Starting from Scratch 3

by Raven

3: Collaborative Design

This year, I offered a workshop at the Communities Conference on Collaborative Community Design.  This material is very relevant to the community building work I am doing and, I think, to anyone who is thinking of creating some type of community.

If you go to ic.org, the Foundation for Intentional Community’s website, they have a directory that lists thousands of communities around the world.  Many represent legitimate communities but there are a lot of others that seem incredibly detailed, to the extent that you might wonder who lives there.  

Similar to my fictional Totally Utopia Community, I have a made up a fairly absurd community I often illustrate this with, I call the Purple Plaid Community.  The fictional description of the community is that everyone wears purple plaid, and all meals are vegan except for the steak dinner on Sunday, and they all meditate at 6:42 in the morning, and on and on and on and on.  It’s pretty strange but I swear there are communities that strange and detailed (or worse) listed in ic.org’s directory.  And, again, who lives there?  When I’ve looked it turns out to be one person, or more commonly, a couple, and they’ve created the perfect community for themselves and wonder why no one wants to join them.

I created the Collaborative Community Design workshop as an antidote to this.  The process I came up with is not the only way to design a community together (I suspect that there are hundreds of ways a group could do it) but I think it’s a good exercise to get folks thinking about how they can design a community together, rather than just relying on one or two people’s vision.

The format I came up with and presented at the Conference had everyone put out two or three bottom lines (deal breakers, non-negotiables) and then make sure that there aren’t any conflicts between them.  (If there are, it may be that you need to start different communities.  At the least, this is good to know before you go any further.)  Assuming these are all compatible, they would be listed all together as a foundation for the community.  

We did this again for deep desires (listing two or three things each person might really want in a community but could give up if necessary) and again, if there weren’t conflicts, added them to the list.  And finally we brainstormed a wishlist and anything that two or more folks checked off and no one had problems with got added to the list–thus developing a community description that was generated by the group rather than by a single person.

Combined bottom lines and deep desires for group at my workshop

When I did this at the Communities Conference, I was surprised that the folks who first volunteered to do it were already in an existing community.  They said that they were thinking of reorganizing the community.  But it seemed to go well and they were happy with the result.

I thought that was the end of it, because we ran out of time on the workshop, but there wasn’t anything in the next slot and a bunch of folks asked me to do it again, this time with a random group of people.  So I did.  

We generated a long rambling list.  I doubt if these folks would actually work together to create a community but one interesting thing came out of this.  I had said if two people had conflicting bottom lines, they probably needed to create different communities.  I was thinking, one person wants urban and another rural, or one person wants under ten and another person wants over twenty, but in this group, one person wanted ‘nonviolence’ as a bottom line.  I asked him what he meant by that, and he wanted a community where no one would even kill mice.  I went on until a woman said that  one of her bottom lines was livestock.  I asked if she meant beef production and she said she did, so I pointed out that the two of them were not likely to create a community together, if he wanted no killing and she wanted killing cattle for meat.

The first group’s wishlist–note every item got two or three checks

As I said, I’m sure this is far from the only process to collectively design a community, but it’s certainly one.  Everyone’s bottom lines are included, most people’s deep desires are included, and probably a bunch of stuff on various wishlists are included.  Most importantly, a community vision emerges from several folks and thus not just one person’s idea of what a community should be.  Among other things, this brings more buy-in to the community vision since everyone’s ideas have been included.

The main lesson here is that one person can’t create a community–you need a lot of folks involved in the process.  In essence, it takes a community to create a community.