September 2023

The Governance Working Group have continued to dialogue with the wider feedback circle and the NFA and have now changed the name of their document from ‘proposal’ to ‘discussion paper’ and written a 7th draft which you can find here.  The next stage will be to hold a full community meeting to start to open the discussion to everyone, please see the Rainbow Bridge for announcements of the meeting.

August 2023

The Governance Working Group have now presented their draft proposal to the wider feedback circle for consideration, feedback has been noted, some changes have been made, and the updated draft proposal has now been sent to both the NFA Council and ColCi for their consideration.  The group is hoping to present the proposal to the community very soon for wider consideration and feedback.

July 2023

• This group was initiated by Dave Till, in discussion with Durten Lau and Gordon McAlpine
• After an open invitation to the community, the full group now has 20 members 
• We used the sociocratic selection process to form a core working group of 6 people from the bigger group:  Dave Till, Gordon McAlpine, Durten Lau, Viv Wylde, Jake Jay Lewin and Marilyn Hamilton
• The core working group meet weekly
• All other members of the group are in our feedback circle, who have access to all the work that we do and will be called upon regularly to provide support and legitimacy through feedback and ideas via emails, comments and suggestions on documents, and/or through ad-hoc meetings
• We have a group remit (see below)
• Our first step is to harvest information about current methods of decision-making in the community to see what works and what’s needed.  We have starting contacting as many organisations on Park as we can to participate in this process
• We will also be asking the whole community to participate soon

There is a lot of useful background material to look at here about work the community has previously done to start to address these matters, such as the Community Change Process, and it’s helpful to have this context to understand what we are all working with now.

Please do contact us if you have any comments or would like to join the feedback circle:

Remit for Governance Group

Preamble

• Governance is concerned with who owns what, who decides what, and with who decides who decides.
• And with agreements on who does what.
• And with how to ensure rules and agreements are adhered to, and what happens when they are not
• Governance can be thought of as a combination of structures, decision-making processes and communication processes.
• This is our working remit. We may amend it as we go along.

Remit

• To create a set of proposals related to governance systems for the whole community and to take these to the community for consultation, revision and adoption.
• The consultation should include all individual community members and all relevant stakeholder organisations and their members.
  • We will keep in communication with the ColCi Commons subgroup, who may be considering new forms of collaboration amongst existing organisations, and with the BenCom group who are also interested in governance.
• We will start by focussing on decision making and communication, but will also explore structures as we find appropriate, and may include proposals for some new structures.

Issues to be addressed by the proposal

• Engagement: the governance system should encourage engagement of community members.
• Remit: all decision making bodies must have a clearly defined remit, available to all.
• Mandate: It must be clear who has mandated any decision making body to make the decisions included in its remit.
• Accountability: Any decision making group should be accountable to those who gave it this mandate.
• Scope/boundaries: our starting point is decisions that affect the Park Ecovillage, Findhorn, and whoever will be affected by such decisions: both individuals and organisations.