We are taking inspiration from a variety of sources for the initial design and direction of Yuba Village.
- Mark Lakeman is by far the most significant inspiration for us, and his TEDx talk (17 min) called Badass Democracy speaks volumes. We showed this at our first community potluck.
- Every year City Repair puts on the Village Building Convergence in Portland. This is a great promo video (1 min) for their event.
- City Repair‘s done a tremendous amount of trailblazing work over the past 20 years, which has been recorded to some degree in their Placemaking Guidebook.
- Sociocracy is a decision-making method suggested by City Repair that involves the people affected by a decision in the forming of the decision, and aims to make sure everyone’s voice is heard and that leadership is distributed throughout an organization. We are learning how it works and will apply the principles as we go.
- Sociocracy For All is the foremost organization teaching and spreading the methodology.
- There is an abundance of videos to learn from. Here are a few:
- We practice the sociocratic meeting process which is summarized in this useful cheat sheet and intro video, and in these excerpts from the following book.
- The book, We the People: Consenting to a Deeper Democracy (find it here on amazon.com) explores the topic in more depth and we see this as essential reading.
