked his take on the use of the word hierarchy to describe what happens in systems.  I’m going to quote liberally from his book:

“The multileveled structure of living organisms, like any other biological structure, is a visible manifestation of the underlying processes of self-organization.  At each level there is a dynamic balance ... between systems levels.  Systems theorists sometimes call this pattern of organization hierarchical, but that word may be rather misleading for the stratified order observed in nature.  The word ‘hierarchy’* referred originally to the government of the Church.  Like all human hierarchies, this ruling body was organized into a number of ranks according to levels of power, each rank being subordinate to the one at the level above it.  In the past the stratified order of nature has often been misinterpreted to justify authoritarian social and political structures.

“To avoid confusion we may reserve the term ‘hierarchy’ for those fairly rigid systems of domination and control which orders are transmitted from the top down.  The traditional system for these structures has been the pyramid.  By contrast, most living systems exhibit multileveled patterns of organization characterized by many intricate and nonlinear pathways along which signals of information and transaction propagate between all levels, ascending as well as descending.  That is why I have turned the pyramid around and transformed it into a tree, a more appropriate symbol for the ecological nature of stratification in living systems.  As a real tree takes its nourishment through both its roots and its leaves, so the power in a systems tree flows in both directions, with neither end dominating the other and all levels interacting in interdependent harmony to support the functioning of the whole.

“The most important aspect of the stratified order in nature is not the transfer of control but rather the organization of complexity.”

(The asterisk (*) in the fifth line of this quote refers to the following note: “From the Greek hieros (‘sacred’) and arkhia (‘rule’).”)

I totally agree with Capra’s take on systems and hierarchy except I would use the term nesting (like Russian dolls) rather than stratified to describe systems within systems within systems.  The hierarchies of corporations and the military are completely different from the way that living organisms and ecological systems are organized.  There is no one at the top of a living system that gives commands.  Rather you have decentralized systems enfolded within decentralized systems and things are worked out by emergence.  (See my last post.)

I understand what Donella Meadows is saying about the need for system to work within systems, but I agree with Fritjof Capra that we need a different word rather than ‘ hierarchy’ to name this process.

Quote of the Day:  “Hierarchies evolve from the lowest level up--from the pieces to the whole, from cell to organ to organism, from individual to team… Life started with single cell bacteria,  not with elephants. The original purpose of a hierarchy is always to help its originating subsystems do their jobs better.  This is something, unfortunately, that both the higher and lower levels of a greatly articulated hierarchy easily can forget.  Therefore, many systems are not meeting our goals because of malfunctioning hierarchies.”  - Donella Meadows

(Add:  I would say the beginning of this as ‘Nested systems emerge from the lowest level up….’)

Emergence

Emergence by Steven Johnson is a wonderful, frustrating book.  

It starts off talking about slime molds, which are sort of the mascot of the self-organizing systems world.  These are tiny single celled creatures that, when threatened, coalesce into a multicellular organism.  For years scientists searched for the ‘pacemaker’ cells that started the process.  It turns out there are no pacemakers.  Slime molds have a completely decentralized method of coalescing.  

I’ve referenced Steven Johnson before--way back in a post on Clustering and Coping (8/13/08).  Even then I mentioned he had a book called Emergence.  I just hadn’t read it until recently.  I picked it up in the bookstore that I’m now working in when I visited it in November.  I’ve now read it twice.

One of the things it reminds me of is Ori Brafman and Rod Beckstrom’s book, The Starfish and the Spider, which I’ve talked about in two early posts: Catalysts and Network Weavers (8/31/08) and Decentralization (12/9/08).  The big difference is that Brafman and Beckstrom’s book focuses on the phenomenon of decentralization, where Johnson focuses on emergence which is a decentralized process.  In some ways this is the most important process in self-organization.  And, in many ways, it’s unpredictable.

What’s wonderful about Emergence is how clearly Johnson spells out what’s involved in the process.  What’s frustrating is that he seems seduced by its uses in corporate culture, cybernetics and the internet, and particularly entertainment systems.  However he does cover (briefly) cell systems and immune systems, and spends more time with cities as organisms (which I find very interesting) before he gets caught in the morass of the world wide web and online games.

However, just when I was about to give up on the book, he steers into emergence and decentralization in politics and gives the WTO Seattle protests of 1999 as an example.  (Of course, this type of organizing was going on long before this--I see it dating back to feminist and anarchist organizing in the 1970s.  For more about what was happening back then, see my post Social Movements in the Seventies, 3/30/09.)  I wish he spent more time on this.

This is a good book to read in conjunction with other systems books and books on decentralization.  By itself, it’s only a small (but significant piece) but it’s incredibly useful in understanding the whole.  I’ll end with the warning at the end of the book: “...it is both the promise and the peril of swarm logic that the higher level behavior is almost impossible to predict in advance.  You never really know what lies at the other end of a phase transition until you press play and find out.  That is the lesson of Gerald Edelman’s recipe for simulating a flesh-and-blood organism: you set up a system of various pattern-recognition devices and feedback loops, connecting the virtual organism to a simulated environment.  And then you see what happens.”

That’s emergence.

Quote of the Day:  “This emphasis on rules might seem like the antithesis of the open-ended, organic systems… but nothing could be further from the truth.  Emergent systems... are rule governed systems: their capacity for learning and growth and experimentation derives from their adherence to low-level rules…  If any of these systems… suddenly started following their own rules, or doing away with rules altogether, the system would stop working: there’d be no global intelligence, just a teeming anarchy of isolated agents, a swarm of without logic.  Emergent behaviors… are all about living within the boundaries defined by rules, but also using that space to create something greater than the sum of its parts.” - Steven Johnson