Last year we (at Winslow Cohousing) had some very contentious meetings. Although we did finally get to consensus some people were left very hurt and angry. It was hard.
We decided that we should do a "tuneup" of our consensus process, and I volunteered to head the task force. There was a lot of energy around this conversation so a fairly big group of us got together to figure out what to do. We quickly established that we probably should come up with a foundation document to have something to stand on when we got into the actual work of crafting new policy.
The key questions that we wanted to address where
* Why do we choose to use consensus (and do we still choose to use it?)
* Why do I, personally choose consensus
* What does consensus look like (when it is working)?
* What does consensus require of us?
* What do we do when consensus breaks down?
I'm running out of time, but in my next post I will talk about where we are so far on these questions. So far, I think, we have made great progress.