Geoph Kozeny has lived in communities of one kind or another for twenty years. As director and head dishwasher for the Community Catalyst Project, he has been on the road for six years visiting communities of all kinds - getting involved in the daily routine of each group, asking about their visions and realities, taking photos and slides, and giving slide shows about the diversity and viability of the communities movement. He does considerable editing and production work for both the Directory of Intentional Communities and Communities magazine.
In my travels over the past six years, I’ve visited over 275 communities of various stripes, plus over 100 different "co-ops" and worker-owned/managed businesses.
One of the things I ask about and look at closely is the forms they choose/use for organizing themselves and for making decisions. I’ve visited anarchists, planner/managers, consumer cooperatives, fundamentalist Christians, yoga colonies, nudist colonies, "New Age" conference centers...just about any kind of group you might imagine.
After doing all of that looking, my opinion about "what works" can be summarized as:
It doesn’t matter whether the person making the decisions is empowered through tradition, charisma, elections, or personal initiative - what counts most is the resulting collective sense of well-being, empowerment, and "community" (also referred to as unity or interconnectedness).
Until the collective "we" develops enough skills, enabling us to live up to grand and glorious expectations, we need to figure out interim compromises that:
clarify our goals,
confirm our agreements,
define an organizational framework,
provide theoretical and hands-on education to develop social and technical skills,
inspire creativity, initiative, and participation,
build a sense of mutual respect, cooperation, and accountability, and
guide our process of review and redirection.
Until this happens, it’s likely that there will be subtle (or sometimes not so subtle) internal power dynamics that go unnoticed, unacknowledged, or outright denied. This observation does not imply that hierarchies have no inherent problems, including power dynamics - merely that the way they describe their own decision- making process is normally closer to the truth than for those groups who aspire to equality. (See Joreen’s "The Tyranny of Structurelessness" in the Directory of Intentional Communities for a more detailed exploration of this tendency.)
The solution is not in avoiding creating systems and standards today, but in having an effective and ongoing process for evaluating what’s working and what’s not, and for implementing changes that move us ever closer to our collective vision of how life could be a its best. We are most likely to succeed in this quest if we find ways to build a sustainable sense of mutual respect, empowerment, and community.