Two separate methods, "consensus" and "dynamic governance," which are spread across three neighbourhoods, with all three neighbourhood boards meeting together once a month. Leans heavily on elder retired people who have the time to participate in the governance. Ownership is owning shares in whole co-op that are related to the size of the house.
Coexistence is apparently easier with a larger group, (30-40), and groups that are too small get at each other (10 households) and cause harm to the relationships with everyone, where a conflict doesn't impact the cohesion of a larger group of 35-40. Dilution of relationships sounds important.
This comes up again when they talk about multiple special purpose vehicles for neighbourhoods financially interacting so loss of one doesn't impact the other ones. It's kind of micro-federated, where federation isn't a response to growth, but rather, a necessary stability feature of surviving as small.
They're the size of a small village, and it seems like you need that critical mass to keep it running so it can evolve organically and even a bit chaotically, and it's not close enough to each other that they will aligning all in one direction (good or bad) and causing strife. I could see how the whole thing could be vulnerable to politics, but it looks like their federated governance model mitigates lockstep.
To those of us (most of us) from a liberal background, I think governance of these kinds can be confusing. We look for legible rulesets and interrogate them with "what happens if." At a second level, we look for legible dynamics like the influence of group size you mention.
None of these are wrong but they're not necessarily key to the character of the system. "Consensus," meaning something more complex than "vote until everyone agrees," is a pretty natural way of making in tightly knit groups. We do it without realising we do it. Some people talk. Some agree. Some object. People talk some more. Usually, a consensus forms.
It's voting or other formal authority systems that need to be invented. They don't tend to exist by default. Not every culture has voting. Every culture has talking until a decision is made.
Consider jury systems. These are pretty formal, but they do have some consensus as part of the system. This is premised on jurors spending a lot of time together, discussing, argueing, etc.
Anyway, my point is that the most important parts are probably ilegible. A functioning culture forms, or it does not. The right governance rules or group size, with the wrong group of people will not work. The reverse probably will.
The interesting thing to me about communities like this that manage to persist for decades is, they find a balance of synergistic independence with collective identity.
They don't need to invent much, but they need to agree on a layer of abstraction above the personal interests of each person in a verbal consensus. Indeed, every group and culture talks until they reach consensus, but the ones who abstract the mechanisms with principles tend to manage growth more persistently. I viewed this ecovillage as a startup solving the ur-problem of governance, but instead of growing like a startup, the are just trying to sustain an equillibrium.
Re: agree on a layer of abstraction; the ur-problem^ of governance; abstracting the mechanisms with principles
Those can be important. I think in a modern context these will probably exist, because we're already familiar with charters, constitutions and such. They're probably quite necessary for dealing with disputes or property implications in a legally compatible way.
That said, I think considering these primary is probably a mistake, over extrapolating from the macropolitics we know.
The idea is not to design a decision making process. Let a process emerge, using our natural social abilities as people to to navigate it. Whatever emerges will probably be people dependant.
A designed system that works, has answers and resolutions for every eventuality and problem is a least common denominator system. You might have to default to this is you need governance for a random collection of people without a binding thread. But for any real community with solidarity, they likely make it work in a more organic way. It'll depend on the individuals and results will vary a lot between groups.
The ur-problem is probably a reference to Goethe. In German 'ur' is a prefix that means primeval/original/ancient. So an ur-problem of governance is the original problem of governance.
Few notes from it at 1.75 speed:
Two separate methods, "consensus" and "dynamic governance," which are spread across three neighbourhoods, with all three neighbourhood boards meeting together once a month. Leans heavily on elder retired people who have the time to participate in the governance. Ownership is owning shares in whole co-op that are related to the size of the house.
Coexistence is apparently easier with a larger group, (30-40), and groups that are too small get at each other (10 households) and cause harm to the relationships with everyone, where a conflict doesn't impact the cohesion of a larger group of 35-40. Dilution of relationships sounds important.
This comes up again when they talk about multiple special purpose vehicles for neighbourhoods financially interacting so loss of one doesn't impact the other ones. It's kind of micro-federated, where federation isn't a response to growth, but rather, a necessary stability feature of surviving as small.
They're the size of a small village, and it seems like you need that critical mass to keep it running so it can evolve organically and even a bit chaotically, and it's not close enough to each other that they will aligning all in one direction (good or bad) and causing strife. I could see how the whole thing could be vulnerable to politics, but it looks like their federated governance model mitigates lockstep.
It reminds me a bit of a talk I heard about Native influence on the creation of the US constitution, via Mowhawk Chief Joseph Brant. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Law_of_Peace